SPAN: July 1973

RTAND TECHNOLOGY INTERACT continued

SPAN 1 ART AND TECHNOLOGY INTERACT

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rithing in the entrance plaza of the museum, Claes Oldenburg's "Giant lcebag" (left) wasfor many the highlight of the exhibition. A metallic cap tops the 5.5-meter-high vinyl bag, whichexpands and contracts in 19-minute cycles, rising and falling, propelled by a complex hydraulic mechanism. Concealed air pockets inflate and deflate the bag, creating a breathing motion.

Oldenburg's approach to technology is "to take something which is formidable in its complexity and make it do some very foolish things." .

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trollingthrough Robert Whitman's semicircular room (below left) the viewer sees 1,000 images of his face in hundreds of corner-shaped mirrors. Other hidden cylindrical mirrors covered . with reflective Mylar create ghostly images of mundane objects which seem to float overhead.

6 U.S.-SOVIET COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN A NEW ERA

by Peter G. Peterson

9 SHALL WE COpy HUMAN BEINGS?

by Willard Gaytin

15 THE ETHICAL QUESTIONS OF GENETIC ENGINEERING

16 FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

by Isaac Asimov

20 TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSPORTATION: TRAVEL IN THE FUTURE

26 HIS WORLD IS A PLASTIC BAG

28 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE IN EVOLUTION

by Jacob Bronowski

34 A COMPUTERIZED COAST GUARD TO THE RESCUE

38 THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE PLANETARY

by Zbigniew Brzezinski

44 THE BALLET DANCERS OF HARLEM

by Ernest Dunbar Front cover: Straddling a single steel rail while riding on a thin cushion of forced air, Grumman Corporation's high-speed train is one of several vehicles of tomorrow. See story on page 20.

Back cover: Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology programmed a computer to draw this random artistic pattern of stars on its screen. See "Art and Technology Interact" (pages 1-5).

STEPHEN

ESPIE, Editor;

ALBERT

E. HEMSING,

Publisher.

Managing Editor:' Carmen Kagal. Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, M.M. Saha. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Kuldip Singh Jus, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Gopi Gajwani. Production Manager: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed by Arun K. Mehta at Vakil & Sons Private Limited, Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-400001.

Photographs: Front cover-Robert Huntzinger. 9-14-Lincoln portrait by Alex Gardner; Gandhi portrait

by Margaret Bourke-White. 21, 24-Robert Huntzinger. 22-23-Joe Pinto except 23 top photo by Thomas Powell III. 34-36-U.S. Coast Guard. 37-Gloria Gurian, courtesy 1969 Kodak International Snapshot Awards. 45, 48-Marbeth. 46-47-Vernon Smith, Scope. Back cover-Design by science and engineering students of Professor Robert O. Preusser, Department of Architecture, MIT. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Subscription: One year, rupees five; single copy, fifty paise. No n~w subscriptions can be accepted at this time. For change of address, send old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to the Circulation Manager, United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I 10001. Allow six weeks for change of address to become effective.

RTAND TECHNOLOGY INTERACT PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER

SPRINGMANN

Not all of America's industrial research is done in the laboratory. One exciting new aspect is the collaboration between art and industry, a joint venture that culminated in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's recent exhibition, "Art and Technology." It was an ambitious attempt, four years in the making, pairing up prominent contemporary artists with space-age industries to produce artifacts that are esthetically pleasing as well as suggestive of bold new directions in practical research. The museum invited some 80 artists and 40 corporations to work together. Some of the results of this interaction of art and technology are shown on these and the following pages.

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lasticsculpture (left) by Robert Irwin of Los Angeles reflects two pretty museum-gael's, creating an eye-deceiving kaleidoscopic effect. The five-meter. high pillar of highly polished acrylic contains indented surfaces which reflect and refract images so that the sculpture appears to be blending and disintegrating into the environment.

"MUd

Muse" (below) features bubbling mud in a 2.7 by 3.6-meter tank and represents a two-year collaboration between artist Robert Rauschenberg and Teledyne, Inc., an electronics and jet-propulsion firm. The tank contains about seven metric tons of driller's mud; its hidden compressed-air system causes the mud to bubble and heave constantly.

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he Jesse Reichek room (above), glows with color emanating from four originalpaintings, two continuously runningfilms and five silk-screen prints shown on right wall, above). Scientists at International Business Machines in Berkeley, California, translated Reichek's pictorial concepts into mathematical forms which could befed into a computer, thereby creating the silk-screen prints and film. eichekfeels that developing works with omputers is akin to the evolutionary design rocess in nature, in that the design is ontrolled by an internal mechanism rather han according to external specifications.

AT AND TECHNOLOGV INTERACT

continued

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etail at right of Ovyind Fahlstrom's sculptural tableau shows a wave, a meatball, a long-nosed man and a comic strip balloon representing a questioning thought. The Swedish artist combined metal and plastic figures and scenes-based on the popular comic book Zap-which were then executed by Heath and Company, producers of outdoor signs in the United States. Of this lVork, FaMstrom says: "I wanted my figures to have a quality of exuberance and the energy of American life and the fatality and rawness of it ... the ecstatic factor."

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he "rainmachine/fiower wall piece" (above) is the work of pop artist Andy Warhol. In its creation, Warhol reproduced over 100 daisies, using a three-dimenSional printing process called Xography. The daisies are mounted in clear-plastic strips, which give an illusion of depth. They are viewed through undulating sheets of artificial rain.

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sit nature or art? Newton Harrison's pools (left) contain varying amounts of saline-algae solutions that, due to a natural chemical process, create their own art. As the waters evaporate, the colors in the different pools change until-at the exhibition's closing-they all become pure white. Harrison adapts materials of nature to create a changing visual experience.

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culptor Tony Smith's "Cave" (above)

is constructed entirely of corrugated

cardboard and wasfabricated by Container Corporation. Covering an area of 10.6 x 10.6 meters, it is made of thousands of tetrahedrons and octahedrons, each 75 centimeters high, glued or taped together. Imitating a natural speleological scene, Smith illuminates his "cave" with shafts of light from above.

¡U.S.-SOVIET, COMMERCIAL RELATIONS INA NEW ERA

Much of last month's summit meeting between V.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev was devoted to strengthening economic ties between their nations. In this article, written before the June summit, a former V.S. Secretary of Commerce comments on the recent expansion of trade between the two countries.

Why now? Why after more than 25 years of cold war and confrontation does President Nixon believe that it is both appropriate and possible to consider closing a breach which once seemed as wide and as permanent as any in America's history?

Admittedly, there remain many of the differences which led originally to our division. We are still ideological adversaries, and there is little prospect that that will change soon. We are political and military rivals and cannot afford to ignore one another's advances in these areas. We each have allies whose associations we will maintain and whose interests often conflict with the interests of the allies of the other.

Nonetheless, in a practical sense, our relationship has been altered. Our concern is no longer with the political-military relationship alone. The preoccupation with military security which led the United States and the Soviet Union through the space and arms races of the 1950s and 1960s has demonstrated that, in an era of nuclear parity complete reliance on the armaments road to security can only escalate to higher and higher levels of cost and complexity. Thus, what seems to be a simple direct measure of a nation's security can also be seen as a reflection of a nation's insecurity.

Today, we attack that insecurity at its foundations by recognizing that the United States and the Soviet Union share a mim-

ber of relationships and do so on a variety of levels. Our common concerns, formerly defined in security terms alone, fall now under a host of new rubrics: our cities, our air, our water, our food, our health, our resource access and our creature comforts.

For political accords to endure, it is essential that they run parallel to tangible and immediate reciprocal welfare gains.

As Henry Kissinger had observed, "changes in atmospherics ... not buttressed by concrete progress, will revert to previous patterns at the first subsequent clash of interests." Both President Nixon and Mr.Brezhnev have emphasized the desirability of concrete steps, and big ones at that.

In an era of reduced military confrontation, the opportunities for such buttressing are nowhere greater than they are in the area of commerce.

Closer economic ties bear both cause and effect relationships to relaxation of political tension. Improvement in political relationships is a prerequisite for improved economic relationships, but, once in place, economic ties create a communality of interest which in turn improves the environment for further progress on the political side.

That the opportunity exists for creation of mutual vested interests is obvious from an¡ examination of our countries' respective economies.

The Soviet economy with a Gross National Product estimated at about $570,000 million of roughly comparable purchasing power is second in size only to the $1,000,000 million plus U.S. economy. Its growth rate in real terms is impressive.

Despite the large size of both our economies, there is remarkably little structural similarity between our economies except in the military area. Whereas congruence may make happy marriages, it is incongruence which can afford maximum benefits in the international trade. In an economic sense, therefore, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, variously blessed and variously developed, are by their very diversity natural trading partners.

In the producer goods sector, the United States and the Soviet Union have substantially different products mixes. Both economies have great strengths, but they excel in different areas. Whereas in 1971 the Soviet Union produced II per cent more crude steel than the United States and 39 per cent more cement; it produced only 6 per cent as many automobiles and only 30 per cent as many trucks and buses.

Despite impressive Soviet gains in the area of consumer goods over the last decade, the U.S. consumer is still three times as likely to own a refrigerator, nine times as likely to own a radio, three times as likely to have a television set and seven times as likely to have a vacuum cleaner. Many consumer durables-such as fully automatic washers, dryers and freezers do not seem to be manufactured or sold in the Soviet Union.

Similarly, the Soviet citizen consumes much less meat than his U.S. counterpart, due, in part, to shortages of feed grains.

Hopefully, the recently negotiated deal of minimum purchases of $750 million worth of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union over the next three years will continue to improve this situation.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union possesses substantially greater energy reserves than the United States. Its unexploited sites suitable for production of hydroelectric power are 2t times greater than ours, its coal reserves are 350 per cent greater, its proven oil reserves are 35 per cent greater than ours, and its proven natural gas reserves are nearly 30 per cent greater. With respect to potential (as opposed to proven) reserves of both oil and natural gas, the Soviet Union probably enjoys an even greater advantage over the United States. In addition, the Soviet Union is blessed with large deposits of other important mineral resources; U.S. production of nickel, platinum, manganese ore and chrome ranges from small (9 per cent for nickel) to infinitesimal (less than I per cent for chrome and manganese) by comparison with production in the Soviet Union.

The U.S. economy is characterized by the relatively high technological sophistication of its agricultural sector; this is not true of the Soviet economy. The Soviet Union employs more than eight times as many people as the U.S. in food production, but it uses less than half as many tractors and trucks and only threequarters as many grain combines as one finds on U.S. farms.

Because of this, and somewhat less favorable climatic conditions,

agricultural labor productivity in the Soviet Union during 1971 is estimated to have been only about II per cent of the U.S. level.

Joint U.S.-Soviet truck and tractor projects currently in various stages of planning hopefully will improve this record.

Underlying the recent shift in focus of Soviet economic strategy from high to low levels of political tensions are several trends in their domestic economy which have become increasingly apparent in recent years.

Declining Growth Rate: The rate of growth of the Soviet economy, while acceptable or even enviable in a world context, has nonetheless shown signs of not meeting goals in recent years.

Economic growth in the Soviet Union, which ran at a rate of 6 per cent through the decade of the 1950s, began to decline during the I960s. Although this growth still compared favorably with the U.S. growth rate, it was disappointing to the Soviet leaders in view.of continuing massive Soviet investment outlays which as percentage of GNP have in recent years been almost twice those of the United States.

Technology: One reason for the recent Soviet growth experience is that despite enormous emphasis and investment in science, they have compiled a record unsatisfactory to some in the Soviet Union in developing high technology in areas other than those in which the Government has mandated concentration and higher priority. The system of quantified and well-publicized ~oals undoubtedly has its virtues. But one of its failings may be that it stresses volume at the expense of quality. Within a single, relatively closed economy, i.e., so-called "hothouse" economy, this type of emphasis is possible. But in a system of open and competing economies, volume can soon become a function of quality.

Some experts note that while large amounts of investment and centralized direction are well suited to building the biggest blast furnace in the world, they can raise obstacles to the technological innovation which often comes from a diversified and decentralized approach. In our view at least, centralized product development tends to be focused and monolithic and the likelihood of serendipitous advance more limited. Solutions may tend to be pursued centrally and one at a time instead of being explored independently in many different ways and in many different places.

We can get some ideas of the problem which the Soviets face by looking at our own system. Many of the important technological breakthroughs in the United States have been made, not by the giants in the field, but by small entrepreneurs. For example, in a field in which I had much of my industrial experience, there are the cases of Polaroid and Xerox. Each was developed by a small handful of brilliant and courageous individuals outside the industrial establishment. In neither case were the inventors able even to interest the giants of the industry in their respective processes. "It won't work, we can't make it, and it wouldn't sell even if we could," they were told. Had they not been able to go into business for themselves, we might not enjoy the benefits of xerography and instant photographs even today. '

Civilian R&D receives only about one-third of R&D outlays in the Soviet Union compared to 50 per cent in the United States.

The small R&D firm, for instance, simply does not exist in the Soviet Union. As a result, even in cases where the technology is known, the Soviets may have more difficulty translating it from the laboratory to the factory floor. In some cases, they have got around this difficulty by buying the end products of other countries and working backwards to recreate the factories which built them. That process is becoming more and more difficult, however, as technology becomes more complex and increasingly presents a moving as well as a very costly target.

In short, advancing technology is not a product but an ongoing process.

Consumerism: Finally, like the United States, the Soviet Union is currently faced with a restive consumer. In our terms, however, their consumer problem is that of another generation.

Within an economy roughly 55 per cent the size of the U.S. economy, the Soviet Union has nonetheless matched the United States almost dollar for dollar in both defense expenditures and new fixed investment. The necessary price which the Soviet Union has had to pay for their parity in these'two areas has been reduced availability of consumer goods. Total consumption, which in 1971 stood at $731,000 million in the United States, was only about 41 per cent of that amount ($270,000 million) in the Soviet Union despite the latter's larger population.

Not only have Soviet consumer goods been relatively scarce, but their quality has been uneven. Their innovations and their styling, for example, have frequently not met Western standards.

This is attributable in part to the fact that the production goals and incentives under which Soviet managers operate tend to emphasize quantity rather than quality. But it is due also to the fact that the Soviet consumer sector has been insulated from competition with Western consumables. As the Soviet economy moves out of its controlled "hothouse" environment and adjusts to the rigors and disciplines of the natural competitive world, I think we can e.xpect marked improvement in the quality, and therefore the competitiveness, of Soviet products.

The pressures which are moving the Soviet Union toward political and economic accommodation with the West parallel a recent shift in U.S. foreign policy toward improving relations with the major Communist powers.

In addition to the overriding political incentives, there are significant economic reasons why the situation in the United States is appropriate for the improvement of trade relations with the Soviet Union.

With the industrial and technological development of other major economies, the U.S. no longer has the monopoly it once enjoyed in the production of certain goods. Our over-all trade balance is a melancholy reminder of these changed circumstances ..

The increased availability of high technology products elsewhere rendered some of our original curbs on exports to the Soviet

Union increasingly anachronistic. The real loser from these particular restraints would have increasingly been the U.S. producer and worker, not the Soviet consumer or the Soviet economy. There comes a point at which we must face the fact that business is business, and, if it is going to go on in any event, we might as well have a piece of the action.

In addition, the United States, like the Soviet Union, is under popular pressure to reallocate resources to meet pressing social demands. Here, we are faced with an exact parallel to the Soviet situation. Our resources, like theirs, are finite. We, too, have a clear incentive to create a political environment in which our national security requirements are reduced-without reducing our real security.

Finally, the United States, which historically has spent its energy and material resources like a drunken sailor, can now feel the hole in the bottom of its pocket. With the tremendous increases which are projected in our energy requirements by the end of this century, it may be very much in our interest to explore seriously the possibility of gaining access to, and in fact to aid in development of, energy fields as rich as those possessed by the Soviet Union.

Clearly then, while the political circumstances are opportune, the will is there, and the mutual interest of both nations is manifest, there remain difficult and complex problems to solve. It is perhaps worth a final review of the commercial stakes which hinge on their solution.

For the Soviet Union, among the most important gains would be: -The ability to supply their industrial sector with advanced manufacturing equipment and know-how in areas where the United States might have a comparative advantage.

-Help in meeting the growing demands of their consumer sector.

-Obtaining capital investment and credits enabling them to harness their undeveloped natural resource wealth.

-Buying grain stocks, which the United States has in abundance, to meet their goal of increased meat consumption.

For the United States, reduced political tension and increased trade would yield: -A balance of trade very much in our favor for at least the near term, especially in such areas as machinery and grains.

-Possible access to large Soviet energy and raw material¡ resources.

So much for the commercial benefits of a successful-and a comprehensive-agreement. But in saying business is business, we are also saying that business is not everything.

0 About the Author: Peter G. Peterson was President Nixon's Secretary of Commerce during the crucial round of trade negotiations with the Soviet Union last year. He has also served as a White House aide on economic affairs and as chief executive with Bell & Howell Company.

In the winter of 1971, before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the biologist James D. Watson expressed dismay that the population had been insufficiently alerted to some of the profound implications of new technologies in genetic research. To the 'uninitiated, the fact that the statement came from a scientist whose own research is in that field may seem analogous to Dr. Frankenstein chastising the Swiss citizenry for failing to storm his laboratories.

But this forceful testimony by the distinguished codiscoverer of ,DNA has been applauded by a growing group of scientists, social scientists and ethicists who sense that the people are shielded, by the complexity of genetic science, from an understanding of the nature and magnitude of threats it poses to their ways of life, their identities and their very existence as a species. The public attention to Watson's testimony-confirming their thesis-was minimal. But some biological scientists, now wary and forewarned, are trying to consider the ethical, social and political implications of their research before its use makes any contemplation merely an expiating exercise. They are even starting to ask whether some research ought to be done at all. With the serious introduction of questions of "ought," ethics has been introduced-and is beginning to shake some of the traditional illusions of a "science above morality," or a "valuefree science."

Of course, in 1818 when Mary Shelley first created her Frankenstein story, the scientific domination of society was just beginning. The idea of one human being fabricating another was purely metaphorical. The process was presumed to be impossible, a grotesque exaggeration. But the inconceivable has become conceivable, and in the 20th century we find ourselves, indeed, patching human beings together out This article has been reprinted by permission of The New York Times Magazine. Copyright Š 1972 by Willard Gaylin.

of parts. We sew on detached arms, and fix shattered hips in place with metal spikes; we patch arterial tubing with plastic; we borrow corneas from the dead, and kidneys from the living or dead; automatic, rechargeable pace-makers placed under the skin regulate the heartbeat, and radio receivers placed in the brain case may shortly control behavior; there are artificial limbs, artificial lungs, artificial kidneys and artificial hearts.

The issue which seemed most worrisome to Watson, and in his opinion called for a campaign to inform the world's citizens so that they might take 'part in planning possible control measures, was the cloning of human beings. Cloning is the production of genetically identical copies of an individual organism. Just as one can take hundreds of cuttings from a specific plant (indeed, the word klon is the Greek word for "twig" or "slip"), each of which can then develop into a mature plantgenetic replicas of the parent-it is now possible to clone animals. To understand the complications and implications of human cloning it is necessary to review some of the "facts of life."

Every species of living organism has the capacity to reproduce its own kind. Indeed, this capability is so fundamental to the concept of being "alive," that it is part of the definition distinguishing animate from inanimate. The mechanism whereby species likeness is transmitted from one generation to the other was discovered by the Austrian priest Gregor Mendel in the 19th century, in some of the most amazing research of modern science. While it is not possible to do justice here to Mendel's genetic principles, it is necessary to recall a few of his conclusions. Working with common garden peas, taking such variables as the color of the flower, the size of the plant, the shape and texture of the seeds, Mendel defined the basic laws of heredity.

Unlike previous vague conceptions of offspring as some loose amalgam of par-

ental qualities (Darwin's panmixis) in which blood lines fused just as blue and yellow water colors blend to make green, Mendel established that the offspring inherit relatively discrete, independent traits which never mix nor modify each other, but maintain a segregated existence ready to be passed on in pure form to a future generation.

He saw the instrument for transfer as a discrete body, later to be called a gene, and recognized that while one gene might dominate another, thus appearing as a particular property, they both existed and were ready to be shipped out to a next generation, again in pure and segregated form.

As a corollary of this segregation principle, Mendel observed that the various traits are inherited r.elatively independently of each other. There may be a separate gene for the size of the pea, the color. of the flower and the height of the plant, and in hybridization a variety of gene patterns is possible through chance combinations.

It is obvious to even those who are not interested in gardening that this has now become a mechanism for controlling, in plants at least, the development of specialized and desired traits; for example, one could grow a large, fully double, highcentered, heavily scented, disease-resistant, thornless rose of a specific color.

Perhaps the most striking fact about Mendel's laws is that they are valid for all living beings. The principles of heredity discovered in the garden pea also apply to the prelate who discovered them. We have since discovered that not only is the principle the same, but that it works in all organisms by means of the identical chemical (DNA) mechanism!

Heredity, however, can be modified by the mechanisms of reproduction, which are not the same in all living beings. Humans, like most advanced life forms, reproduce sexually, which might not seem like the hottest piece of news, but the biological significance of this fact must be understood.

Sexual reproduction does not always depend upon copulation. Obviously, plants do not copulate, yet they have a variety of mechanisms for self-pollination or, more commonly, cross-pollination, both of which are examples of sexual reproduction.

Animals also have a wide range of reproductive styles. Sexual reproduction can take place within a single organism-the hermaphrodite forms-but consider the case of the earthworm: Hermaphrodite though it be, producing both sperm and egg,the earthworm, like most higher plants, generally eschews self-fertilization; instead, it seeks out a partner and, in what seems to be a model of sexual courtesy and cooperation, inseminates the other while being inseminated itself. At the other extreme are forms in which fertilization of the egg by the sperm occurs outside of the organism, without contact between the parents.

Cloning could be used to help an endangered species augment their numbers to the level needed for survival.

What is essential to the definition of sexual, as distinguished from asexual, reproduction is that the new generation is formed by a combination of individual genes, half contributed by one parent and half by the other-the variability of the mix in the higher species being so complex as to almost guarantee the uniqueness of each individual. By contrast, in the asexual reproduction of lower forms such as the amoeba, there is a splitting of the organism and the genetic make-up of the two creatures derived from the original is identical, carrying the same undisturbed gene pattern as the "parent" organism.

The genes in human beings are distri-

buted among 46 chromosomes. These 46 chains of inheritance exist in the nucleus of every single body cell of the organism except for the sex cells. These cells, ova in women and sperm in men, contain only half the normal quantity-23-and are called haploid. When fertilization occurs, the nuclei of the sperm and the egg fuse, forming an egg cell with a full complement of chromosomes. The fertilized egg proceeds to undergo spontaneous division into two, then four, then eight, finally into the billions of cells that comprise the human body.

In the meantime, the cells "differentiate," changing drastically in shape and function, thus forming the various tissues and organs of the body. The genetic code, embodied in that chance mixtures of genes from parental chromosomes, guides and contributes in some as yet unknown way to the ultimate form of the adult organism.

Sexual reproduction with separate male and female forms guarantees a richness and a variability to the species. This process, combined with Darwinian principles, permits the evolution of individuals with enhanced adaptability and survival values.

It is sexual reproduction which mandates continued change-and, therefore, ultimately, improved adaptive capacity.

The process of differentiation represents one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology. How can these cells, which are identical in early divisions with each containing the exact same nucleus (meaning the full potential to form the entire creature) evolve so differently? Lung tissue looks different from bone, skin from blood, muscle from cartilage, because the microscopic cells that make up the tissue have evolved into entirely different forms. The individual cell -ignoring most of its potential-becomes a specialist, and takes the form most suited to its function, which also has become specialized. Some cells will become chemical manufacturing units-reproducing, for example, insulin; some will be the-wirelike

cells of the nervous system that conduct impulses from other cells that have become pain receptors in the skin, to still others that have become "appreciators" of pain in the brain.

However it may have occurred, once differentiation develops it would seem that there is virtually no way back, short of regeneration itself. If this is true of an animal, it seems equally true of a vegetable.

If man's heredity mechanism was first understood from common garden peas, it seems only equitable that the mechanism's undoing may be from the common garden carrot. Most of us have had the experience of growing vegetables from seeds. The seed is the equivalent of the fertilized egg ready to go, and, since the earth is its natural womb, the planter is merely a mechanical middleman. In a startling set of experiments during the early 1960s, Professor F.e. Steward, a cellular physiologist at Cornell University in New York, began agitating individual cells from carrot root in various nutritive media.

Almost any mechanical or chemical stimulus can cause an egg or seed cell to begin dividing-heat, light, touching, shaking, or more exposure to a nutrient medium. Steward used differentiated cells, not seeds, yet amazingly these cells began to proliferate. Eventually, with patience and changing media and techniques, Steward was able to force the individual root cells to form clumps and organized masses; what is more, they began to differentiate again into other kinds of cells.

He finally succeeded in carrying one individual cell to the ultimate stage of a fullgrown carrot plant-roots, stalk, leaves, flowers, seeds and all. Any cell can, conceivably, be thus forced, once the technology is understood, to grow into a full plant. And what is possible with a vegetable cell is, at least theoretically, just as possible with an animal cell. Animal cells, of course, have already been cultured in the laboratory. Tissue cultures are a basic

medical research tool. But tissue cultures deed genetically identical to anything. are not whole organisms-merely sheets It remained for Professor John Gurdon, of identical type cells-and the concept of a biologist at Oxford, to perform the stungrowing a whole organism from one cell ning experiment that bridged the technolasexually in a laboratory would seem im- ogy of parthenogenesis and that of Stewpossible. But that Cornell carrot confronts ard's carrots. In the mid-'60s, Professor our incredulity. To a scientific mind, the Gurdon, working with a frog's eggs, deleap from single cell to cloned carrot is vised a technique, employing radiation, greater than the leap from cloned carrot that destroyed the nucleus of an egg cell to cloned man. without damaging the body of the egg.

Is cloning a man foreseeable in any rea- Then, by equally complicated mechanisms, sonable time? Years ago, J.B.S. Haldane, he managed to take the nucleus from an the brilliant British biologist and mathe- ordinary body cell of the frog (with its full matician, confidently assumed the immi- complement of chromosomes) and intrude nence of human cloning and eagerly anti- it into the egg cell. Until now, it was an cipated its potential uses. Yet, to most unproved assumption that the nuclei of people, such a development was inconceiv- all cells, regardless of how different they able.One could imagine taking a single might be, were identical in their genetic sloughed cell from the skin of a person's inheritance and contained the entire latent hand, or even from the hand of a mummy potential for reproduction of a differen(since cells are neither "alive" nor "dead," tiated, multicelled adult. If Gurdon's hybut are merely intact or not intact), and pothesis was correct, the newly constructed seeing it perpetuate itself into a sheet of egg cell was now the equivalent of a fertiskin tissue. But could one really visualize lized egg and should, on stimulation, be the cell forming a finger, let alone a hand, capable of producing an adult form. This let alone an embryo, let alone another is precisely what happened. Some of the Amenhotep? cells, on division, formed perfectly normal There is an entirely different laboratory tadpoles, some of which, indeed, became procedure, known for years, that also perfectly normal frogs genetically identical offers an alternative to sexual reproduc- to the frog that donated the nucleus.

John Gurdon used an intestinal cell. He tion. When an egg cell is stimulated mechanically or chemically, it will start the could have used any other body cell, and division process which leads to the adult the cell could have been from a male or a form even though it is unfertilized. This female. The enucleated egg into which the virgin birth, or parthenogenesis, occurs in nucleus was injected was also unimportant, nature, the typical example being the honey genetically speaking; it was merely the enbee, whose fertilized eggs produce workers vironment. The means now exist to proand queens and whose unfertilized eggs duce thousands of genetically identical offdevelop parthenogenetically into drones or spring in the laboratory-at least in frogs. males. Beginning with simple sea forms, What seemed like Haldane's immense laboratory parthenogenesis progressed up and overvalued faith in scientific technolthe evolutionary ladder to the point that in ogy now sounds like a rational prediction.

1939 a whole rabbit was reported created In 1969 Robert Sinsheimer, chairman of from an unfertilized egg. However, since the division of biology at California Instiin most species the unfertilized sex cell, tute of Technology, stated that he assumunlike all of the other cells of the body, is ed it would be possible to clone human haploid, the individual formed is not organisms within 10 to 20 years. The way genetically identical to its mother, or in- has thus been paved for the production

of genetic copies of particularly prized individuals, in enormous quantities if desiredfor whatever purposes.

There are still major obstacles to the cloning of human beings. Human ova and frog ova are vastly different in some respects-size, for one. Contrary to what one might guess, the frog egg is huge compared to the microscopic human ovum.

This is because the frog egg, like a chicken egg, must contain all the nutrient to support the complete development of the embryo; in the human being the egg is implanted in the wall of the maternal uterus soon after fertilization, and a placenta forms which permits direct feeding of the fetus by the mother. The size of human ova, therefore, is incredibly small considering the size of the offspring. H.J. Muller, the great biologist, calculated that all the human eggs from the totar population of the earth (then two and one-half billion) would occupy less than a gallon of space.

Because of the minute size of human ova, further advances in microsurgery and laboratory techniques will be necessary before cloning becomes possible.

Gurdon has already supplied most of the technology for human cloning. Following the method he used on frogs, the nucleus of an egg cell from any donor would be destroyed. A nucleus (they are all alike) from any convenient cell of the person to be "replicated" would be inserted into the enucleated egg by microsurgical techniques (which have not yet been developed). On placing this new egg cell into an appropriate nutrient medium-a number of recipes have been devised-the "normal" process of division would commence. By the time it has divided into the 8- to 32cell stage-four to six days-it would be ready for implantation.

Many technical problems still remain, but given sufficient imperative they will be solved. Whether we will actually do human cloning involves other considerations.

The types of questions that normally

arise about any new and dramatic technological procedure fall into the categories of: can man, will man, and ought man.

There is a tendency, particularly in antitechnology treatises, to lump the first two together and to consider the third an independent problem. This kind of reasoning usually assures us that what science can do, it will do. The facts are more complicated, as usual, than the polemics.

There is much that man can do which he does not do-because he is aware that he ought not. We do not, for example, perform many behavioral experiments on babies, even though some research would unquestionably contribute to knowledge and the common good. Societal morality has traditionally disapproved of the use of human beings as research animals. Their humanness protects them from certain kinds of destructive research.

'Mary Shelley's "fantasy" is no longer a fantasy ... and in its realization we no longer identify with Dr. Frankenstein but with his monster.'

The typical scientist is a product of the culture's ethical system and reacts intuitively to its built-in values-even if he has never thought through its philosophical premises. In general, the culture-value system is one input into the broader psychologicalforces that drive men toward certain goals and tacitly discourage others.

In pure research, however, a goal may be pursued with no advance knowledge of its utility. Thus may a startling technique become available before we are prepared to consider all the implications of its application. Similarly, confusion can arise when the pursuit of one problem leads, accidentally, to the solution of another

which, because unanticipated, was insufficiently evaluated. In these circumstances, the experimentalist is often tempted to do what can be done-merely for the excitement of doing it. The work on DNA of James Watson and Francis Crick has opened the way to all sorts of experiments in genetic surgery that may be beyond the intent of the two pioneers.

What would be the value of cloning?

The most immediate answer comes from the field of animal husbandry, which would gain new breeding techniques on a par with those already available to the plant biologist. If a particular brand of rice or wheat is developed, a true line can be offered so that the genetically pure strain, and only that strain, can be propagated.

This technique would also permit us to manipulate the massive genetic multiples involved in breeding the best cattle possible for meat. Cloning could also be used to augment the number of members of an endangered species to that critical level necessary for group survival.

Would there be legitimate uses for human cloning? Certainly the general speculation about multiple Mozarts, or an army of supersoldiers who are identical in every respect, with replaceable parts available for convenient transplants in case of injury, a're insufficient to motivate scientific research.

They are not only insufficient, they are naIve. A human being is more (or less) than his genetic potential. It is the interaction of his genetic variables with the environment that produces the "person." The individual can be altered by the cytoplasm of the egg; by the biochemistry of the circulating blood through the placenta; by the diet and emotions of the woman carrying the child and by the trauma of the birth process. And all these environmental influences come to bear before what is usually visualized as life experience has yet begun.

The life experience itself further pounds, pulls and shapes the same genetic clay into

wondrous and ludicrous varIatIOns. If identical twins separated from birth show disparate form and personality, identical twins separated by a generation of timeclones-might not even recognize one another. We are not only what we are genetically given, but what we eat, hear, see, smell, learn, feel, touch, do and have done to. A genetic St. Francis clone could evolve into a tyrant. Or, more optimistically, a Hitler clone has the potential for sainthood.

The technical steps necessary to do human cloning are likely to be inspired not by the quest for a super race but by the need to solve compelling problems. Once developed to a point of predictable success, cloning will first be used as an eccentric application of a standard procedure, for a humanitarian end, as illustrated by a hypothetical case: A couple w~ch has one adored infant and is incapable of having another learns that the child has been mortally injured. What possible harm would result, it may be asked, if one of the child's cells is taken so that he could be genetically reproduced (with the clone implanted in his mother's womb, or a substitute's) and nine months later "reborn" to the delight and comfort of his mourning parents?

Cloning-that most artificial of phenomena-would in this way be exploited to serve the most fundamental of human needs, bearing and raising children. Yet, on the other hand, it would totally cleave that need from related physiological and procreative behavior (sexual passion, tenderness and romantic love) which have traditionally initiated, accompanied and complemented parenthood.

Cloning commands our attention more because it dramatizes the developing issues in bioethics than because of its potential threat to our way of life. Many biologists, ethicists and social scientists see it not as a pressing problem but a metaphoric device serving to focus attention on identical prob-

lems that arise from less dramatic forms of genetic engineering and that might slip into public use, protected from public debate by the incremental nature of the changes they impose.

All the issues have certain common features. The new technology will be motivated by the most humanitarian ends (with the exception of biological war researchanother story). Its purpose will be to relieve suffering, to conquer disease, to restore normal capacities (as in conceiving or bearing a child). The difficulties of assessing the worth of this work versus the cost are compounded because the benefits are immediate, concrete and tend to serve the individual, while the costs, if any, are perceived in abstractions ("humanness," "relatedness" and "quality of life"), are apparent only with time and are paid for by society as a whole or future generations.

Who will determine what will be done and what will not? Who will determine what should be done and what should not?

What controls should there be? How do we balance private rights and the general good? On what basis will we allocate decisions to either personal conscience or public policy?

Are there areas in which control of human development and behavior is bad per se, independent of the nature of the controlled things, the intention of the controller or the reasons for control? Are there processes which, once started, will bring irreversible changes so slight as to not be significant in one generation-but may, inexorably and incrementally, bring major changes to successive generations?

And if we do attempt human cloning, what will we do with the "debris," the discarded messes along the line? What will we do with those pieces and parts, nearsuccesses and almost-persons? What will we call the debris? At what arbitrary point will the damaged "goods" become damaged "children," requiring nurture rather than disposal? The more successful one

became at this kind of experimentation, the more horrifyingly close to human would be the failures. The whole thing seems beyond contemplation for ethical and esthetic, as well as scientific reasons.

The capacity of man to reconstruct himself is the capacity to destroy himself by changing into a new creature-perhaps better, but not man.

When Mary Shelley conceived Dr. Frankenstein, science was all promise. The technological age existed only in the e'fcitement of anticipation, and there was leisure to philosophize. Man was ascending, and the only terror was that in his rise he would offend God by assuming too much and reaching too high, by coming too close.

The scientist was the new Prometheus.

By the end of the 19th century, technology had surpassed even its own expectations. Man was too arrogant to recognize arrogance. Man did not have to fear God, he had replaced Him. There was nothing that technology would not eventually solve.

The whole of history seemed to be contrived to serve the purposes and glorify the name of Homo sapiens.

It seems grossly unfair that so short a time as the last 25 years should have produced so precipitous a fall. But then, the way down the mountain has traditionally been faster than the way up. Man has been handed the bill and he is not sure he has enough assets to pay up. We have destroyed much of our environment, exhausted much of our resources and have manufactured weapons of total destruction without sufficiently secure control mechanisms. The biological revolution may offer relief or hasten total failure. Unfortunately, things now move faster, and we are less sure of how to even recognize success or failure.

But technology has elevated man-and there is no going back. "Natural man" is the co-operative creation of nature and man. Antitechnology is self-hatred.

The tragic irony is not that Mary Shelley's "fantasy" once again has a relevance.

The tragedy is that it is no longer a fantasy -and that in its realization we no longer identify with Dr. Frankenstein but with his monster.

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Planned single alterations inevitably turn out to be package deals. The unpredicted comple~ities of environmental intervention, with the resulting ecological disasters, should serve as a warning model.

Improvement is a form of substitution.

The increasing capacity of man to reconstruct himself is, by definition, the capacity to destroy himself through transformation into another creature-perhaps better, but not man.

If, in a time of anxiety, when the human species is unsure of its future and frightened by developments it does not understand, it is offered a planned environment, it may accept. If man is promised security and assured survival at the cost of his personal freedom and essential dignity, he may accept, particularly if he is told that the freedom he abandons is an illusion and the dignity only a conceit. Modern learning theory applied early through global television (the average American four-year-old already watches 40 to 60 hours a week) and other teaching machines can program man beyond anything yet seen. The real danger of "pure strains" may come equally from conditioning and cloning. And both, as About the Author: Willard Gaylin, M.D., is well as a frightening array of other prob- president of the Institute of Society', "Ethics lems not mentioned, demonstrate the fine and the Life Sciences, and associate professor line between promise and perdition in the of psychiatry at Columbia University. His new biotechnology. latest book is In the Serviceof Their Country.

THE ETHICAL QUESTIONS or GENETIC ENGINEERING From time to time the alarm is raised that science is overreaching itself. We all remember hearing it raised with regard to the nuclear scientists. Now we are hearing it again because of things that might soon happen in the laboratories of the biomedical scientists who will soon have the power to reshape the genetic make-up of the human species-and hence the power to determine the direction of man's future evolution.

The new science causing such alarm is called "genetic engineering." Oqe of its many technologies-cloning, or the creation of genetically identical replicas of a single individual-is discussed in detail in the preceding article. But genetic engineering involves techniques besides cloning. Its scientists are working in the fields of in vitro fertilization, or the fertilization of an egg-cell in the test tube and its subsequent reimplantation in the uterus. Other aspects of genetic engineering involve modification of an individual's genes-for medical therapy or other reasons.

Obviously, some of the implications of tampering with human genes are disturbing to contemplate. They raise ethical, political arid social questions of the greatest significance for the future of the human race. This is why many Americans in all fieldsthe sciences, social sciences, humanities, education, law, medicine, politics-are calling for more ,public discussion of the whole subject to expose it to the widest public scrutiny. There is a grow..ing feeling that it should be discussed fully, candidly and openly -and that discussion should begin now, before genetic engineering technology is fully developed.

What are the ethical questions involved? Some of them have been covered in the previous article's discussion of the specific technique of cloning human beings. A more comprehensive gamut of considerations was listed recently in an article in the Saturday Review of Science, by the U.S. Senator from California, John V. Tunney.

1. There are the two basic and interrelated questions: What genetic traits are to be judged "desirable?" Who is to make that judgment?

2. Would genetic engineering designed to "improve" man affect the degree of diversity among men? Should we presume the concept of an "optimum" man? Does-or should-man seek an "optimum?" What would the quest for an "optimum" do for our sense of tolerance of the imperfect? Is "tolerance" a value to be cherished?

3. Should there be different biological times for different kinds of experiments? Do different ethical considerations apply if we distinguish between experimentation on an unfertilized or fertilized egg, a fetus, an infant, a child, an adult?

4. How much of a difference is there between genetic "therapy" to correct factors known to cause disease and "genetic engi-

neering," defined as techniques to alter man in terms of some parameters other than disease? Might it be preferable to respond more receptively to genetic therapy, or is such a distinction unworkable?

5. Would techniques developed for the therapy of an individual patient automatically be diffused into the general public for purposes other than therapy? Is medical science operationally capable of restricting the use to therapy only?

6. Doesn't any eugenics program-therapeutic or otherwise -imply a certain attitude toward a "proper" norm for human behavior? Who is to determine what the norm is?

7. How are such words as "normal," "abnormal," "health," "disease" and "improvement" to be defined?

8. Would genetic improvement be continuous? In other words, would it invariably make all children "superior" to their parents? What would be the social consequences of this? Would it institutionalize generation gaps and isolate communities by generations?

9. Will the quest for genetic improvement lead man to a perception of himself as lacking any worth in the state he is in?

10. If we have a well-developed ability to perform genetic therapy, and if such therapy is not available to all, how will we determine who will receive it? Are some people more desirable or worthy of treatment? How will the selection be made?

It is obvious that there are no clear-cut answers to these questions. Moreover, they raise many political problems. What will happen if some races or nations decide one set of traits is superior to another? Can the world afford to let each nation do its own genetic engineering, or is this another of the growing number of problems that require international agreements?

It is wise to remember that when we enter the realm of ethical arguments, no one has a greater claim to wisdom than anyone else. Another way of saying this is that the debate that is certain to come must not be left to scientists alone. Many suggestions will be forthcoming. Among the most interesting were the tentative guidelines outlined by Senator Tunney in the conclusion of his article. He said: "We would suggest that among the values that man ought to protect most fully are the values of humility, of compassion, of diversity, and of skepticism. We would suggest that any scientific initiatives of one generation that would foreclose or eliminate the options of future generations-any decision today that implies an ability to predict the human traits that will be most cherished tomorrow-smacks of arrogance and should be avoided.

We would suggest that man should exercise the utmost caution in this sensitive field and that decisions that will be genetically irreversible might require a wisdom we do not possess."

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Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity proves that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, thus effectively preventing man from ever reaching the distant stars. Writers of science fiction circumvented the problem by inventing 'hyperspace,' where natural laws are different.

Recent research has shown that it is 'not impossible' for such a hyperspace to exist.

If you push something hard enough, it begins to move. If you continue to push it while it moves, it accelerates; that is, it keeps moving faster and faster. Is there a limit to how fast it can move? If we just keep on pushing and pushing, will it go faster and faster and faster? Or won't it?

When something moves, it has kinetic energy. The quantity of kinetic energy possessed by a moving object depends upon its velocity and its mass. Velocity is a straightforward property that is easy to grasp. To be told something is moving at a high or a low velocity brings a clear picture to mind. Mass, however, is a little more subtle.

Mass is related to the ease with which an object can be accelerated. Suppose you have two .baseballs; one is conventional, and the othe~ is an exact imitation in solid steel. It would take much more effort to accelerate the steel ball to a particular speed by throwing it than it would the ordinary baseball. The steel ball, therefore, has more mass.

Gravitational pull also depends on mass. The steel ball is attracted more strongly to the earth than the baseball because the steel ball has more mass. In general, then, on the surface of the earth, a more massive object is heavier than a less massive one. In fact, it is common (but not really correct) to say "heavier" and "lighter" when we mean "more massive" and "less massive."

But back to our moving object with kinetic energy that depends on both velocity and mass. If our moving object is made to move more rapidly by means of that push we're talking about, then its kinetic energy increases. This increase is reflected both in an increase in velocity and in an increase in mass, the two factors on which kinetic energy depends.

At low velocities, the ordinary velocities in the world about us, most of the increase in kinetic energy goes into increase in velocity and very little into increase in mass.

In fact, the increase in mass is so tiny at This article has been reprinted from Saturday Review of Science.

Copyright © 1972 by Saturday Review, Inc.

ordinary velocities that it could not be measured. It was assumed that as an object gained kinetic energy, only the velocity increased-the mass remained unchanged.

As a result, mass was often incorrectly defined as simply the quantity of matter in a particular object, something that obviously couldn't change with velocity.

In the 1890s, however, theoretical reasons arose for considering the possibility that mass increased as velocity increased.

Then, in 1905, Albert Einstein explained the matter exactly in his Special Theory of Relativity. He presented an equation that

described just how mass increased as velocity increased.

Using this equation, you can calculate that an object with a mass of one kilogram when it is at rest has a mass of 1.005 kilograms when it is moving at 30,000 kilometers a second. (A velocity of 30,000 kilometers per second-about 18,600 miles per second-is far greater than any velocity measured prior to the 20th century, and even then the increase in mass is -only half of one per cent. It's no surprise that the mass increase was never suspected until the 1890s.)

As velocity continues to increase, the mass begins to increase more rapidly. At 150,000 kilometers per second, an object that has a "rest mass" of one kilogram has a mass of 1.15 kilograms. At 270,000 kilometers per second, the mass has risen to 2.29 kilograms.

As the mass increases, however, the difficulty of further accelerating the object -making it move still faster-also increases. (That's the definition of mass.) A push of a given size becomes less and less effective as a way of increasing the object's velocity and more and more effective as a way of increasing its mass. By the time velocity has increased to_ 299,000 kilometers per second, almost all the energy gained by an object through further pushes goes into an increase in mass and very little goes into an increase in velocity. This is just the opposite of the situation at very low or "normal" velocities.

As we approach a velocity of 299,792.5 kilometers per second, just about all the extra energy derived from a push goes into additional mass and almost none goes into additional velocity. If a velocity of 299,792.5 kilometers per second could actually be reached, the mass of any moving object with a rest mass greater than zero would be infinite. No push, however great, could then make it move faster.

As it happens, 299,792.5 kilometers per second (about 186,000 miles per second) is the speed of light. Thus what Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity tells us is that it is impossible for any object with mass to

be accelerated to speeds equal to or greater than the speed of light. The speed of light (in a vacuum) is the absolute speed limit for objects with mass, objects such as ourselves and our spaceships.

Nor is this just theory. Velocities at very nearly the speed of light have been measured since the Special Theory was announced and the increase in mass was found to be exactly as predicted. The Special Theory predicted all sorts of phenomena that have since been observed with great accuracy, and there seems to be no reason to doubt the theory or to doubt the fact that the speed of light is the speed limit for all objects with mass.

But let's get more fundamental. All objects with mass are made up of combinations of subatomic particles that themselves possess _mass;_forexample, the proton, the electron, and the neutron. Such particles must always move at speeds less than that of light. They are called "tardyons," a name invented by physicist Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and his co-workers.

There also are particles that at rest would have no mass at all-a rest mass of zero. However, these particles are never at rest, so the value of the rest mass must be determined indirectly. Bilaniuk therefore suggested the term "proper mass" be used to replace rest mass in order to avoid speaking of the rest mass of something that is never at rest.

It turns out that any particle with a

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'If the tachyons [hypothetical particles that move faster than the speed of light] are not forbidden, then they must exist. But can we detect them?' proper mass of zero must travel at the speed 'of 299,792.5 kilometers per second, no more, no less. Light is made up of photons, particles that have a proper mass of zero. This is why light travels at 299,792.5 kilometers per second and why this speed is known as the "speed of light." Other particles with proper mass of zero, such as neutrinos and gravitons, also travel at the speed of light. Bilaniuk suggested that all such zero mass particles be termed "Iux;ons" from a Latin word for "light."

This celestial speed limit, the speed of light, has been of particular annoyance to writers of science fiction because it has seriously limited the scope of their stories.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 25 trillion miles away. Traveling at the speed of light, it would take 4.3 years (earthtime) to go from earth to Alpha Centauri, and another 4.3 years to come back. Special Relativity's speed limit therefore means that a minimum of 8.6 years must pass on earth before anything can make a round trip to even the nearest star. A minimum of 600 years must pass before anything can get to the Pole Star and back. A minimum of 150,000 years must pass before anything can get to the other end of our galaxy and back. A minimum of five million years must pass before anything can get to the Andromeda Galaxy and back.

Taking these minimum time lapses into account (and remembering that the actual time lapse would be much larger under any reasonable conditions) would make any science fiction story involving interstellar travel extraordinarily complicated.

Science fiction writers who wished to avoid these complications would find themselves confined to the solar system only.

What can be done? To begin with, science fiction writers might ignore the whole thing and pretend there is no limit.

That, however, is not real science fiction; it is just fairy tales. On the other hand, science fiction writers can sigh and accept the speed limit with all its complications.

L. Sprague de Camp did so routinely and Poul Anderson recently wrote a novel, Tau

Zero, that accepted the limit in a very fruitful manner. Finally, science fiction writers might find some more-or-Iess plausible way of getting around the speed limit.

Thus, Edward E. Sinith, in his series of intergalactic romances, assumed some device for reducing the inertia of any object to zero. With zero inertia, any pu~h -can produce infinite acceleration, and Smith reasoned that any velocity up to the infinite would therefore become possible.

Of course, there is no known way of reducing inertia to zero. Even if there were a way, inertia is completely equivalent to mass and to reduce inertia to zero is to reduce mass to zero. Particles without mass can be accelerated with infinite ease, but only to the speed of light. Smith's zeroinertia drive would make possible travel at the speed of light but not/aster than light.

A much more common science fictional device is to imagine an object leaving our universe altogether.

To see what this means, let's consider a simple analogy. Suppose that a person must struggle along on foot across very difficult country-mountainous and full of cliffs, declivities, torrential rivers, and so on. He might well argue that it was completely impossible to travel more than two miles a day. If he has so long concentrated on surface travel as to consider it the only form of progress conceivable, he might well come to imagine that a speed limit of two miles per day represents a natural law and an ultimate limit under all circumstances.

But what if he travels through the air, not necessarily in a powered device such as a jet plane or rocket, but in something as simple as a balloon? He can then easily cover two miles in an hour or less, regardless of how broken and difficult the ground beneath him is. In getting into a balloon, he moved outside the "universe" to which his fancied ultimate speed limit applied.

Or, speaking in dimensions, he derived a speed limit for two-dimensional travel along a surface, but it did not apply to travel in three dimensions by way of a balIoon.

Similarly, the Einsteinian limit might be conceived of as applying only to our own space. In that case, what if we could move into something beyond space, as our balloonist moved into something beyond surface. In the region beyond space, or "hyperspace," there might be no speed limit at alI. You could move at any velocity, however enormous, by the proper application of energy and then, after a time lapse of a few seconds, perhaps, re-enter ordinary space at some point that would have required two centuries of travel in the ordinary fashion.

Hyperspace, expressly stated or quietly assumed, has been part of the stock in trade of science fiction writers for several decades now.

Few, if any, science fiction writers supposed hyperspace and faster-than-light travel to be anything more than convenient fiction that made it simpler to develop the intricacies and pathways of plots on a galactic and supergalactic scale. Yet, surprisingly enough, science seemed to come to their rescue. What science fiction writers were groping toward by means of pure imagination was something that, in a way, seemed to have justification after all in Special Relativity.

Suppose we imagine an object with a rest mass of one kilogram moving at 425,000 kilometers per second, nearly half again as fast as the speed of light. We might dismiss this as impossible but, for a moment, let's not. Rather, let us use Einstein's equation to calculate what its mass would be if it did reach this speed.

It turns out that, according to Einstein's equation, an object with a rest mass of one kilogram moving at 425,000 kilometers per second has a mass equal to ,J-:I kilograms.

The expression ,J-:I is what mathematicians call an "imaginary number." Such numbers are not realIy imaginary and have important uses, but they are not the kind of numbers ordinarily considered appropriate for measuring mass. The general feeling would be to consider an imaginary mass as "absurd" and let it go at that.

In 1962, however, Bilaniuk and his coworkers decided to check into the matter of imaginary mass and see if it might be given meaning. Perhaps an imaginary mass merely implied a set of properties that were different from those possessed by objects with ordinary mass. For instance, an object with ordinary mass speeds up when pushed and slows down when it makes its way through a resisting medium.

What if an object with imaginary mass slowed down when it was pushed and speeded up when it made its way through a resisting medium? On the same line of thought, an object with ordinary mass has more energy the faster it goes. What if an object with imaginary mass has less energy the faster it goes?

Once such concepts were introduced, Bilaniuk and his associates were able to show that objects with imaginary mass, traveling faster than the speed of light, did not violate Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. In 1967, physicist Gerald Feinberg, in discussing these faster-than-light particles, called them "tachyons" from a Greek word meaning "speed."

However, tachyons have their own limi¡ tations. As they gain energy by being pushed, they slow down. As they move slower and slower, it becomes more and more difficult to make them move still slower. When they approach the speed of light, they cannot be made to go any more slowly.

There are, then, three classes of particles: 1. Tardyons, which have a proper massgreater than zero and which can move at any velocity less than the speed of light, but can never move at the speed of light or faster; 2. Luxons, which have a proper mass of zero and which can move only at the speed of light; and 3. Tachyons, which have an imaginary proper mass and which can move at any velocity greater than the speed of light, but can never move at the speed of light or slower.

Granted that this third class, the tachyons, can e~ist without violating Special Relativity, do they actually exist? It is a

common rule in theoretical physics, one accepted by many physicists, that anything not forbidden by the basic laws of nature must take place. If the tachyons are not forbidden, then they must exist. But can we detect them?

In theory, there is a way of doing so.

When a tachyon passes through a vacuum at more than the speed of light (as it must), it leaves a flash of light trailing behind it.

If this light were detected, one could, from the light's properties, identify and characterize the tachyon that has passed. Unfortunately, a tachyon moving at more than the speed of light remains in a particular vicinity-say, in the neighborhood of a detecting device-for only an incredibly small fraction of a second. The chances of detecting a tachyon are therefore incredibly small, and none have as yet been detected.

(But that doesn't prove they don't exist.)

It is perfectly possible to convert a particle from one class to another. For example, an electron and a positron, both of which are tardyons, can combine to form gamma rays. Gamma rays are composed of luxons and can be converted back into electrons and positrons. There would seem, then, to be no theoretical objection to the conversion of tardyons to tachyons and back again, if the proper procedure could be found.

Suppose, then, that it were possible to convert all the tardyons in a spaceship, together with its contents, both animate and inanimate, into equivalent tachyons. The tachyon-spaceship, with no perceptible interval of acceleration, would be moving at perhaps 1,000 times the speed of light and would get to the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri in a little over a day. There it would be reconverted into tardyons.

It must be admitted that this is a lot harder to do than to say. How does one convert tardyons into tachyons while maintaining all the intricate interrelationships between the tardyons, say, in a human body? How does one control the exact speed and direction of travel of the tachyons? How does one convert the tachyons

back into tardyons with such preCISIOn that everything is returned exactly to the original without disturbing that delicate phenomenon called life?

But suppose it could be done. In that case, going to the distant stars and galaxies by way of the tachyon-universe would be exactly equivalent to the science fictional dream of making the trip by way of hyperspace. Would the speed limit then be lifted? Would the universe, in theory at least, be at our feet?

Maybe not. In an article I wrote in 1969, I suggested that the two universes that are separated by the "luxon wall," ours of the tardyons and the other of the tachyons, represented a suspicious asymmetry. It seemed to me that the laws of nature were basically symmetrical, and to imagine speeds less than light on one side of the wall and speeds greater than light on the other wasn't right.

Properly speaking, I suggested (without any mathematical analysis at all and arguing entirely from intuition) that whichever side of the luxon wall you were on would seem to be the tardyon universe and it would always be the other side that was the tachyon universe. In that way there would be perfect symmetry: Both sides would be tardyon to themselves; both sides tachyon to the other. In an article entitled "Space-Time" in the 1971 issue of the McGraw-Hil/ Yearbook of Science and Technology, Bilaniuk subjected the matter to careful mathematical analysis. He found that there was just this symmetry between the two universes.

If this is so, the speed limit remains.

No matter how spaceships shift back and forth between universes, they are always tardyon, and it is always the other universe that is going faster than the speed of light.

Science fiction writers must, after all, look elsewhere for their hyperspace.

0 About the Author: Isaac Asimov. a writer of fiction and nonfiction, is an associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University Medical School. He is the author of 122 books.

TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSPORTATION

TBA"i\. â&#x20AC;˘ THE FU1\\"\ Whether suspended beneath a curving monorail glittering in the morning sun or cradled by horizontal guidewheels on an elevated track, the transit car of tomorrow glides swiftly, silently, smoothly. The Monocab (right) and the Dashaveyor (above)-operated by computer and powered by electricity-are two of the new, sophisticated vehicles called "people-movers," which have been designed to meet the urgent transportation needs of the world's cities. Monocab and Dashaveyor are more than ideas for the future. Their gleaming glass and steel realities were seen last year at the first international exposition devoted entirely to transportation, TRANSPO-72. The nine-day fair at Washington's Dulles International Airport brought together some 500 exhibits of transportation technology-both today's and tomorrow's. The problems of transportation are full of paradoxes.

People are discovering that while they can fly across states and continents at speeds approaching that of sound, they are forced to crawl through city traffic more slowly than horse-drawn carriages did 60 years ago. A Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system using people-movers may free the city dweller from traffic delays and whisk him to his destination in air-conditioned comfort and safety. And

Parking towers rise to meet the sky, strange vehicles run swiftly past, rubber bags inflate to cushion accident shocks. since the PRT system will be operated electrically, it will make the city less noisy and more free of harmful pollutants.

New PRT vehicles such as Monocab and Dashaveyor provide the most promising solution to urban traffic congestion. They ride more smoothly than luxury automobiles; their service is more personalized than streetcars, trains and buses. Once inside the PRT car, all the rider has to do is push a button and he is whisked away to his destination. Says William Magruder, a U.S. Government adviser on technology: "Think of the system as a horizontal elevator."

Recent cost analyses have put a price tag of about $2.5 million per kilometer for a metropolitan PRT system. This compares with about $16.7 million per kilometer for an advanced surface railway system and more than $31 million per kilometer for a subway.

But PRT is only one solution to the problems of travel in the future. For long-distance, high-speed transportation, the Grumman Corporation has built a train that hurtles along the ground faster than many planes can fly. Called the Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle, the train straddles a single steel rail (see front cover) while riding on a thin cushion of forced air. It is propelled by a nonpolluting linear induction motor at speeds approaching 500 kilometers per hour.

In considering the transportation needs of the next decades, TRANSPO's exhibitors did not overlook the faithful automobile.

They realized that the automobile will retain its dominance as ground transportation, and that American scientists and engineers have been rallying to the Government-sponsored effort to build the ultimate safety car. Among the experimental vehicles shown at TRANSPO was an automobile built by Fairchild Industries (see page 24) which has energy-absorbing hydraulic bumpers that automatically extend 30 centimeters forward when the car reaches a speed of 40 to 50 kilometers an hour. With inflatable air bags that instantaneously deploy to protect passengers in the event of an accident (photo at far right, bottom), padded interiors and extra durable construction, the Fairchild car is built to protect passengers in head-on crashes at 80,kilometers an hour.

As the number of cars increases, parking poses an acute problem. One designer's solution to this is the Park Mobile (photo at right). The model displayed at TRANSPO can stack 22 cars in the ground space for two.

New and ingenious, brilliant both in conception and design, the exhibits at TRANSPO-72 did more than demonstrate the giant strides made in modern transportation. They gave us a preview of the vehicles, the tools and the technology that will soon be solving the transportation problems of an ever-more0 crowded world.

One solution to city parking problems is the self-service parking tower (left) which has a capacity of 22 automobiles stacked one above the other. The four-passenger Insta-Glide car (below) is powered by a helical motor that revolves like a corkscrew. Speed is 80 kilometers

an hour. The "people-mover" developed

by Transportation Technology, Inc.â&#x20AC;˘ (below center) moves on a cushion of air and can carry 10 passengers at 40 kilometers an hour. Bottom: An air cushion safety device for cars inflates itself within six-hundredths of a second following a collision.

FI-J

A visit to TRANSPO-72 was a glimpse of travel in the future. One of the star attractions was the "robot lady" (right) showing the command capabilities of a computerized railroad control system developed by the General Railway Signals Company. Fairchild Industries' safety car (top) may well be the prototype of tomorrow's automobile. Its hydraulic bumpers are shown extended, which happens

automatically when the car reaches a speed of 50 kilometers an hour. At left, exposition visitors stroll through the yawning cargo bay of the C-5 Galaxy aircraft, the world's largest plane. One exhibit, the Westinghouse Air Brake Company's "people-mover" (above left) is already operating at the San Diego Wild Life Park. Another popular exhibit was the air cushion vehicle (above) designed by Transportation Technology, Inc.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY KEEPS THIS BABY ALIVE

Ris world is aplastic'bal David Phillip is an "untouchable." Even his mother must cuddle him through big rubber gloves sealed into the plastic isolation chamber in which he lives (right), for her touch might contaminate and kill him. David has a rare birth defect called Combined Immune Deficiency Disease, which has left him with the weak immunological defenses of a six-week~old embryo.

He has no thymus gland and no lymph nodes. He lacks an adequate supply of white blood cells, and the few he has are incapable of producing antibodies. This means that David's body is incapable of fighting any infection or disease. He must live in an ingenious device of medical technologya huge, air-tight, completely sterilized plastic bubble which can be moved back and forth between a hospital and his home in Houston, Texas.

Except for the first few seconds of his life, David has never been outside that bubble. The doctors allow him-inside his plastic bag-to spend several weeks at a time at home, to absorb as much family life as he can. Neighbors' children (below) often peer in the window of his house to watch him play with his germless plastic toys. But whether at home or in the hospital, his food and clothing are steam-sterilized, and the air he breathes is filtered through four layers of glass wool. David is very much like a normal child. He laughs a lot. He recognizes both his parents and his sister, who is perfectly normal. His parents are hopeful that one day he too will be a normal child.

The doctors are giving him carefully controlled doses of bacteria and viruses in an effort to raise his resistance to a survival level. This process could take as long as three years. Should they fail, the only alternative would be a bone-marrow transplant, which may start the manufacture of those cells David lacks. David's deficiency is linked with X chromosomes, which means that females can be carriers, but only males can be affected.

However long it is before David can leave his sterile and isolated plastic world, his parents feel that they can endure it. "We can put up with whatever we have to," said his mother, "and one of these days I'm going to be able at last to put a big wet kiss on his cheek."

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TBCBIOLOGY AID COLTORBIII BVOLUTIOI Beginning with the premise that man is a tool-making animal, the author argues that technology is inseparable from the history of human culture. 'Human evolution,' he says, 'owes its speed to the gift of technology by which we have shaped the environment .... Every civilization has been grounded on technology: What makes today's unique is that for the first time we believe that every man is entitled to all its benefits.'

There is no blueprint of the future, nothing that might be read as a map to the promised land. Since the heyday of H.G. Wells, almost no one has written seriously about the future except the prophets of gloom, such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Their books were made popular by their moralizing tone, but in fact they lack moral as well as scientific imagination: The tragic air about them derives from a complacent assurance that literary England in the first half of the century was the arbiter and expression of ethical wisdom forever. Meanwhile, the writers with a more inventive turn of mind have backed away into science fiction, where their timid and trivial adventures in whimsy do not aspire to genuine imagination and humanity, and so do not rank even as minor prophecy.

Perhaps it has become too painful to think about the future, whose melancholy course just ahead of us is constantly predictable, and yet which we constantly fail to steer away from patently disastrous policies. Whatever the reason, we are intellectually in the middle of a grand withdrawal from history, of which the withdrawal from the future is the less visible but the more ominous half. It is, as if we were trying to close our eyes to all that has made us human, by way of biological and This article has been reprinted by permission of The American Scholar. Copyright Š 1972 by J. Bronowski.

cultural evolution, and want instead to play at being happy foundlings in a hole in time.

The truth is, however, that the special gifts of man and his achievements are inseparable from his evolutionary history as the only substantially self-made animal. A multitude of animal species run, fly, swim, and burrow around us, shaped by and locked into their environment; and among all the species, only man has achieved enough command to have largely influenced his own biological evolution. In the past, man has molded himself for the most part unconsciously, by changing the environment so that its selective pressure on him changed. Now we are able to command at least our immediate future with a much larger understanding of the implications of what we do; and it would be ironic if we chose this new moment to bring history to a standstill.

The contemporary crisis of withdrawal from past and future together has been brought home to me by reading again Desmond Bernal's small classic of prophecy, The World, the Flesh & the Devil, which has been reprinted after a biblical lapse of 40 years. My first reading of the book in 1929 is still bright in my mind, not because it was memorable, but because in a heightened form it was natural and native to Cambridge then: an active, un-

inhibited, bubbling society of young men who were forever speculating about everything. I was a fairly inquisitive undergraduate, but Desmond Bernal as a junior research don in crystallography outdid us all in curiosity, argument, and irritating candor. His great range of interests makes Bernal's first book an epitome of the intellectual tone of Cambridge then, and (by the way) is expressed in its arch title: The World is man's physical environment, the Flesh is his biological frame, and the Devil is his psychological make-up.

Bernal was thinking on an evolutionary scale of time, and trying to guess the future toward which man is. heading, in part by the elaboration of his species-specific talents, and in part by the short-term choices that he makes, half consciously, to direct his long-term fate. Naturally he foresaw that man would more and more crowd and despoil the earth: In the long run, therefore, he would have to make new earths and put them into solar orbit. Since a man-made earth would necessarily be small, say 16 kilometers across, it would have no gravity to speak of and would therefore best be made hollow, with the population moving and working freely inside as a three-dimensional, self-contained city culture. Chemical and energy exchanges would have to take place through the shell, which would thus have to serve both as mother quarry and as cell wall;

and the inhabitants would occasionally I am deliberately thrusting these specusend off from the shell new copies of their lations at the reader because it seems to earth, like the twinning of living cells. In me timely to remind ourselves that man time the solar system would presumably be is an evolved being whose evolution is still whirling with little earths by the hundred going on. We are creatures like others in thousand, each isolated from the others course of change, and we are unlike the and set on its own evolutionary path. others mainly in our rate and range of If this seems a fantastic way to reshape change. Very recent studies of the protein the world. Bernal's way with the flesh is chemistry of primates suggest that we and even more unorthodox. His thought here the chimpanzee were one stock no longer begins from the observation that Boswell than 10 or 20 million years ago, so that quotes from Benjamin Franklin, that man our evolution has gone prodigiously fast is a tool-making animal. We now know (particularly in the growth of our brain that this is indeed how man has extended in the last half million years). By contrast, the reach of his organs into his unique such social insects as the ants have reability to shape the environment to himself. mained quite unchanged for at least 50 Sooner or later, therefore, Bernal holds, million years, locked in their rigid hierthe more sophisticated tools will be made archies of function by structure. We have into normal extensions of the body, and to face the logic oflife, which is that species built into us for life. (Evidently this is reach a steady state, and stop evolving, already happening to our eyes, as we first only when the individuals fall into uniform eke them out with spectacles and then and indeed identical types. By contrast, replace those by contact lenses.) The re- evolution goes on if there is a pool of sult would be a human being as an inte- viable mutations, which can express themgrated tool kit, part flesh and part appa- selves in structures and in behavior difratus, all run directly by the central ner- ferent from the normal: so that it is reasonvous system. able to prophesy that the more variable Oddly, Bernal is both most original and the members of a species are, the more least specific in casting out the devil, that freely and unexpectedly will it evolve. is, the psychological limitations of people If we value variety in human beings, we in their everyday behavior. What is orig- cannot be squeamish in admitting that, inal is that he tackles the subject at all; as a consequence, man will go on evolving for this is a field of prophecy that the quite strangely. professional forecasters always shirk-as can be seen in the otherwise sturdy work of two recent American panels to assess new technology, one run by the U.S. National 'To quarrel with Academy of Sciences and the other by technology is to quarrel the Institute for the Future in Middleton, with the nature of Connecticut.

What the panels guess about changes man-just as if we were in physical and even in biological habits . to quarrel with his is as always bold and stimulating; but symbolic imagination.' what they say about the effect of such changes on personal and social psychology is as always meager, old-womanish, and painfully vague. Bernal marches up to the devil boldly, though he comes away fairly Therefore when we say aloud (and vague himself. His main hope is to liberate rightly) that we need to safeguard the enthe originality that is hidden in every vironment of life, we must beware of sehuman mind, and his recipe for that is to cretly thinking that we must stabilize the cast out fear, particularly the fear of star- environment-with the hidden assumption tling innovations. There is also a nice plea that the fullness of human life is to be for a union of the cultures, by race, geog- equated with man as he is now. Of course, raphy, and disciplines, which was indeed it is unwelcome and unsettling to be told prophetic in 1929 but, by a special irony, that we are not the peak of nature, a musounds almost nostalgic at this moment, seum piece for eternity; but no doubt when the literary Jeremiahs are¡ in full Neanderthal man (whose line has become wail again, and the cultures are as far extinct) felt the same way before us. The apart as ever. quality of life is not God-given; on the

contrary, since the evolutionary rise of man it has been man-made, and it must not be fixed to mean what happens to be agreeable to the kind of men that we are now--eonservatives who like to pose as conservationists. It does not make sense to talk of the quality of life unless we have in mind a choice among the possible satisfactions that human life can provide, and particularly a choice among different modes of intellectual satisfaction.

Again I am deliberately invoking a long perspective in order to make the reader look hard at the Wordsworthian catchwords that are traded in America's health food stores. If the basis for our disgust with the commuter city and the power state is the belief that they are unnatural to man (as surely they are) then we need to say what is natural. Moreover, what is natural to man must be specific to him, which is why the general accounts of animal behavior that derive from Konrad Lorenz will not do. Of course man is a poor creature if he blinds himself to the power and the satisfactions of his animal....c heritage; but he is even poorer, poorer than any animal, if he does not explore those satisfactions that are unique to his species. Hence the scientific search by ethologists for universals in animal behavior is distorted from its purpose, and becomes a silly piece of journalistic sensation, if it is used as a prescription for what is "natural" in human conduct. Magazine readers seem to like to be told that they share a universal beastliness with animals -perhaps because it absolves them of the responsibility to feel human; but that is not what has made our species man rather than any other animal.

What has made us men has been deeply documented now by the fossil finds in Africa in the last 50 years, which have traced the biological and cultural specialization of modern man back to its origins, and by the newer work in primate ethology.

More than a million, perhaps two million years ago, the hominids went on from using rudimentary tools (which the chimpanzee does) to making them and keeping them for future use. That discovery, that simple lunge into technological foresight, released the brake on evolution which the environment imposes on other animals, and sent man off breakneck at a speed unmatched in the three billion years that life has existed on earth. For without that discovery, evolution is necessarily held down to the pace of biological adaptation.

But from the time of the basic human the environment ceases to set the pace, which instead is then set by the capacity to store knowledge and to form plans from it.

This is a remarkable finding, for it implies that the evolution of man has always been culture-driven, and that the driving component was technology. A culture cannot be inherited in the genes, of course; what the hominids passed from one generation to the next was greater dexterity of hand and more farsighted planning in the brain, which became able to manipulate symbols as artifacts. We assume that the choice of mates with these gifts, and the higher reproduction and survival rates of those who possessed them, produced a unique form of natural selection, namely, a self-selection for these culturally useful attributes. (The same selection is still at work: To this day, the correlation of intelligence quotients between bride and bridegroom is higher than between parents and children.) Thus human evolution owes its speed to the gift of technology by which,¡we have shaped the environment; we have never fitted very well into any ecological niche, and instead have carved our own niches with our hands and brain. But even this metaphor is too formal: What has happened is that we have exploited a genetic accident which has made us able progressively to store and organize experience so that we can profit from almost any terrestrial environment. discovery of the future)

On this grand scale of history, therefore, to quarrel with technology is to quarrel with the nature of man-just as if we were to quarrel with his upright gait, his symbolic imagination, his faculty for speech, or his unusual sexual posture and appetite. Of course that is no reason why those who choose should not dislike technology; now that it has helped indirectly to give them a brain two to three times larger than the chimpanzee's,' they are surely free to use it to prefer the life or even the brain of the chimpanzee. But they cannot then take as their ground the claim that they want to return to nature, meaning the nature of man. For the nature of man is expressed in the same few universals in every culture, and one of these universals is technology.

By the,same token, it is a flat denial of history to assert that cultures in which technology has flourished have stifled the development of more personal and sensi-

tive expressions of human nature. On the contrary, the works of high culture that we admire come from the most advanced technological societies of their day-as soon as one looks at the monuments of art and architecture and literature that express the peaks of the human imagination for us, one sees that they match the peaks of technological sophistication in history. (We do not even take our religions from technologically backward civilizations: Buddha, Confucius, Christ and Mohammed were not the desert prophets of backward peoples, but grew up in great intellectual civilizations.) I shall not labor this historical analysis as I have done the biological one, because the facts here are open to everyone to inspect, and are selfevident as soon as we attend to them. The only way to get around them is to dismiss them: that is to say, that Sophocles and Michelangelo and Marlowe and Christopher Wren are fossils whose record is irrelevant to the cultural mishaps of city life in the 20th century-the profound human problems that many of today's idealists believe have been vouchsafed to them for the first time.

'An armory of old and scaly prejudices is being foisted on the young in the disguise of a gospel of nature.'

There is a good deal of talk now about a counterculture, and on the face of it what is being countered is only technology as a social culture. That, for example, is what the words say on the pages of some books with that phrase in the title: technology is soulless, get rid of it and let your soul breathe out. But what is important is what the words do not. sayall the invisible sludge of rejection on which such thoughts float. The words do not say anything about the great concepts of science, of course, about the achievements of the rational intellect, or about the imaginative creation in this century of a world picture unbelievably richer and more harmonious than anything you can get from drugs. That was to be e~pected;

the counterculture is against science. What was not expected is the heavy silence about music and painting and literature as lasting and living expressions of all that has made our culture, and has alone made it worthwhile. Some perfunctory parade of literary commonplaces. and a little mantra-chanting are, it seems, all the equipment that the soul needs on its soaring flight into the acid blue of being human. There is a hidden, plangent hatred of everything except private experience: the counterculture is against culture.

The fact, the dreadful fact, is that the assertion by those who speak for a counterculture that technology distorts human nature is not only false, as biology and as history. It is a deliberate act of mischief, for it is a recapitulation in modern dress of the anti-intellectual, irrational and illiberal prejudices that have always been endemic.

In the past this homespun obscurantism has been a defensive faith for the old; now it is being sold to the young as a respectable brand of snake oil that will dull the itch of ignorance without personal effort. No quack commercial on television can equal this unholy piece of legerdemain. The ethic of the Chamber of Commerce, do-it-yourself, my-way-isas-good-as-yours, who-are-you-anyway-toprefer-brains-to-what-I-have is artlessly turned into a hippie slogan; and we are supposed not to recognize in the rejuvenation the traditional truculence of those who have always claimed that know-nothing can do duty for know-better.

An armory of old and scaly prejudices is being foisted on the young in the disguise of a gospel of nature. For years crackpots have been writing to the papers to warn of the peril (and the impiety) of adding fluoride to drinking water. Now the junior citizens are taking over from them, warning of the peril (and the outrage) of using chemical manure-as if the use of dung had been revealed by some supernatural being, and was not a technology but a magic. Solemnly they tell me that home-baked is better than the bread in the supermarket (as of course it is), not for the sensible reason that personal care went to make it, but because the home oven was invented by Adam and the factory oven by science. My grandfather used to talk like that, always recalling a golden age of simplicity. Bernal has a nice remark about such "very sane reactionaries at all periods warning us to remain in the natural and

primitive state of humanity, which is usually the last stage but one in their cultural history." In my grandfather's stories, that always turned out to be when he was 20.

But when was it for the teen-agers who now talk like him?

The danger in this phony naturalism, this antirational vision of man, is that it points the young away from the true ills of the state, to those lesser targets that the Chamber of Commerce can shoot at too. It is wonderful, for example, to see how happily all parties have joined in crying out against smog and oil slicks. Why not? They ar~ indeed dangerous to lifeand who is to blame a politician if he does not go out of his way to correct the impression that they are more dangerous than the competitive stockpiling of nuclear weapons. So in the register of instant cliches pollution now ranks high as a symbol for universal abuse which will mask all differences; and instead of the old way of life we all agree to preserve and hold sacred the environment.

There used to be a time, not many years ago, when ecologists spoke proudly of their work as The Subversive Science (it is the title of an early book of essays on the subject), and when it was enough to protest against the violence done to fauna and flora and to point to the threat that it carried. But all that has become a commonplace of political oratory, which most of the time merely wants to sell a new technological gimmick in place of the old.

No protest has any intellectual weight now if it is" not directed toward a sensible (and not a nihilistic) mode of social change, and begins with a communal and human and not a technical diagnosis.

Why has pollution become visible and threatening today as it was not 40 years ago? Surely not because technology is less efficient in controlling its own side effects: quite the contrary. If there is smog in Los Angeles and Tokyo, and if it is right to feel that as a universal anguish, it is because we now find it natural to concede that one man has as much business to own a motorcar as another. Pollution is not the cost of technology in itself, nor even of the abuse of technology: It is the result of a shift in technology from the privilege of a few to the right of all.

What we have done, and should be proud to own, is to make the benefits of technology (in the sense of a high standard of health, convenience, privacy and infor-

mati on) as much a human right as life and liberty. In the space of a hundred years we have transformed working- and middleclass life in America so that it now commands as a matter of course what used to be the luxuries of upper-class privilegerunning and hot water, an indoor toilet that flushes, health care and medicines, gas heating and electric light, door-to-door travel, news brought into the house, reading and letter writing, telephone conversation, and all the other norms of daily life that someone born into the working class (D.H. Lawrence, say) once could reach only by endless struggles. Of course, the proliferation of the apparatus to do these things, the water mains and the sewers, the apartment houses, the roads and the telephone wires, the tin cans and the gift wrappings, for a time has turned the landscape cockeyed. But that distortion is not the price of technology-it is the price of revolution anywhere, at any time, like the guillotine springing up in the Place de la Concorde.

'Many intellectuals have abandoned their own history and have retreated into the counterculture of the shaman, the mystic.'

With the step from privilege to everyday use, technology has become a moral and not a material demand; it is a visible expression of the drive for social justice.

And the change came about as a change in the esteem of one man for another-as we see, for example, in the bitter fight in America for the abolition of slavery. Now the sense that all men are entitled to the same standard has spread to the standard of living, which means (everywhere in the world) the use of new techniques to wrest a modest plenty from the starveling grasp of nature.

Technology, then, is no longer a prerogative of status. It is not a weapon of national or commercial or social rivalry (as it was, say, at the time of the FrancoPrussian war), because the spread of scientific knowledge has abolished any lasting monopoly.

Every civilization has been grounded

on technology: What makes today's unique is that for the first time we believe that every man is entitled to all its benefits.

That gives a special moral force to the protest, a sense of revulsion in the face of abuse, when young men see it misused as, for example, in war. Paul Goodman in an essay entitled "Can Technology Be Humane?" likened this ethical aspiration to "a new Protestant Reformation." The analogy is exact because the Reformation was a popular movement of protest to take the interpretation of the Scriptures (and their social lessons) out of the hands of privileged groups and put it into the consciousness of every man as an equal.

The same claim to an equal share in all human goods, and an equal access to nature and to knowledge, gives its special quality to the technical civilization that we are trying to make.

But it is logically and morally untenable to think that equality can be stabilized by training just enough scientists to keep the rest of the population supplied with a sort of minimum pabulum of comfort.

Such parasitic solutions are inspired by the ethic of famine that blows from the past, and that pretends that scarcity makes men equal-a dogma that flies in the face of history. It really is too late to credit that all comfort corrupts, all industry despoils, and running water and the electric blanket inevitably bring in their train social rivalries and nuclear warheads.

The whole economic outlook of nations coveting one another's mines and landscapes as sources of wealth is as dead as mercantilism. On the contrary, we have wealth in every kind of technique for mass production-and an egalitarian mass which, though its values are still improvised from television commercials, is waiting to share it. What makes equal is plenty; so that we have to add to the Reformation the one concept that Luther's puritanical mind feared (for instance, in the Anabaptist revolt): an ethic of plenty.

An ethic of plenty is different in kind from the traditional codes, which as a matter of historical necessity have been inspired by the need to be frugal with natural resources and diligently to build up reserves against famine. Once it comes home to people that their material needs can all be satisfied, then frugality, diligence and thrift cease to be virtues-or can only be preserved by diverting the surplus to other false, archaic virtues, such as na-

tionalism and war. But the way to sap the lingering superstition that virtues must be ascetic is certainly not to propose in their place another bout of puritanism, which is what the nature faddists preach.

The basis of puritanism was submission to a divine or natural ordinance that people could not all have (or be) what th'ey wanted. It came to be assumed that what they wanted was also bad: But of course this truism derives from the need to deny it to them, and not the other way about. Thus the crucial thesis in the old Protestant faith was, necessarily, that it is wrong for men to seek fulfillment (or salvation) in the satisfaction of their personal talents. But a new Protestant Reformation, if it is not to be merely obscurantist, must resolutely put that thesis in reverse. The progress of cultures has always depended on the satisfaction that active men have derived from using their talents; and now that we have it in our reach to offer that to everybody, we have to complete what Freud and Henry Ford began: to make personal satisfaction one of the acknowledged norms of conduct.

The duty that now falls on intellectuals is a great and quite novel educational task: to show people that personal satisfaction does not lie in aping the satiSfadion of others. In the presence of plenty, there is no conflict between private desire and public stringency (what used to be called public good)-either between individual and individual, or between individual and state.

What gives satisfaction then has to do so in the long run: not in the day-to-day of appetite, which will not do as a goal, but in a policy to live by-to be a person by.

The question on which morality turns in an age of potential plenty is: What shall I be? It is indeed the question on the lips of every protester in the new Reformation.

But it has to be a question cast all the way into the future: What shall I become, by virtue of what I do now, to myself. It is in this sense that all nature becomes one, and that we cannot afford to dishonor any part of the creation: because a separation there, a shrugging of the shoulders at greed or cruelty or vulgarity, is a permanent mark on one's own personality. The Germans discovered that when they closed their eyes to the concentration camps, and it faces us in every littered landscape: The man who is coarsened by my indifference, the butcher, is me. The human values exist in me, and when I let them idle for a turn or two, the machinery that rusts is my future self.

Such an ethic for contemporary life, a

doctrine of equal respect for all human potential, cannot ignore the values of science. As Paul Goodman insists, "There is only one culture," and within it science is not value-neutral. It would be idle for me to try to expound the scientific values in a page, when I have spent much of my life in elucidating their place in the totality of values, first in Science and Human Values and more recently in The Identity of Man. Yet there are some crucial things to be said briefly that are pertinent to our present discontents.

'Science is the only method that we have found so far for turning human knowledge into rational action.'

For this is a time when, as I began by saying, many intellectuals have abandoned their own history and have retreated into the counterculture of the shaman, the mystic and the witch doctor. Tn doing this, they have also abandoned the historical responsibility of the intellectual, which is to be the guardian of the values and the conscience of society. Whether they are scientists or scholars, literary critics or philosophers, intellectuals are not merely the vessels in which traditional knowledge reposes and the vehicles by which it is transported. Intellectuals have these functions because they prize knowledge, either as the expression of intellectual truth or as the experience of emotional truth. Without this dedication to truth as a universal end, intellectuals would be only a memory bank; with it, they are the goads of civilization. It is therefore critical that scientists stand fast to maintain at least their share of the ethical responsibility of intellectuals, namely, those values on which the practice of science depends and which its example teaches.

First, there is a special integrity in knowledge which makes it what I have just described, something more than a memory bank. Knowledge in this sense has as its aim the truth about the nature of things, and so it imposes an obligation to be true to the nature of things-inanimate as well as living nature. It is a human obligation, because knowledge is human, and it is

the final sanction to which technology has to conform.

Second, there is an absolute bar to pretense, and specifically to the pretense that the second best will do just as well as the best. We are surrounded by this pretense, in the goods, the information and the policies that are offered to us, in the men who offer them, and in their loyalty to their selfappointed goals. The fire that must drive the new Reformation is a rage against this creeping, pervading hypocrisy, the lie of the second best.

And third, science has been uncommonly successful as a strategy to command the future because it admits no distinction between ends and means. There are no higher ends in science than truthful knowledge, and there are no other means allowed on the way than truthful knowledge. In an age in which ideologies claim, not so much arrogantly as insolently, that they are justified in using men as means, this central value in the ethic df science has a right to be put at the center of the Reformation.

There is no blueprint of the future in these affirmations, nor do they alone make up a bible for the Reformation. But in a time when a deep sense of moral discontent is in danger of being diverted to surface ills, it is right to look to the roots of culture.

The roots lie in the evolutionary history of man, which made technology the most formative of his species-specific talents; and as Bernal's prophetic vision reminds us, we are not at the end of its reach to change man and his environment together.

Those who rail at this prospect in alarm have in their minds a picture of technology as an instrument to give monopoly power to a class or nation. But that phase is over; we are now in a phase of popular technology, when it has become the means and expression of a moral aspiration for justice in equality. In this Reformation setting, it is important to analyze the values that have made science and technology successful as practical ethics. The values of science are an important part of human nature, though only a part. And if we want to maintain any hold on the future, then their social importance is paramount: for science is the only method that we have found so far for turning human knowledge into rational action.

0 About the Author: Jacob Bronowski is director of the Council for Biology in Human Affairs at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Among his many books are Science and Human Values, and The Identity of Man.

When disaster strikes on the high seas, the U.S. Coast Guard's electronic searchand-rescue system stands ready to help those in trouble. In its Washington, D.C., offices, a computer Oeft) maintains data on 15,000 vessels, including times and places of departure, speed and destination.

The 311-foot, 2,500-ton U.S. Coast Guard cutter Coos Bay was returning to its home port of Portland, Maine, from winter patrol off the coast of Labrador. Suddenly she received an SOS from the British motorship Ambassador in the North Atlantic. The Coos Bay changed her course and headed toward the sinking vessel (above), whose exact position was also being broadcast to all nearby . ships with the help of the Coast Guard's computer in Washington. Ships closest to the distress area were steaming to the rescue.

By the time the Coos Bay arrived,

the Norwegian ship Fruen, one of four merchant vessels to reach the scene earlier, had recovered nine men. Then the Coos Bay took over. Its "throwing gun" shot a 15-man rubber life raft over to the Ambassador. Five men jumped into it and pushed off from the sinking ship (see raft in photo), but all were washed overboard when they failed to crawl :under its protective canopy. Six swimmers from the Coos Bay went over the side to search for them.

They rescued two; the other three were washed back on board the Ambassador and rescued a little

later. Although the Coos Bay was constantly rolling 20-45 degrees and was being buffeted by high seas and winds, she managed to save all the remaining men from the sinking ship. Eleven persops were rescued; one was drowned.

(Fourteen of the Ambassador's crew had been lost the previous day when two of her life rafts upset in the sea.)

This is not an unusual story in the everyday life of the U.S. Coast Guard, America's oldest seagoing service. Its motto is Semper Paratus (Always Ready), and in 1971 it answered 50,000 calls for help,

Whatever the mission, the U.S. Coast Guard lives up to its motto: Always Ready. saved 4,000 lives and rescued S233 million in property. Founded in 1790, the Coast Guard's 38,000 officers and seamen can be found in every corner of the seas, from North Pole to South Pole. Their mission is nothing more or less than to preserve life and property at sea.

Carrying out this responsibility involves the Coast Guard in a wide variety of activities. Because of the drama involved, perhaps the best known are its search-andrescue (SAR) missions, such as the Coos Bay's saving the Ambassador's crew.

SAR is only one of the Coast Guard's seven vital jobs. It is also responsible for merchant marine safety, such as the investigation of marine accidents, enforcement of pollution regulations, vessel inspection, issuance of marine licenses and pleasure boating; aids to navigation, such as the manning and maintenance of lighthouses, lightships, buoys, and sophisticated LORAN (LongRange Navigation) stations; marine law enforcement, such as the protection of U.S. fisheries from foreign exploitation; polar operations, such as the opening of shipping lanes to remote military and scientific outposts, scientific surveys, oceanography and meteor-

ology; military readiness, such as planning and training to serve as part of the U.S. Navy in times of conflict; and reserve training, such as preparing reservists for active duty in time of a national emergency.

The members of America's smallest armed service serve at lonely navigational stations on mid-ocean reefs or bleak deserts, aboard icebreakers in the Antarctic, aboard buoy tenders in Alaskan waters or lightships at harbor entrances, in hurricane tracking planes over the Caribbean, in small rowboats during inland floods, or even at a complicated computer in the Coast Guard's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

When Guardsmen get together to swap sea stories, the best ones usually are about rescues. Unlike in the past when most often Guardsmen relied on their boats only, today helicopters, fixed-wing planes, air-cushion vehicles, electronics and computers help the Coast Guard carryon its SAR missions.

Modern electronics and sophisticated computers have enabled the service to replace a slow, clumsy, manual system of plotting ships' positions-a vital step in saving lives and property.

Unable to climb into the rubber life raft thrown to them by a Coast Guard cutter, two injured crewmen (left) from a broken tanker are helped aboard by two Guardsmen. Below: A Coast Guard helicopter lowers a basket and rescuer to save the lone occupant (in shorts) of a powerless outboard motorboat smashed on rocks near San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In 1971 almost 6,000 ships of 65 nations co-operated with the Coast Guard in the operation of AMVER (Automated Merchant Vessel Report). The world's most extensive electronic search-andrescue communication system, AMVER brings modern technology to bear on the ancient creed of mariners: "No call for assistance will go unaided."

Upon leaving port, participating ships radio their time and place of departure, destination, estimated time of arrival, routing, position, speed and medical search-and-rescue capabilities to AMVER headquarters in New York harbor, over a free, worldwide network of 70 maritime radio stations.

This data is relayed to andstored in the memory bank of a computer in the Coast Guard's headquarters in Washington, D.C. The computer maintains SAR characteristics of about 15,000 ships in its memory bank, and plots passages of 1,600 ships a day. Moments or days later, the information can be retrieved instantly in an emergency: a seaman critically ill who needs urgent medical treatment or evacuation to a ship with better medical facilities or a shore hospital; a tanker, broken in two in a gale, whose officers and men must be rescued; a small plane out of petrol which soon must be landed in the sea.

As soon as a call for help is received, the computer prints out a list of all nearby vessels within seconds, outlining the vessels' characteristics, such as speed and SAR medical facilities, which could determine how long rescue ships would take to get to the ship needing help and what they could do when they got there.

Many times private or commercial ships are closer to an emergency than the Coast Guard -even with its more than 100 helicopters and 61 fixed-wing airplanes. When the ship in distress is outside the Coast Guard's rescue area, the surface pictures of available ships in the vicinity are relayed to the nearest Coast Guard

rescue co-ordination center.

AMVER is unique in that it is voluntary, free and open to all ships of any size, flying any flag and on any ocean of the world.

Between 30-45 per cent of the world's ships now participate.

Information given to AMVER is confidential and is not released for any commercial activityonly to aid in search-and-rescue operations.

Inexperienced recreational sailors, skippering small pleasure boats, are responsible for twothirds of the 50,000 calls for help the Coast Guard receives each year. A few months ago, a motorboat was grounded in the rough surf near San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Disabled by engine trouble, the powerless boat was driven by the strong currents toward huge rocks along the shoreline. As the boat crashed into the rocks, its lone occupant (wearing shorts in photo, below left) was thrown into the surf. Within minutes a Coast Guard helicopter was on the scene to save the stranded sailor.

MEDICO is another service operated by the Coast Guard, in co-operation with commercial wire services and the U.S. Public Health Service. Like AMVER, it is free to ships of all flags and it enables skippers of ships to radio a superurgent call to shore with facts about serious illness or injury and receive back a diagnosis and suggested treatment.

Ships' officers describe the medical emergency as best they can; the message is radioed to the nearest shore station, which relays it to the closest hospital operated by the U.S. Public Health Service. An answer from a general practitioner or a specialist is on its way back as soon as a considered diagnosis can be made and treatment prescribed.

Like AMVER, MEDICO handles thousands of calls a year.

With both, the record of lives saved is astonishing. In everything they do, in fact, the U.S. Coast Guardsmen can take pride in being faithful to their motto: Semper Paratus.

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IITIRIITIGIIL liD I'll .LIIITIRY

World politics is becoming a single global process in which there is no longer a sharp demarcation between 'domestic' and 'international' problems. Instead, the line today is drawn between 'international' problemsthe old nationalistic, ideological conflicts-and the new 'planetary' problems such as pollution, nutrition, the population explosion. The older generation tends to be concerned with 'the international,' the young with 'the planetary.' But all of us, says the author, should be concerned with both. The realities of power politics are as relevant to the world as the realities of ecology.

Let me begin with a disagreeable prediction. As the older generation fades, and the younger ripens, we will increasingly look back on the Cold War as a period marked by relative calm, by a measure of stability, and by a great deal of clarity. I speak of the Cold War in these terms not because of any attachment to the spirit or the issues of the Cold War, but because the Cold War had a certain intellectual form which, I submit, our present age and the years ahead of us will more and more lack. It will stand in contrast to the confused, turbulent, perplexing state of global affairs that is presently in the making.

The cause of all this is that foreign affairs are leaving an era we have come to understand and are entering an era for which we will lack conceptual tools of analysis. First, I would like to look at the implications of that transition for international affairs. Secondly, I would like to try to evaluate how that transition affects the perceptions of the older and the younger generation, and how the transition affects the richer and poorer nations. Thirdly, I would like to examine the interactions and to draw from the foregoing some general policy conclusions.

"International affairs" as we have come to know them began, I suppose, with the industrial age. Three inventions were critical in the transformation of relationships into a new pattern. The first was the compass, which made possible long-distance navigation, and with it the rise of imperialism and colonialism. The second was gunpowder, which eventually required the maintenance of a politically organized apparatus of warfare (i.e. a professional army) and then, with the growing complexity of weaponry, an industrial infrastructure to sustain it, thereby reinforcing organizational imperatives of the modern state machinery.

The third was printing, which revolutionized the civic relationship between the ruled and the rulers. Printing made possible political proselytization; this, in turn, made for greater mass consciousness, which required novel principles of political mobilization. Hence the age of nationalism: the first period in human history of mass political action on the basis of mass commitment.

There are the equivalents of these three factors in the post-industrial technetronic age. First of all, there are the computers, which make possible the conquest of space on a scale unimaginable just a few decades ago, not to 'speak of their implications for internal social, economic as well as political behavior. Secondly, there is nuclear power, which has revolutionized the nature of warfare and qualitatively transformed the relationship between policy and power.

And thirdly, there are electronic communications which make possible for the first time the spatial intermeshing of humanity on a global scale. Cumulatively, the introduction of these inventions has transformed international affairs in several very significant ways.

1. They make for a condition of what I should like to call high peace/low war. War is now a luxury which only the poor and the weak can afford. In the past the rich nations fought with all the resources at their command, on the basis of sustained national effort. The rich industrialized nations, as they engaged in warfare, increasingly ab-

sorbed other nations in their conflicts. Today the relationship of conflict to power and wealth is reversed. The rich avoid reliance on a direct force, but force is often the sole resource that the poorer nations possess. It is a fact that since World War II most wars and the vast majority of casualties involved conflicts between poorer and weaker nations. The rich no longer fight directly; at best, they fight by proxy. They no longer engage in head-on, central, warlike confrontations. This is largely because of the introduction of nuclear weapons, which inhibit the use of "all available power" as a matter of policy.

At the same time, formal distinctions between war and peace are now confused and blurred. War used to be officially declared-a custom that has been almost forgotten.

Today nations maintain diplomatic relationships and simultaneously engage in acts of war against each other. Indeed, today war looks like peace and peace very often appears like war. This is surely a very basic change in international politics.

2. The introduction of these new inventions makes for a condition that could be referred to as simultaneous congestion and differentiation. Communications clearly bring us together, but science and technology differentiate men and societies. Marco Polo would be en route for months from Europe to Asia and he would travel through societies essentially similar in their social and political arrangements, even though differentiated by culture, language, and religion.

Today a man can visit the moon, while other men still live on this earth in conditions not unlike those of the Middle Ages. In the past, space consumed time; now, time compresses space.

This is a radical alteration in the nature of global human interrelationships. It prompts both psychic propinquity and widening material disparity. It breeds enormous tension and hostility. Moreover, mankind today is more differentiated than at any other point in history. In the past, to be sure, we have had agrarian societies at different levels of development, and industrial societies emerged in the course of the last hundred years. But today we have-in unprecedented coexistence-agrarian societies of a primitive type, of relatively advanced types, agrarian-industrial societies, industrial societies, mature industrial societies and increasingly "post-industrial" societies. All this makes for psychic relationships and philosophical differences much more complex than at any point in human history. We are somehow "closer" and yet we are much more differentiated.

3. There is in the less developed nations a novel condition-overt despair. This feeling is one of increasingly active frustration, rather than of passive resignation which was typical of the agrarian age and even of much of the industrial age. We thus have a situation which is fundamentally different from the conditions of 19th-century Europe when Europe was beginning to industrialize.

There are a number of fundamental differences between processes of modernization today and when the West (i.e., Europe and America) experienced industrialization and modernization. The first involves a different relationship between population and economic growth. In the 19th century, economic growth in the industrializing countries was equal to (or somewhat more rapid than) population growth.

Today population growth is more rapid than economic growth, on a ratio of two-to-one and in some places even three-to-one. This creates obvious demographic pressures of the sort which the world in its earlier period of changewhich was much more compartmentalized-has not previouslyexperienced.

Furthermore, there is now a different relationship between unemployment and social stability. As the West industrialized and industry expanded, we absorbed into this society added increments of labor through the process of immigration. Europe, as it industrialized, absorbed into the urban centers the needed labor; but the needless labor, or the economically underemployed labor, remained in the countryside, part of the traditional fabric of religious and social institutions. Today we have a massive influx of people into the urban centers of the world, the urban slums of the world, and with it prospects of massive unemployment. It is estimated that in about 15 years from now about 20 per cent of the labor-capable males in the less developed nations are going to be unemployed. If all the Five-Year Plans of the less developed nations in Asia are successful, the number of jobs will grow by 140 million. The number of employable males during the same period will have grown by 270 million. The prospect of massive global unemployment is a reality and it creates an entirely different attitude toward social and political institutions, given the less traditional and much more uprooted context in which it operates.

The younger generation, focusing on planetary concerns, 'stresses the more generalized question of human survival ... of social well-being.'

Nor is this all. There is also a different relationship between subjective and objective change. In the 19th century, objective change was more rapid than subjective change.

That is to say, the rates of coal extraction, of steel production, of urban growth, of living space and of social welfare available to individuals expanded more rapidly than changes in political consciousness, to the extent that these can be measured by the growth of literacy. Today subjective change expands infinitely faster than objective change. The real revolution today is in access to schools, to universities, to radios, to newspapers, and increasingly to television.

This produces an entirely new subjective relationship to one's environment. Indeed, the mass production of pseudoeducated college graduates in the less developed nations (although not only there) is producing instability of the sort which in 1970 erupted in Sri Lanka (it was largely a college-based revolution). Taken together, this makes for conditions of great frustration, of enormous social tension.

Frantz Fanon is thus much more relevant to the "third world" today than Karl Marx.

As a result, it is increasingly difficult to subsume revolutionary developments in the "third world" within the organizational framework of one ideology, something which some people still expected in the early phases of the industrial revolution when Marxism universalized the Western experience and made it appear to be globally applicable.

Today, the much more likely pattern of behavior in the "third world" is going to involve a series of frustrated outbreaks in the context of intense but rapidly changing radical beliefs.

Finally, a special role is being played by cultural crises in the advanced countries. The essential nature of the crisis can perhaps be best described by quoting from the words not of a social scientist but of a novelist. As Herman Hesse wrote in SteppenwolJ: Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. There are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

This passage seems to me to capture most perceptively the basic dilemma of the advanced societies.

Contrary to historic expectations, wealth is producing not social stability nor an affluent conformity but a collapse of established sociological values in confusion and uncertainty. It has also bred a further danger: A new social situation has developed in which significant portions of the younger generation-naturally much more perplexed by this new reality because they are much more exposed to ithave adopted a posture of growing escapism rather than involvement. Given the nature of the age, that withdrawal tends to proclaim itself as idealistic; thus there is a great deal of talk today about idealism among the younger generation. But I think it is a fair observation to say that a great deal of this self-proclaimed idealism is, in fact, a form of hedonism and narcissism. r say this more in a spirit of analysis than of criticism. In an age of perplexity and novelty, in an age which lacks intellectual moorings, it is easier to find fulfilment in the self, though prevailing moral standards still dictate the necessity of high-minded rhetoric.

Accordingly, I find the real danger to young people today to be not one of over-engagement but of underengagement. Their sporadic civiCcommitment is constantly limited by the difficulties marked by a great hedonistic and narcissist personality. The older generation, at the same time, devoted to only partially relevant truths, adopts a defensive-posture of protecting vested traditional interests rather than of translating their commitment to the future into significant and morally desirable actions of their own.

This problem is most acute in American society but I think that Western Europe as well as Japan is also beginning to experience it" and I suspect that this dilemma is boiling beneath the surface of the Communist systems.

There, unlike in the democratic system, change is covert and gradual; it involves gestation and then erupts violently.

In our society we have a tradition of unstable stability, or of protracted and overt turbulence, which provides some safety valves even though it occasionally makes for some very painful confrontations.

These four changes taken together involve, in my view, a very novel fusion of domestic and international processes.

If I were to search for an analogy which explains best to me (writing as I am in Manhattan) what the world is about today, I would say that the world is New York City and New York City is the world; that is to say, a community of -extremely ill-defined jurisdictions, of overlapping sovereignties, a curious mixture of violence and order, of change and retrogression, of a precarious coexistence which is close physically, remote culturally, and socially divided between affluence and poverty. This is what the world is becoming, and this is why international politics is ceasing to be what it has been and is becoming as ingle) protracted) global political process in which there is fusion between the domestic and the international, in which one can no longer sharply demarcate domestic politics from international politics.

All of this makes for enormous difficulty in interpretation, in the definition of priorities and, thus, for the development of sustained policies.

'The problems of power are still with us and in some respects they are acquiring new and very important dimensions.'

This problem is further complicated by differentiated generational experiences. In a way the older generation enjoys the corrupting luxury of apparent clarity; the younger, the enervating stimulus of overwhelming perplexity. As a broad generalization in this connection, let me suggest that the older generation, as it looks at the world, tends to emphasize international problems. The questions of power, if you will, the goal of stability or the more morally desirable goal of peace, are the central organizing point of reference for the older generation. The younger generation, as I see it in my encounter's with younger persons on several continents, focuses more on planetary concerns. It therefore stresses the more generalized question of human survival, and hence its goal is that of development or of social well-being.

Let me suggest further that both are partially right but, because of the nature of the transition from traditional international politics to a new global political process in which we find ourselves, it is very difficult to develop plans or ideas which would give both generations a shared standard.and a common sense of direction. Moreover, the tense dialectical conflict between the two perspectives makes it even more difficult to construct a viable synthesis.

The problems of power are, of course, still with us and

in some respects they are acquiring new and very important dimensions. Certainly the continuing American-Soviet rivalry is not a mere matter of the historic personalities of V.1. Lenin or John Foster Dulles; it is also a matter of de Tocqueville, by which I mean the pages in his classic work on Russo-American rivalry, century-old political realities. Two enormous continental powers with different historical traditions and different value systems-relations between them are bound to be complex, and human nature being what it is and organizational compulsions being what they are, the coexistence is bound to be competitive. This competition is becoming more rather than less complicated.

One new factor in it is the question of "parity" in the American-Soviet relationship. What does it mean for our relationships when a crisis develops? Is it possible to bargain effectively and steadily in such a confrontation? They have never dealt with each other before in the setting of parity.

One need only look at the continuing Middle East explosiveness to realize the immediacy of this problem.

Secondly, there are novel imperial dilemmas facing the last two major imperial powers in the world. One concerns the United States and its relationships with Latin America.

As Yankee pre-eminence fades, can the U.S. strike a new balance, a new relationship of stability with the southern hemisphere? On the Soviet side, an even younger and in some respects perhaps more vigorous imperial system clearly is not at all acquiescing in the dismantling of its vast imperial assets. What the Soviet Union has been doing in Eastern Europe since 1968 clearly involves the shoring up of its several imperial relationships. There are also grounds for anxiety about the future position of Yugoslavia, given its internal divisions and the likelihood of a major political crisis after the death of Tito.

Thirdly, we confront novel diplomatic and power complexities stemming from a new triangular configuration in the world. This is the Washington-Peking-Moscow relationship, which has now dramatically surfaced with urgency and importance. There is also the Washington-Moscow-European relationship, which involves such issues as the Ostpolitik and the European Security Conference, as well as the mutual balanced force reduction proposals. There is the Washington-Tokyo-European triangle, particularly in the economic and financial field. There is the WashingtonPeking-Tokyo triangle in Asia. All of these demand a degree of diplomatic effort which taxes the ability of individual decision-makers and which imposes unprecedented strains on existing policy-making machinery.

There is, beyond that, the reality of autonomous conflicts, and these are not necessarily the products of the past1945 epoch. The Middle Eastern conflict has a vitality of its own; the India-Pakistan conflict is not yet resolved.

These involve burdensome questions of power.

Lastly, in this quick overview of international political reaiities, we now witness the appearance on the scene of new power aspirants. As the United States reappraises,

agonizingly or not, its relationships with the world, new powers are stepping forth as would-be dominant regional powers. If! can put it this way, the retirement of the global policeman precipitates a competition for local police jobs.

This rush to regional "law and order" itself breeds tensions and political problems. Brazil clearly aspires to become the dominant southern hemispheric power, and I rather suspect that within the next five years anti-Brazilianism may become as strong a motivating political force on the Latin American continent as today anti-Yankeeism is. Iran is beginning to playa dominant role in the Persian Gulf, and this is producing conflicts with Iraq and, by proxy, with the Soviet Union. India clearly sees itself now as the dominant power in the southern Asian continent and perhaps as a major Asian power. In the Far East there is uncertainty concerning the future of those classical Asian giants, Japan and China. All of this, creating tensions, conflicts, and power dilemmas, interacts with the new realities that obsess the younger generation and which have, as I have suggested, a planetary dimension.

Without science ~ndtechnology, 'there simply is no solution to most of the planetary issues with which the younger generation is concerned.'

How deep and lasting is the clash between the two perspectives? The younger generation seems to be more concerned with the ecological problem, and this clearly does have a global dimension. Because of it, there is now a widespread anxiety about the development, indeed even the moral justification, of science and technology. For the more advanced countries, increasingly oriented toward science-intensive industries, this is causing particularly acute dilemmas.

There is also a nutritional concern. This is not only a matter of survival but also of general poverty, of social injustice, of population growth. The fact is that, in spite of all of the development in agricultural capabilities, the per capita food consumption in the less developed nations today is no better than it was before World War II. What. has improved are the means of distribution and the system of production in some of the most demographically dense areas, but the per capita results have not improved, and the "nutritional problem" therefore remains a very basic issue.

The question raised by the younger generation is whether the world can long endure such large pockets of backwardness. Can New York endure with an impoverished ghetto? And if "the world is New York," can the world endure with global ghettos? Can we compartmentalize suffering? That, too, is a political problem ultimately, as well as a moral one. It is unlikely that politics and the economics

of human suffering can safely be compartmentalized, and the divisive issue of social justice-heretofore primarily a domestic one-is thus becoming a central one in the global political process.

Finally, many in the younger generation are saying that if the 19th century was the century of the quest for personal liberty (and I think it was, starting with the American and the French revolutions), then the 20th century in its latter decades is becoming the epoch of the quest for equality.

Here the problem is: How do we define "equality?" How do we provide for a "true equality" on the racial front, on the generational front between young and old, on the social front between white- and blue-collar workers, and on the sexual front between men and women? Can it ever be resolved? Can equality even be statistically defined? Let us only say that it involves complex moral issues, and that also, it involves political issues, for the conspicuous absence of equality has become today as much of an explosive issue as the absence of liberty was in the 19th century.

I would submit that the interaction between these concerns of the young and old, both of them involving a real and yet a partial insight into our current condition, is a conflicting one. In a way, we are confronted here with a set of dialectical contradictions between old international concerns and new planetary aspirations, and each, though real, makes the resolution of the other more difficult. Political rivalry doubtless conflicts with the quest for the improvement of the human condition and with the struggle for human survival. But the solution to the problems posed by political rivalry is not to pretend that the exercise of power in world affairs is misguided, and that the search for a balance of power (with all the accompanying costs) is somehow immoral. W~ cannot ignore power and those who do are, it seems to me, engaging essentially in escapism.

Nationalism keeps alive old conflicts, and who can doubt it? But nationalism is also a source of cohesion, and we do know of the danger that the absence of deep beliefs and growing skepticism may paralyze meaningful action.

It is difficult in a skeptical age to be truly and enduringly idealistic. Surely, an active idealism can be sustained only if it is wedded to something more than momentary passions and enthusiasms. Accordingly, idealism today is increasingly characterized by a sporadic quality and lacks the seriousness of a long-term commitment.

Can it be seriously contended that the development of science and technology is not imperative for effective solutions to our world-wide dilemmas? Yet there is no doubt that science and technology differentiate mankind both quantitatively and qualitatively. Still, without reliance on the developing ingenuity of our scientists and technologists there simply is no solution to most, if not all, of the planetary issues with which the younger generation is particularly concerned.

Similarly, I think it is quite undeniable that economic

growth is clearly necessary to deal with problems of material inequality and social injustice. Yet we are also faced with the prospect of inadequate natural resources and the ecological costs of higher production. This will have a particularly important effect on those nations which have been heretofore accustomed to operate from a basis of resource bounty. This has particularly grave implications for the United States which, in the course of the next 20years, is likely to shift from a resource-plentiful nation to a resource-importing nation.

This change will further complicate America's own internal development as well as its capacity to operate effectively on the international scene. All of these dilemmas pose the danger that the older generation, by focusing primarily on the traditional international problems, may inadvertently keep alive old hostilities; and yet the young, because the very scale of their concerns escapes intellectual clarity, may turn their backs on formidable issues which confront the world today.

The cumulative effect of that, I fear, will not be War or NeoImperialism, but increasingly a condition of global anarchy -of a progressive global breakdown. It will be a chaos which will operate across boundaries, and we will not be able to compartmentalize ourselves from it. The real danger for the 1970s and '80s is a world-wide disintegration of social and political order: in brief, a planetary fragmentation of peoples and states.

'The United States ... has no choice but to remain actively involved in the world ... a move to isolationism would contribute to global anarchy.'

To respond to this will not be easy, for to state the problem is easier than to define the remedy. Moreover, inherent in what I am suggesting is the proposition that it is impossible at this stage to formulate totally relevant responses. We appear to be at the beginning of an age which we have not yet grasped. We are where our ancestors were when for the first time man began to leave the agrarian epoch and moved toward the industrial age. This novel complexity confronted Europe with acute times of trouble, and Europeans for a century and more struggled with this new historic dilemma.

Finally, through a process of debate and dialogue, of confrontation and confusion, of fear and apprehension, two syntheses emerged which then gave the successive generations a sense of historical direction. These two syntheses were clearly Liberalism and Marxism. Both provided meaningful, historically relevant, and morally imperative guides to conduct. Indeed, when the United States still had the luxury of imitating others because it seemed to be "historically behind," the American system was saved by creatively adapting both Marxism' and Liberalism to the American context: the Rooseveltian "New Deal."

Today America is the society in the forefront of the thrust into the new age, and this is what makes it extremely difficult for Americans at this stage to develop relevant conceptualization. The problem is, first of all, a conceptual one: how to integrate this new experience with the old, and then, on that basis, to develop relevant policies. As a very broad suggestion, movement along three lines impresses me as historically pertinent and might help eventually to define a true and practicable approach to the next decade.

The first is perhaps self-evident, but let me state it anyway: The United States as a society has no choice but to remain actively involved in the world. Its continued global involvement in the affairs of other continents doesn't only imply slogans and benign wishes; it means a combination of the American resources of power and reform. But I believe that a move either to pacifism, or to protectionism, or to isolationism would contribute to global anarchy. Accordingly, I favor a deliberate effort to create a community of the developed nations, spanning the Atlantic and the Pacific, and embracing Western Europe and Japan in the first instance and associated states in the second. These are the states which are, more or less, in a similar historical stage of development; and these are the states which confront some of the same dilemmas. The "Atlantic" concept was a relevant idea for the 1950s and '60s, but today we need surely a broader global concept, one on which a new structure of international co-operation can be built.

Secondly, although I do not see an effective resolution of the "cold war" and, even though political and ideological conflict with the Communist states is a continuing reality, it behooves us to try to engage the Communist countries, when they are ready, in globally co-operative undertakings. This is why we have to persist in what I once called "peaceful engagement with the East," but we should not let ourselves be deluded by the thought that this ought to be the primary axis of world peace. I do not believe that a Congress of Vienna-like structure can be built on the basis of a contrived arrangement with those who still are our adversaries and at the cost of hard-won constructive relationships between America and her allies.

Lastly, the real need for leadership' today in the United States is not for "personal leadership. " Charismatic appeal, real or manufactured by mass media, is not the historical need at the moment. The need is for conceptual leadershipwhich can span the real gaps in perception of reality inherent in the present generational and national divisions. The recovery of this kind of conceptual relevance is, therefore, an imperative of our time.

0 About the Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski is director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs and professor of public law and government at Columbia University. His articles have often appeared in leading American magazines. He has written several books, including The FragileBlossom,Crisisand Changein Japan, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics, and Between Two Ages.

THE BALLET DANCERS

OF HARLEM

Hundreds of underprivileged black youngsters have been drawn off the streets of New York's slums and into the elegant world of classical ballet. In barely three years, these young dancers have developed into one of the world's most exciting ballet companies today.

To get to the Dance Theater of Harlem, you have to walk through tough, crowded streets and along dank, depressing avenues. But once inside the refurbished garage that houses the troupe, the scene is transformed-you have entered a world where both bodies and spirits soar. Animated tots and lively teen-agers in leotards rush to classes or lounge around bright rehearsal halls.

Somewhere in the midst of all this action you will come across the director-founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH). He is Arthur Mitchell, a man who in only three years has gathered a flock of untrained black youngsters and molded them into one of the world's most exciting young ballet companies.

For 18 years Mitchell was a featured performer-and the only blackwith the renowned New York City Ballet. While Negroes have been increasingly prominent in America's modern dance groups, they wereand are-extremely rare in classical ballet companies. Mitchell, one of those rare ones, was determined to see that black youngsters got the chance to leap the classical ballet barrier.

"We started in 1968," he says, "only a few blocks away from where I grew up here in Harlem. I used to leave the doors open and the people would just come in. I began with two dancers and 30 children. By the end of the summer, I had 400 kids in the school. Now we have 1,200. When I

told people I was going to start a ballet school in Harlem, they would say: 'Ballet? In Harlem? It's so incongruous!' " In time Mitchell was able to build a first-rate staff that includes his associate director Karel Shook, the former ballet master of the Netherlands National Ballet who was once Mitchell's own teacher. On the DTH's board of directors are George Balanchine, director of the New York City Ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein, director of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Ford Foundation has helped with financial support.

Though the school got off to a promising start, there were a few obstacles. Reflecting on the initial criticism, Mitchell says: "I told the people who said I should be teaching African . dance that since I had not studied it, I should not be teaching it." He continues: "I feel that the way we black people will get something done is to help ourselves-and each other. It's very important that the blacks who can¡ make a contribution do so-whether it's lending money or providing talent-especially to help the young people in our community."

From the beginning, Mitchell was determined that the Dance Theater would not become some exotic curiosity. He felt it should have strong ties with the neighborhood. "We started an 'open house' series on Wednesday afternoons," he recalls, "to which we'd invite groups-Boy Scouts, pub-

lic school classes, ladies' luncheon clubs-to come and see what we were doing. We created what we call 'Friends of the Dance Theater of Harlem.' " Walking around the DTH buildings you see sylphlike girls, but you also see brawny young men who look like football players. This is all part of Mitchell's recruitment rationale.

"Our whole policy is that this is a community-oriented school," he says, "for anybody who wants to come in and study. Most dance schools want you to be tall and have thin legs and all that, but I say, 'Why shouldn't a short, fat child be allowed to study the ~rt?' Maybe that would give the child an incentive to lose weight. For if you say that only tall, skinny girls can dance, it's a kind of prejudice like the one that says only whites can dance ballet. Well, why can't blacks?

"So we open the doors to anyone who wants to come in. We then separate the gifted ones and put them in special classes, but at the same time even those who can't become profes-¡ sionals become members of a more discerning audience-when they go to the theater they won't accept inferior efforts."

Of the 1,200 children enrolled in the school, about two-thirds are black.

The rest include whites, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and other races and nationalities. Most pay a minimal fee (50 cents for those from 8 to 12, a dollar a week for teen-agers), but there is also a

scholarship program for needy black youngsters.

In recent months, the DTH has expanded its activities. Mitchell explains: "We started out as a dance school-classical ballet, jazz, modern, ethnic and tap dance-but we now also teach drama, piano, guitar, choral music and sewing. Still, our primary line is classical ballet."

"You have to be disciplined to be a dancer," he adds, "and because of the discipline, our kids' schoolwork improves. They concentrate more. As they begin to appreciate themselves more, they begin to stand better, not in the round-shouldered way that's typical of so many of today's youths.

Then they begin to dress better, be-

cause they are standing better!"

"Our company includes all kinds of kids," Mitchell continues. "One of them wanted to be a truckdriver, another was a runaway from home; but when you see them onstage, you see an elegance, a discipline, a technique that's beautiful-young people 'doing their thing' and doing it correctly by anyone's standards."

Because the DTH is so much in demand, the group spends much of its time traveling (a tutor goes along), giving lecture-demonstrations at colleges and universities across the United States, in addition to concert performances. Wherever they have appeared, critics have heaped superlatives on the company and its performances are

Guiding genius of the Harlem dancers is Arthur Mitchell (below and above far right) whose spirit

usually sold out. The troupe's schedule is already booked solid through 1973.

On tour or in Harlem, Mitchell is a firm instructor who is also like a Joving parent. He recalls: "In 1971 we did a lO-week trip through Europe, performing in Spoleto, Torino, Verona, Florence, then up to Amsterdam, Brussels and Osten de. Here were kids who had never been off the streets of Harlem and now they were in Europe-getting a chance to see what the world was like and then carrying it all back here. It opened up whole new areas in their lives."

0 About former is now music,

the Author: Ernest Dunbar, a senior editor of Look magazine, a free-lance writer specializing in the arts, and Negro subjects.

rvades the troupe whether at rehearsal or during their spectacular productions onstage (overleaf).