November 1985

Tantra Art at UCLA Circles and squares. Dots and triangles. Piercing eyes and coiled snakes. And the Om symbol. These iconographic elements of Tantra art promise to come alive for visitors to the Tantra Art exhibition at the Wight Art Gallery of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) November 24 through January 5, 1986. Although the 80 paintings on view are by contemporary Indian artists, Tantra itself is ancient. Its birth marked the first time in Indian religious history that two seemingly incompatible streams of Indian life, yoga (spiritual discipline) and bhoga (enjoyment), met to synthesize into a spiritual discipline. Tantra art is just one manifestation of the Tantric philosophy, which reinterprets many of the orthodox norms of Hindu spirituality. In its art form, this has meant also a reinterpretation of space, light, color, form and a marriage of graphics with rituals, myths and magic.

SPAN 2 Salt Lake City, Vision in a Valley

by Suzanne Dean

9 A Nation of States

12

Celebrating a Harvest

by Roger B. Swain

15 The Artist and His Audience

20

There Is More to Atlanta Than Coca-Cola

26 Focus On ...

28 Crocs in the Backyard

by Sabita Radhakrishna

31 On the Lighter Side

32 The Productivity Factor

35 Harmony in Harlem

by A. Peter Bailey

39 Sense and Nonsense

42 New Tools for Teeth

46

An Underwater Eden

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Warren W. McCurdy

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Editorial Assistant Photo Editor

Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

Photographs: Front cover-Kevin Horan. Inside front cover-top, center right, bottom left from the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 2-8 Kevin Horan. 4-University of Utah. 9-illustration by Nand Katyal. 13-courtesy Purdue University. IS-illustration

by D. Levine. 20-courtesy High Museum, Atlanta. 21, 24-25-Wm. Sumpter Unlimited/Flip Chalfont. 22-courtesy Coca-Cola Company. 26-Robb Miller. 27 top-Loup Langton, The Pennsylvania Times. 27 bottomAvinash Pasricha. 28-K.R. V. Bhakta. 35-38-Michael O'Brien.

43,4'4-Avinash Pasricha. 46-48-courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Inside back cover, top-Randa Bishop©1985 (3); bottom left-Carol Suriani © 1985. Back coverHightower (2); bottom right-Mario Randa Bishop © 1985.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily rellect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues), Rs.25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 48b.

Front cover: Firs·t there were the mountains; then with the Mormons came their tabernacle; and today high-rise buildings testify to Salt Lake City'S position as a center of high technology.

See pages 2-8.

Back cover: An American girl joins her Indian friends in celebrating India Day in New York on August 18.

See also inside back cover.

Within a year of becoming Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi has made two trips to the United States. During his second visit last month, to attend the 40th-anniversary ceremonies of the United Nations in New York, he was once again able to confer with President Ronald Reagan, renewing the warm relationship they had formed during his state visit in June. It was during that earlier trip that the Prime Minister inaugurated the Festival of India. '!his time he took the opportunity to show how pleased he has been with the ongoing Festival's success. "My mother was extremely worried about how it would work and whether we would be able to pull it off," he said to a select gathering brought together by Festival trustees.

"But with the help of Indians and American friends here, we have held a festival that has changed the impressions of India. The next great task should be to see that, after it closes, the interest between the two countries is maintained--not merely India in America, but also America in India." We at SPAN have of course been very much aware of the Festival's successes, having regularly celebrated them in all their splendor at every opportunity.

Readers of this issue will find they even have a jLnllPon Festival-goers, by having a preview of the captivating Tantra Art exhibition (inside front cover), which opens November 24 in Los Angeles. Farther along, our display on the closing pages gives an idea of just how penetrating the phenomenon that SPAN nicknamed as India Fever really is, with an Indian Independence Day parade led by the mayor of New York City and Americans attired in Indian dress and performing Indian dances. Next month and in the months to corne we will be featuring a great deal more on the Festival.

Traditionally, November for most Americans comes loaded with a cornucopia of images and expectations.

First is the abrupt change of season, made more noticeable by the sudden loss of a daylight hour with ~he change from what Americans call Daylight Savings Time at 00:00 hours on the last Sunday in October. The days were already shortening at an accelerating pace, but that extra hour, given so gladly in the spring and now reclaimed, makes everyone viscerally aware that winter is really on its way.

For those Americans living in regions where winter is a factor to contend with--still a majority of the population despite migrations to the southwestern Sun Belt--November is the time to prepare for the corning chill from the north. A regular happening in America during November is, of course, election day--on the first Tuesday after the first Monday. Presidential elections occur only at four-year intervals, but local elections take place almost every year--ballots on bond issues for money to build schools and highways, elections to fill vacancies or just because some local terms are only for one year. Even though presidential elections are the ones attracting all the attention, our article, "A Nation of States," shows that it is really at the grass-roots level that American politics literally begins and ends. The reader may be surprised to discover some facets of the U.S. electoral system that even otherwise knowledgeable Americans do not fully realize.

Also, November is a time for American families to come together, on the last Thursday, for a day of Thanksgiving.

When the first Thanksgiving took place, in autumn 1621 in what is now the State of ~~ssachusetts, there could have been scant thought given to the tradition then being established.

By all accounts, it was a simple celebration of a first harvest, to which the new American settlers invited a local American Indian tribe to share in. The spirit of that first Thanksgiving has carried down through the years to the present and the day has become one of the most beloved holidays on the American calendar. No matter where they find themselves on that day, one can be sure that, if at all possible to do so, Americans will be sharing the Thanksgiving spirit with one another--and very often introducing non-American friends to the celebration as well.

On the theme of Thanksgiving and harvest, SPAN is pleased to offer readers an insightful article on "Celebrating a Harvest," by an eloquent gardener who argues persuasively for safeguards to prevent further loss of varieties of seed strains.

As miracle seeds produce ever greater yields per hectare, the danger increases that farmers will hew to those seeds and no other, setting up conditions whereby a single blight could conceivably circle the globe. "Unless we somehow reverse the trend," he cautions, "gene banks and national parks will become vast refugee camps. And many plants will never get in. A bulldozer chewing away at the edge of a tropical forest may seem a long way from Thanksgiving dinner. But it is not that far at all."

--J.A.M.

SALT LAKE CITY

Vision InaValley Once notable mainly as the home of the Mormon religion and as a center of copper mining, Salt Lake City, located deep among the Rocky Mountains in the rural state of Utah, is fast becoming known for the surprising innovations in high technology products, like the world's first artificial heart, with uncommon regularity by its citizens and

institutions. The city is now a premier center for other biomedical and bioengineering research, as well as a leader in the computer and aerospace industries.

Between 1970 and 1980, I . its popu atIon burgeoned by 35 percent as new settlers joined f t h t na Ives 0 as en Salt Lake City into the 21st century.

To accommodate the growing population, houses and offices are springing up everywhere (left). But residents can still enjoy the sunset high above the bustle (top). The seagull (sculpture, above) is revered for saving early settlers from a grasshopper plague, 2,000 kilometers from the sea.

O

n December 2, 1982, the first permanent artificial human heart was implanted-in American dentist Barney Clark. The fist-sized heart, which kept Clark alive for 111 days, had been developed not in New York or Los Angeles, America's largest cities, but in Salt Lake City, a metropolitan area of about one million on the otherwise sparsely populated western edge of the Rocky Mountains. Salt Lake City ranks only 50th in size among American cities. The desert valley where the city is located was settled in 1848 by Mormon pioneers, members of a minority religious sect who had traveled across 1,600 kilometers of prairie by foot and ox-drawn wagon to escape religious intolerance in the eastern part of the country. According to legend, when the Mormons arrived, the valley had but one tree.

Yet Salt Lake City, precisely because of its size and climate as well as its educated populace, good quality of life and pioneering spirit, is helping lead a national shift from mining and manufacturing to "high technology," particularly in the computer and biomedical industries. In fact, some business experts believe that what is happening in Salt Lake City is an economic revolution in microcosm, a harbinger of the changes that will affect America and the whole world in the 1980s and beyond. According to John Naisbitt, author of the bestselling Megatrends [see SPAN August 1985], a new, interdependent, worldwide economy is emerging. Underdeveloped countries are industrializing and taking over labor-intensive activities, such as production of automobiles, refining metals, coal and oil, while industrialized nations, such as the United States and Japan, are focusing on technological research aimed at developing completely new products, machines and manufacturing processes.

The result in the United States is an "entrepreneurial revolution" in which hundreds of scientists and inventors are forming their own small companies to speed the movement of products and ideas from university and company laboratories into the marketplace.

"Today, Americans are creating new companies at the rate of 600,000 a year," Naisbitt said in a recent interview. "In 1950, at the height of the industrial period, it was only 93,000 a year. The last

time there was such a blooming of entrepreneurialism was when we changed from an agricultural to an industrial society."

From 1900 until recently, Salt Lake City'S biggest industry was copper mining at the world's largest open pit mine 40 kilometers from downtown.

Now, because of the worldwide recession and competition from other nations, mining is declining, and Kennecott, the copper company, has laid off 2,000 local miners.

In the last decade, however, Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, has become headquarters not just for the artificial heart but also for projects to develop an artificial ear, a movable artificial arm and artificial blood vessels. The city has 20 companies making computer equipment and more than 100 small software, or computer programming, firms. Two firms in the city are making robot-type devices that replace humans in manufacturing plants. Local employment in electronics jumped from 2,500 in 1976 to 4,400 in 1979 and then to 6,300 in 1982-a 148 percent increase in six years. The number employed making "specialty instruments," mainly medical devices, increased 50 percent, from 2,600 to 4,000, between 1976 and 1982.

Typically, high technology activity is centered near universities. In Salt Lake City, the hub is a 130-hectare "research park"-a landscaped green near the University of Utah where nonpolluting, scientific and research companies have been invited to set up headquarters.

Though the facility is only one-fourth oGcupied, it still has 30 firms employing 3,000 persons. High-technology firms have similarly clustered in other regions of the country, notably in Silicon Valley near Stanford University in California; at Research Triangle near three major universities in the southeastern United States; and on the outskirts of Boston where researchers from Harvard yniv'ersity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities have established their firms.

High technology growth in Salt Lake City has arrived along two tracks. The computer industry developed first, mainly because of geographic factors and an economic awakening in the American West in the 1970s. The bioengineering industry came later, primarily because key Salt Lake City citizens were determined to make their town, and the University of Utah, an important research center.

In the late 1950s, after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, the United States intensified efforts to build its rocketry and aerospace capabilities.

Salt Lake City was a good location for aerospace firms because it was within two hours by aeroplane of space engineering companies on the West Coast, yet had a labor surplus and fairly inexpensive coal-generated power.

Rockets and spacecraft, however, depended on computers. So in 1956, Sperry-Univac, a competitor with IBM, the world's largest computer company, opened a design and manufacturing headquarters in Salt Lake City. Sperry, which has expanded from defense and aerospace work into commercial computer equipment and soft-

Clockwise from bottom left: Willem J. Kolff holds an early model of the artificial heart his firm pioneered; Donald Lyman has set lip a new company to make artificial blood vessels from chemical materials; a technician checks a machine that automatically mounts tiny components onto circllit boards; another does handwork; a lab worker checks jars of virus-resistant potatoes.

ware, now has about 4,000 workers, but is expected soon to surpass Kennecott as Salt Lake City'S largest employer.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States "revolved around that marvelous triangle formed by Chicago, Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.," according to Thayne Robson, an economic researcher at the University of Utah. Many Americans knew little about Salt Lake City or the Rocky Mountains. The image was that it was all just sagebrush and American Indians west of Denver. The 1970s, however, brought a major transition. The population in the Rocky Mountain region increased both from births and from people migrating to the area.

Salt Lake City'S population grew 35

percent between 1970 and 1980. All types of business boomed.

"Increased air routes, satellite communication and saturation of radio and television meant the Rocky Mountains were no longer isolated from developments in the rest of the country," says Robson.

One reason for growth was the world's energy crisis. The American West has most of the nation's reserves of coal, oil-rich shale and tar sands, and soon private companies and the government began investigating how to tap the supplies. At the same time, citizen groups launched an environmental crusade to prevent energy development from altering some of the last natural, rugged territory in America.

Several of the companies involved in geological and ecological projects set up central offices in Salt Lake City. One firm, Native Plants Inc., a company specializing in revegetating mine and pipeline sites, is located in the University of Utah research park. The firm later branched into biotechnology-using the latest findings from biological research to produce both superior crops and plant products, including everything from shampoo to a thickener for ice cream.

Currently, Native Plants is using cell fusion to merge crop strains that yield such beneficial hybrids as an edible potato that is pest-resistant.

The company then clones and sells thousands of genetic duplicates of the new, superior plant. The

firm's most advanced project involves genetic engineering of plants. Company scientists are trying to find out which plant genes carry specific traits so that they can create new plants with the desired characteristics. The firm plans to use this method to produce a high-protein grain that will grow on nonproductive land in countries that have food shortages. Native Plants has become an international leader in its field and is now selling its goods in Mexico, Western Europe, Kenya and Sri Lanka.

One earmark of high-technology firms is a highly educated staff. Native Plants has employees with master's and doctoral degrees in forestry, horticulture, botany, molecular biology, cellular biology, ecology and genetics. "We could staff a major university biology department," says company president Michael Alder.

During the 1970s, the bulk of Salt Lake City's high-technology growth was in computers. The computer industry was taking off nationwide, and companiesincluding a semiconductor manufacturer, two computer terminal producers and two manufacturers of personal computers-viewed the Rocky Mountain region as a promising site. Other companies were launched by computer scientists and University of Utah researchers already living in Salt Lake City. Like some of the bioengineers who would come later, these persons left secure jobs with no assurance their companies could make money. "Utah has a lot of creative and clever people who also have a pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit," explains Dale B. Carpenter, Utah State director of economic development.

One of the computer entrepreneurs, Professor David C. Evans of the University of Utah, was determined to make computers that were simple enough for almost anyone to use. Evans began building machines that turned stored information into graphs and pictures, rather than numbers. His company, Evans and Sutherland, now employs 750 persons and is an international leader in computer graphics. The firm makes simulators for training jet pilots and engineering design stations that enable engineers in the aircraft, automobile and other businesses to see how their final products will look.

"The whole computer graphics industry worldwide is based on the early research in Salt Lake City," says a vice-president of Evans and Sutherland.

Despite the universal concern about high technology replacing people with computers and robots, it is people, from every walk of life, who stand to benefit-and not only¡ from the technology itself, but also from the enormous numbers of new jobs that are created and the new skills that are required. Young people, like the couple rushing to get married in the Mormon Tabernacle (right, middle), have never had greater opportunities for a good life. Between 1979 and 1983, when high-tech industries were booming, more than 7 million new jobs were added to the work force in the United States.

In time, still other manufacturing and engineering companies began forming in Salt Lake City to begin applying the technology developed by computer firms.

Kenway Engineering, founded by Wayne S. Brown, a University of Utah mechanical engineering professor, made computer-controlled systems that steer driverless carts through warehouses and plants. "An operator punches the part number he wants into the computer," Brown explains, "and the system remembers where the part is and takes it in a cart over the shortest possible route to where it is needed, either to the dock or the assembly line. It can be used for everything from cars to nuts and bolts."

Another Salt Lake City company is developing "robotic vision" for quality control at cable and wire plants. A television camera photographs wire as it comes off the assembly line, and a computer calculates whether the wire is of standard size; if not, the computer sounds a warning alarm.

The beginnings of Salt Lake City's

bioengineering industry go back to 1964 and the appointment of James Fletcher, a scientist and inventor, as president of the University of Utah. Fletcher had helped design space rockets and equipment for unmanned probes of the moon. Though he was reared in the eastern United States, Fletcher was descended from Mormon pioneers. He says he decided to return to the home of his forebears "because I felt most of the big problems of the nation would be solved by education, and I wanted to make my contribution to humanity." Fletcher began transforming the University of Utah, then a fairly average state university, into a top research institution.

The new university president wasn't particular about what field of science university researchers pursued.

He sought government funding for various studies and set up the research park as a site for all kinds of scientific firms.

However, when Fletcher convinced Dr. Willem J. Kolff, leading world authority on artificial organs, to relocate his

research to Salt Lake City, the university began focusing on bioengineering.

Kolff, white-haired, slim and seemingly indefatigable, had built the world's first kidney dialysis machine at a small hospital in the Netherlands in 1943. The scientist later immigrated to America and joined the Cleveland Clinic, a heart research center in Ohio. There he helped develop the heart-lung machine used in open-heart surgeries. At the University of Utah, Kolff gathered the engineers, physicists, chemists, anesthesiologists, cardiologists and surgeons who developed and implanted the first artificial heart in Barney Clark and who have implanted artificial hearts in several other humans since.

One key to Kolff's success undoubtedly has been his interdisciplinary approach.

In high technology, developments in one scientific field often have applications in totally different fields. For instance, the miniaturization of circuitry achieved by the computer industry has enabled the wiring for artificial organs to fit in a small

enough space so that the organs can be implanted in the body. However, when Kolff was building his artificial heart and other devices, he found that miniature circuits manufactured for computers did not quite suit his needs. So he started building his own circuitry "chips." Ironically, Kolff, long a world leader in medicine, has recently been hailed for his accomplishments in electronics.

One thing that attracted Kolff and other scientists was a policy at the University of Utah allowing researchers to earn extra mo.ney by either forming their own companies or selling rights to inventions to other private companies. Where some of the work on an invention has been done at the university, the university is paid back in the form of stock in the new company or a percentage of sales.

"Money flows back to the university for the work it does, and the university sees technology put to use," explains one high-technology executive.

A few years ago, to further encourage entrepreneurialism, the university

formed the "Innovation Center," which provides business consultation to talented scientists and inventors and helps them find financial backers. The Innovation Center has since become a private company headed

by Wayne Brown, the founder of the warehouse systems company. A four-building complex is being constructed at the research park where Innovation Center clients will be given offices and laboratories until they get their firms launched and can afford their own facilities. After new companies begin making money, they pay back the Innovation Center company for its help.

A few years after arriving in Utah, Kolff and several of his scientists founded Kolff Medical, Inc., to further develop and eventually manufacture artificial hearts.

"Someday, there could be 50,000 artificial heart implants a year in the United States," says James Brophy, vicepresident in charge of research at the University of Utah. "Somebody has to build those hearts and train people to

A well-kept apartment building in the city's historic Capitol neighborhood. implant them. That may all be done here in Salt Lake City by Kolff Medical."

Kolff Medical also owns rights to the artificial ear that is being developed by a colleague at the University of Utah. The device converts sound waves to computer impulses. The computer has been programmed so it stimulates nerve endings in a deaf person's inner ear. The electrically stimulated nerve endings carry messages that the brain is able to interpret as words and sounds.

Other researchers who once worked for Kolff have left his team to develop their own inventions-and companies.

Stephen C. Jacobsen, who once worked for Kolff on a portable version of the kidney-dialysis machine, left to work on an artificial arm and founded Motion Control, Inc., to manufacture and sell the device. The arm is designed so that slight muscle actions in the shoulder or upper arm will signal it to bend at the elbow. An artificial hand closes electronically, allowing an amputee to be able to grip a cup.

Donald Lyman, once an engineer in Kolff's program, is now making artificial

blood vessels as small as four millimeters in diameter from chemical materials.

The vessels could replace human arteries damaged by arterial sclerosis. Lyman is in the process of setting up a company to manufacture his invention.

J. Burt Bunnell was an undergraduate student at the University of Utah when he worked for Kolff.

Since then, he has developed a high-frequency ventilator that helps premature babies breathe, but doesn't damage their lungs. He is president of Bunnell Biomedical Inc., a firm in the research park that makes and sells the ventilator and other related devices.

Why all this activity in a place like Salt Lake City?

The experts reply that, whether by luck or planning, Salt Lake City has become a prototype of the postindustrialage city. John Naisbitt calls it one of ten American "cities of great opportunity for the 1980s."

Young high-technology companies are generally avoiding large, congested industrial cities. Yet the firms must locate in cities large enough to offer airports, banks, universities and other vital services. Because of its earlier mining and aerospace days, Salt Lake City has developed this "critical mass."

Another key requirement is an adequate supply of educated workers. The Mormon Church emphasizes large families and education, and more than 40 percent of Salt Lake City residents are Mormons. As a result, the city's population, on average, is one of the youngest of any American city. More than SO percent are between the ages of 16 and 34 and are entering or soon will enter the work force-or are able to change jobs. And more than 80 percent of all city residents are high school graduates.

Presently, however, the Salt Lake Valley is grappling with serious labor adjustment problems. Kennecott plans to modernize its mining facilities so the operation can be run with fewer workers.

"While we may be pumping a lot of money into these facilities, it doesn't mean we're going to add people," says a Kennecott executive. "The people laid off for the most part will not be recalled."

Many of the workers are middle-aged men with families, yet their only experience is in mining. Some feel worthless and desperate.

The city has young people capable of training for technician jobs. But there is a shortage of expert engineers and scientists. The University of Utah has not been able to expand crucial undergraduate and graduate programs fast enough to keep up with demand, and presently 1,400 students are applying for 60 openings in the computer science department.

"In an industrial society," Naisbitt noted, "when your company looks for a place to locate, it looks for the infrastructure-water, transportation and so forth. But with the kind of companies we're building today, you can put your facility almost any place. You look instead for ambience, for the quality of life."

Salt Lake City seems to offer the right kind of lifestyle. The town is located in the west-central region of the United' States-an area high-technology companies favor because of the moderate to warm temperatures and dry climate.

There are plenty of outdoor recreation opportunities, including skiing in the mountains and sailing and sunbathing at the giant Great Salt Lake just west of town. And for its size, the city is culturally soph~ticated.

"We have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a ballet that got rave reviews at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., one of the top 15 symphonies in the United States and an opera company that, while not the best in the country, is coming of age," notes Dale Carpenter, a Utah State official.

"Yesterday is over," writes John Naisbitt in Megatrends. The Earth is moving toward a global economy, he says, and Third World nations are entering industrial boom cycles. The U.S economy is "no longer based primarily on industry. " ... America "must move beyond the industrial tasks of the past toward the great new enterprises of the future."

Those enterprises will be headquartered in places like Salt Lake City.

0 Suzanne Dean is a journalism teacher at the University of Utah.

About the Author:

A Nation of States The United States does not have national elections, only state elections. This one basic, very simple fact is the key to understanding the nation's quadrennial campaign for the Presidency. America was founded by people who had left or escaped from certain problems they had experienced in Europe. One source of those problems,

as the founders of the Republic saw it, was absolute power in the hands of the kings and queens. Those who fought the American Revolution in the 1770s and who then sat down to design a new government structure were distrustful of a powerful central government.

There is a second historical element that is part of the story. Over the almost 200 years of American history before the United States was born, the 13 colonies, from New Hampshire in the North to Georgia in the South, developed fairly independently of one another. They had different climates, economies, populations, cultures and-of course-different politics.

So, when this set of differences across the 13 colonies was combined with a basic distrust of a strong central government, it became clear that the new government of the new nation was not going to be one in which these independent colonies would simply give up their identities and their independent political and economic power to some new, unknown and powerful central national government.

If there is one key word that describes what came out of this dynamic, it is the word federal. In the United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, federal means a division between state and national governments-specifically that only a few and specified powers are granted to the central government, and others, including those not specified in the Constitution, are then retained by the states and the state governments.

Of course, the concept of federalism-this balance between the federal government and the state governnot a stagnant one. On the contrary, it is ments-is very dynamic. Think of it in terms of a pendulum slowly swinging back and forth between the view that the states should have more power and responsibility, and the view that the national government should have more power and responsibility.

The American Congress has passed thousands of laws over the last two centuries of American history interpreting and re-interpreting what the concept of federalism shall mean. The nation's Supreme Court has likewise made hundreds of decisions, adding to the changing meaning of federalism.

The national debate over federalism, over the relative power and authority of the central government, as opposed to the state governments, continues to this day.

During the last SO years, with the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II and the Nuclear Era, the central government has grown dramatically. But the pendulum continues to swing.

The incumbent President, Ronald Reagan, has taken strong ideological and philosophical positions claiming that the federal government has gotten too large, that it controls too much of the lives of the American people, that it collects-and spends-too many of the tax dollars and, he argues, it is time to cut back the size and scope of the national government and give back to the states the responsibility and authority for a variety of programs.

Indeed, while the words conservative and liberal have lots of different meanings, in the United States the most commonly used meaning relates directly to the differing

philosophies concerning the size and scope of the federal government. Yet, one area that has changed very little in the last 200 years is the American election system.

As I mentioned before, the founders were very this includistrustful of concentrations of power-and ded as much the power of the masses as the power of kings. One result of that distrust is that they designed a system in which the President is elected not by the population directly, but by the states.

They established a system in which the voters of each state would not vote directly for the President, but would vote for a state-level group of electors.

Each candidate would have a list of electors in the state pledged to him, and the voters would choose which electors they wanted. These electors would then meet in the Electoral College, usually convened only once every four years, and cast their ballots. Since the number of electors from each state would reflect the state's population size, representative democracy would still prevail.

But should a majority not be found for a candidate, then their electors, being drawn-as they would befrom the social, economic and political elite of society, could negotiate, discuss and choose a President. In modern times the Electoral College doesn't actually meet; rather, the electors mail their ballots in to the capital, where they are simply tabulated and announced.

The key word in the U.S. Constitution isfederal.

It means a division between a state government and national government.

The details of the Electoral College are not so important; what is important is that we see in all of this the idea of federalism-and the important role of the statesonce again. And this applies every four years both to the primary elections-in which each party nominates¡ its candidate-and to the general election in November, when all voters choose the President.

Let's move from the general to the specific, and talk just about the primary election for a minute or two, to fully appreciate how important this federal nature, this state by state, election process can be.

In, the Democratic Party the presidential candidate becomes the person who wins a majority of the delegates or votes at the party's national convention, which meets only once every four years for the explicit purpose of nominating candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency. There are about 2,000 total delegates to be

selected, and they are chosen in their states in about the same way as the population is distributed across the country. In this way, populous New York and California are more heavily represented than sparsely populated Alaska, Oregon, Iowa or New Hampshire.

So all a candidate must do is gain a majority of the delegates' votes; he doesn't have to win all the states.

In the primary election it is of course more complicated: part of the reason is that the states hold their primary elections on different days-spread across several months-so that a small state that happens to hold an early primary election, becomes very important-not because of its number of delegates, but because of its publicity value in the overall campaign.

It is even more complex than that. Given the federal nature of the process, the Democratic Party of New York may have-and quite likely will have-different rules for election and selection of its delegates than the Democratic Party of New Hampshire or the Democratic Party of Iowa or Alabama. This means that a candidate for the Presidency must establish an organization that keeps track of the following: the timing of the primary election, the rules that a given state has, and of course the political judgment-the likelihood that the candidate is more or less popular in the state.

Consider this last point for a minute-the likelihood of success. Some states are traditionally more conservative, some more liberal. Some states have a higher level of labor union activity, others a smaller level. Some states have more blacks, others might have more older people, some are more agricultural.

The consequence of all these factors-different population, different politics, different timing, different election rules, different size-all of these wouldn't be so bad except for the fact of federalism: each primary election is a different and separate state election.

This means that the candidate must develop his strategy not for a national election within the Democratic or Republican Party-but a strategy for running in a series of sometimes very different state-level elections.

And the nation saw a similar kind of campaign in 1980 when there were initially several different candidates in the Republican Party who wanted the honor of running against President Jimmy Carter.

And thus, perhaps it can be seen how in the early state primary elections, when there were still six or eight candidates, newspaper and television reporters were looking for clues as to how the national electorate felt.

But it was how the people felt in New Hampshire or Iowa or Connecticut or South Carolina and Alabama-and those states are different from one another.

In a general election there are a few differences from the primary election campaign: The election is held in all states on the same day. Attention is focused on Republicans v. Democrats, although once in a while a serious "third" party candidate is in the running. But the federal nature of the election is still the dominant characteristic.

Each state has a number of electoral votes in approximate proportion to its population size. But each state's electoral votes are decided by the voters of just that state.

Therefore, a candidate can figure out a strategy in which he might say- "I have only so much money, so much time and so much energy. So, instead of traveling to each and every state, I should figure out which states I have the best chance of winning. If I can win most of the largest states and a handful of small ones, I can win the Presidency of the United States, even if I lose 30 other states.

"Even if the other candidate wins those 30 other states with huge majorities, and even if I win those 20 big and medium states just by a whisker, the arithmetic is such that I can still win the Presidency."

In fact, one political scientist has calculated that during the1980s, with the population growth in the Sunbelt states of the Southwest, and population decline in the New England area, if a candidate won just the South and Southwestern states, and lost all the others, he could win the Presidency.

And so each candidate's strategy is to look at a political map and design his own unique, be~t strategy for winning that coalition of states-based on the interaction of his own political background and the political and social characteristics of each state-noting the party pattern of the state, and its agricultural, economic, racial and other characteristics.

Now, to be realistic, I am not arguing that presidential candidates actually say such things. There is some symbolic value in traveling to many states. And with modern television, what a candidate says in New York is seen and heard in Texas and California. So even if New York is a loss, campaigning there might be very important to a possible win in California.

But I hope my main point is clear. Let me illustrate it with a discussion I had with former President Gerald Ford. After being defeated in 1976 President Ford went on a lecture tour of colleges and universities. Since I was teaching a class in public opinion and elections, I arranged for him to come to our class.

I asked President Ford for his evaluation of the value of public opinion polls in national elections. His answer was both surprising and enlightening: He said that, actually, the famous polls, like the Gallup Poll, were really not too useful to the presidential candidate because they were national polls. The useful polls were state polls, he said, because the campaign for the Presidency was really a campaign made up of individual state elections. In some states the candidate has an easy chance of winning, in others almost no chance, and in some states there is a real contest. So the presidential candidate, he said, puts together a campaign based on estimates of the outcomes of those separate state contests.

The American election system is a reflection of the nation's form of government, a federal government in which the states have both historical and contemporary importance. And as translated into the election system, this means that the presidential election is really not a national election after all, but a collection of state elections.

0 About the Author: Neal E. Cutler is with the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern California.

CELEBRATING A HARVEST

Thanksgiving dinner is summer 10 Ireland began Thanksgiving, celebrated in November each over; so is the vegetable with great promise. The year in America, is traditionally the garden. As I push my chair potato fields looked their back, I can look out the best-row after row of dark time to enjoy the fruits of a year's labor. window and see a few green foliage sprinkled with But a gardener is only as good as twisted and shriveled tomapurple blossoms. Then in his seeds and there must be safeguards to plants still tied to their July, the weather turned to preserve different strains to stakes, the remaining fruits rainy, foggy and cold. In freezing solid by night and field after field, potato ensure future harvests. thawing to rotting mush by plants withered, and within day. But I have long since a few days turned black. A terrible stench filled the air. cleaned up most of the garTubers that were dug in the den and sowed it with winhopes of salvaging something soon rotted. For the Irish peasant, ter rye. What was, in September, a lush jungle of cucumbers and beans, melons, peppers and eggplants, is now a sparse accustomed to eating as much as four kilos of potatoes a day, the grassland. And rising in its midst is the compost heap-a great loss of a year's harvest was catastrophic. And the next year's crop was blighted as well. One out of every eight people died-of burial mound.

The first frosty night, in mid-September here in New starvation, dysentery, scurvy, cholera, typhus-a million in all, England, was a few weeks early this year, and it looked for a the greatest dying Europe had seen since the Black Death. More while like the garden might be cut down in its prime. As the than a million were forced to emigrate. mercury fell, I rushed about in the dark, harvesting vegetables I cannot dig potatoes, lifting the thin-skinned tubers out of by flashlight and draping old sheets and burlap sacks over the soil on the tines of my spading fork, without thinking of the everything I could. But now that the cold has set in for good, I Irish and the great famine. I would hate to spend the winter no longer mourn the garden's death. Almost without exception without my own supply of potatoes, a few of them now and then my vegetables are annuals, plants that flower, set seed and die baked all afternoon over a wood stove. every year. Or they are plants that I grow as if they were An early death of the garden is not the only death I fear. I annuals: beets and carrots are biennials; tomatoes are peren- also worry just as much about death that comes on time and nials that freeze to death each fall at this latitude. To raise then settles in to stay. By now I am resigned to the death of this vegetables is to grow accustomed to death. year's garden, but I fully intend to plant another in the spring.

Like salmon, many of these vegetables die in a flurry of Seed catalogs will be here soon, offering grains of life done up reproduction. And so our family's food supply peaks every fall. in neat packets. From these, gardens regenerate.

Quarts of stewed tomatoes, sweet chili, canned beans and dill But what if, this winter, the mail doesn't bring any seed pickles line the fruit-room shelves. In the cellar, strings of catalogs? That would bring my gardening to a halt-the onions hang above barrels of potatoes and turnips, and carrots equivalent of death settling in for good. To be sure, this is not packed in damp sand. Upstairs, butternut squash nl:;stle in likely to happen. Seed catalogs in January are as certain as boxes under the beds, and great bunches of kidney beans, zucchini in August. Yet suppose the catalogs do come, but no waiting to be threshed, dry in the attic. Thanksgiving dinner is longer offer the vegetable varieties I am accustomed to not for mourning a garden that is dead, but for celebrating the growing? abundance it left behind.

This is more than possible; it happens every winter. In this Had the garden succumbed prematurely to disease, or year's Burpee catalog, for example, 10 varieties have been insects, or frost, I would not be celebrating. The sideboard discontinued, among them Stowell's Evergreen Hybrid sweet would not be crowded with leftover pumpkin pie, creamed corn, Lady Godiva pumpkin, Scarlet Globe radish, Malabar onions, stewed tomatoes and potato dumplings. Death in the spinach and Sunray tomato. If I want to grow them next spring, garden is all right only if it occurs on time, after the peas have I must search other seed catalogs or plant what seed I have left filled their pods, after the pumpkins have turned orange. in last year's packets. That only grants me a year's stay, unless Death that comes early can be disastrous. In 1845, the I manage to save seed from my own plants. And that is

useless with hybrids, for the offspring will not resemble the parents.

All too often, a variety, once discontinued, is gone for good. And with it dies a bond that has developed between the plant and the gardener. I am attached to the taste of what I grow. To me, Long Season beets taste the way beets are supposed to taste. What is more, I understand, almost subconsciously, what, each variety needs to grow well. Some of the vegetables I raise are the same ones that my grandfather raised. In a sense, we have grown up together.

Some varieties grow well in my garden because they are particularly suited to my wet and rocky hillside. Tolerance for are the reasons that cold, poor soil or a short season-these new vegetable varieties are singled out from their kin in the first place. But local adaptation is of little interest to a seed company whose market extends from coast to coast. For them, the best varieties are ones that grow equally well in any garden.

Thousands of other gardeners have become just as alarmed as I by the prospect of permanent death in the garden. Among them is Kent Whealy, the director of Seed Savers Exchange, the largest of several grass-roots organizations committed to keeping death a seasonal visitor. "We are particularly interested in contacting gardeners who are keeping seed of vegetable varieties that are family heirlooms; garden varieties of American Indian, Mennonite, Amish, Dunkard, Hutterite or Cajun gardeners; no longer listed in any seed catalog; foreign, unusual or mutations; extremely disease- or insect- or droughtresistant; very hardy , of exceptional quality or otherwise outstanding." The Winter Yearbook, published each year by Seed Savers Exchange, contains a directory of vegetable varieties offered and wanted by the group's 550 members.

The yearbook is not a seed catalog; it is an invitation to others to join in keeping little-known, or little-grown, varieties alive. This is no trivial matter. In the case of corn, melons, cucumbers and squash, the varieties must either be preemptively hand-pollinated or grown 400 meters from each other to prevent wind and insects from accidentally crosspollinating them and contaminating the seed stock. To focus members' efforts on preserving the most jeopardized varieties,

Kent Whealy has spent much of the last three years preparing a computerized inventory of the nonhybrid seeds still available from seed companies.

Called The Garden Seed Inventory, it lists 5,000 varieties available from 240 companies in the United States and Canada.

The disappearance of vegetable varieties alarms not only those of us who have an emotional attachment to them. It is just as alarming to plant breeders, the original genetic engineers whose task it is to create new vegetables. To come up with a better cucumber, a breeder needs a diversity of cucumbers to work with, a stockpile of genes from which desired features can be taken and mixed to form a new, more interesting variety.

Some of the improvements will be in taste, size or days to maturity. But the one indispensable feature is greater disease resistance. Its achievement is never hidden under a bushel.

Sweet Success Hybrid cucumber, trumpets this year's Burpee catalog, is "resistant to cucumber and watermelon viruses, scab and leaf spot; tolerant to powdery and downy mildews." Such disease-resistance is all that stands between many of us and a great pickle shortage. .

Shortly after I began raising vegetables, I chanced to look through an atlas of plant pathology. Less than halfway through the parade of scabby, yellowed, rotten, blighted vegetables, I despaired of ever having a healthy garden. That I did, and have continued to, does -not mean that I am especially skilled or especially lucky. The fact is that most of the vegetables I grow defend themselves. Some have been doing it for years, others were given the ability recently by plant breeders who built in genes for self-defense.

Plant breeding, however, is never completed, because the enemy never stays quite the same. Like flu which reappears in a new form every winter, plant diseases are constantly evolving new lines of attack. Although many tomatoes are resistant to fusarium Wilt, a new lethal race of the disease has recently appeared, turning plants yellow, wilted and dead once more.

The appearance of any such new threat to a garden's well-being sends breeders back to their pollinating.

They seldom start with the most recent offerings of seed

catalogs. Like Renoir paintings, these varieties are too highly¡ derived to be progenitors. The path to future p~rfection runs instead through ugly, ill-tasting, irregular and unpromising varieties. But each of these has something indispensable, a gene or genes for some desirable trait. The genius of the plant breeder is to rearrange these genes so that they all end up in one plant. The work may involve decades, and many thousands of crosses. Solving Rubik's Cube is easy by comparison.

The genetic diversity that breeders need to work with is not always available at their doorstep. Part of the reason that the potato blight was so severe was that all the potatoes grown in Europe at that time were descended from only two batches of tubers, one introduced to Spain in 1570, the other to England in 1590. Having the same ancestors, the potatoes from Dublin to Warsaw shared the same genetic characteristics, among them a susceptibility to the fungus Phytophthora infestans that caused the blight.

The problem of genetic uniformity in our crops continues to plague us today. As recently as 1969, some 96 percent of the commercial pea hectorage was planted with only two varieties.

Such genetic similarity virtually invites catastrophe. In 1970, the southern corn leaf blight destroyed more than 15 percent of the United States corn crop, which at the time shared a common trait. The "new blood" that breeders sought in the aftermath of the Irish potato famine was not to be found in Europe. Seeking blight resistance, plant hunters traveled to where the potato had been cultivated for thousands, not hundreds, of years-to Andean slopes and valleys in Peru and Bolivia, to Mexico, to Argentina. There in the fields of local farmers, and in the wild species growing nearby, they found blight resistance.

None of this would have been possible, of course, if the genetic diversity did not exist, if it had been allowed to go extinct. I am not the first to see the connection between the long-term survival of breeding stocks and the short-term survival of my garden. Concern over loss of genetic stocks goes back at least 60 years and has led to the formation of a network of gene banks in the United States and abroad.

The largest such repository in the United States is the National Seed Storage Laboratory located in Fort Collins, Colorado. On adjustable steel shelves, in windowless rooms, in a red brick building at Colorado State University, are sealed metal cans and foil pouches containing 200,000 collections of seeds of crops and their wild relatives. Each container is carefully labeled inside and out, for the deposits in seed banks are handled as carefully as those at savings and loans.

The seeds are stored at a temperature of minus 20 degrees Centigrade, with a 5 percent moisture content to enhance their longevity. Experiments are under way with storing seeds in liquid nitrogen (minus 196 degrees Centigrade), which would theoretically keep them viable indefinitely. But in the meantime, the staff must regularly sample the viability of the seeds in each container. When it begins to drop, whether in 20 years or 50, the seeds must be planted and a new crop of seed raised to replace the old.

Daunted as I am by the prospects of perpetuating even a few old family favorites in my own garden, I cannot comprehend the logistics of doing this. And I am told that funds are already so tight that thousands of collections of seeds sit uncataloged in cardboard boxes. They are inside the bank's walls, all right, but until all these valuable collections are properly deposited, no one

will be able to make a withdrawal.

The designers of the gene banks have made every effort to keep their holdings secure. Duplicate deposits are made in other banks, even in other countries, lest a war-or some natural disaster overrun one of the collections. But accidents still happen. A blown fuse in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, resulted in an electrical failure that caused the facility to lose a year's stock of seed potatoes.

In the past, plant collectors have gone abroad in search of new genes because they wanted to take advantage of the diversity that occurs in the region where the plant was first domesticated. Of the vegetables I grow in my garden, the only one native to North America is the Jerusalem artichoke. All the rest originated somewhere else-the carrot in Central Asia, peas in Abyssinia, eggplant in India, cabbage in the Mediterranean, corn in Mexico and Central America. David Fairchild, who spent his life collecting plants for the U.S. Agriculture Department, titled his autobiography The World Was My Garden. For me, it still is.

Some of the greatest achievements yet to be realized in plant breeding will depend on exotic genes, both from primitive varieties and wild species. There is a species of wild tomato (Lycopersicon cheesmanii) growing in the Galapagos Islands that is so resistant to salt that itcan be grown in pure seawater.

One relative of the potato, the Solanum acaule, in Peru and Bolivia survives freezing. When drought-proof, frost-proof, disease- and insect-proof vegetables appear, they will carry genes from far-off places.

But the plant explorers who set out in search of exotic genes today may discover that they are too late. Just as local peoples have learned to drink Coca-Cola, they are switching from the indigenous varieties of their ancestors-the ones grown for many millenniums-to the newer higher-yielding improved ones. Garrison Wilkes, a corn geneticist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, points out that the products of technology are displacing the source upon which the technology is based. "It is analogous," he once said, "to taking stones from the foundation to repair the roof." But why should a Mexican farmer content himself with one-third of his neighbor's yield by planting the unimproved corn? Especially since more and more often, the harvest is sold for cash, not eaten for subsistence.

This is progress. So is the younger generation's abandonment of agriculture altogether. Cities bulge and corn fields become Volkswagen assembly plants.

Unless we somehow reverse the trend, gene banks and national parks will become vast refugee camps. And many plants will never get in. A bulldozer chewing away at the edge of a tropical forest may seem a long way from Thanksgiving dinner. But it is not that far at all. I hear the heavy rumble of the diesel, watch the battered yellow blade cut away yet another slice of bank. And as the machine pivots, one of its treads crushes to death the last .surviving member of an unidentified plant. From here, I cannot help imagining that that plant contained the very gene my garden has been waiting for. No wonder I feel indignant. Only when I know that we are protecting all the genes that this planet is stocked with, will I be able to relax and enjoy my food.

0 About the Author: Roger B. Swain is science editor of Horticulture magazine and author of Field Days: Journal of an Itinerant Biologist.

What does Melville's career tell us of the creative imagination but that it lies at the mercy of earthly circumstances? Melville wrote, in his dozen productive years, with extraordinary intensity, spending such long hours at his writing table that his health and sanity were feared for and his eyes became, in his words, "tender as young sparrows." Yet his youth held few hints of precocity or of literary concern; in 1850 he told Hawthorne, "Until I was 25, I had no development at all. From my 25th year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I, have not unfolded within myself." The pre- Typee [his first novel, 1846] silence of this, in his father's words, "amiable and docile" youth-compare Poe and Hawthorne and Bryant, all scribbling and published

The Artist and His Audience by their very early 2os-foreshadows the eventual return to silence when, at 38, after the publication of The ConfidenceMan, Melville again succumbed to fatalism and intellectual passivity.

At the age of 25 however, he found himself brimming with the exotic material Drawing of Herman Melville by David Levine.

Reprinted by permission of The New York Review of Books. Š 1%3-1985.

of his recent adventures in the South Seas, and sensed a public eager for the kind of adventure tale that he could provide. "The book is certainly calcu'lated for popular reading, or for none at all," he wrote the publisher of Typee. The English edition coming first, he permitted the American text to be bowdlerized of "all passages ... which offer violence to the feelings of any large class of readers."

These included not only "indelicate" sexual passages guite appropriate to the Polynesian setting, but unflattering accounts of the South Seas missionaries: "I have rejected every thing, in revising the book, which refers to the missionaries," Melville assured his publisher.

"So far as the wide and permanent popularity of the book is concerned, their exclusion will certainly be beneficial."

One of America's premier literary stylists, Updike believes that the creative imagination is best served by the "freedom it manages to keep regardless of contemporary response."

A certain Walter Whitman, reviewing the book in the Brooklyn Eagle, praised it as summer reading: "A strange, graceful, most readable book this .... As a book to hold in one's hand and pore dreamily over of a summer day, it is unsurpassed." Its successor, Omoo, was even more consciously shaped to avoid offending the prejudices of a large audience, and to at least one reader, the wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, seemed "very inferior to Typee, being written not so much for its own sake as to make another book apparently." In writing Mardi, Melville himself began to chafe against the requirements of making yet another book. Writing his English publisher, John Murray, he confessed, "Proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; and a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, and felt irked, cramped and fettered by plodding along with dull commonplaces. " Chastened by the self-indulgent book's failure, he returned to facts and commonplaces in Redburn and White-Jacket, but with a good deal of resentment and bitterness and self-scorn. He wrote his father-in-law that the books were "two jobs, which I have done for moneybeing forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." To Richard Henry Dana, Jr., whose Two Years Before the Mast was a classic of the genre in which Melville first composed, he claimed to have turned out these books "almost entirely for lucre" and in his journal marveled that a favorable reviewer of Redburn should "waste so many pages upon a thing, which I, the author, know to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with." And he wrote Evert Duyckinck that he hoped never to write another book like it, though it "puts money into an empty purse." When an author, he goes on, "attempts anything higher-God help him and save him! for it is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon-for a hollow purse makes the poet sink-witness Mardi."

Yet his spirits and energy remained high, and in the middle of writing the next sea adventure, Moby-Dick, he met Hawthorne, whose example and presence, for the year that they lived as neighbors in the Berkshires, emboldened Melville to plume his pinions for another flight, and to rewrite his text into a complicated, exuberant, exhaustive and

wholly original masterpiece. However, as with Mardi, the reviews were sour and the receipts meager, and he settled again to court a popular audience. To his publisher he promised, "My new book [is] very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine-being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, and stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life." Alas, Pierre, weirdly fetching up all his domestic devils and the resentments he had endured in the households of his mother and his wife, disastrously miscarried, as did The Confidence-Man, its attempt to convey riverboat atmosphere and frontier humor all but smothered under a misanthropy that verges on pathology. Rage had overtaken the sunny-humored natural stylist of Typee and Omoo, and he ceased to court an audience that had ceased to respond.

The spectacle of an artist at war with an audience's expectations was, by Melville's time, still uncommon. His contemporary, Dickens, appeared to enjoy the give-and-take wi.th readers that periodical serialization had opened up, and with no strain upon his artistic conscience sometimes trimmed his plot in response to letters he received. This same Dickens undertook extensive tours of dramatic readings from his own work, weeping with his audience over the death of Little Nell and indeed putting so much of himself into these performances that he shortened his life-a crowd pleaser, as well as a genius, to the end. Pleasing the audience, for writers as well as for other sorts of Victorian musical entertainers, was the art, and though Stendhal claimed to be writing for an audience of the future, not until Flaubert was the notion formulated of a novelistic art that existed in independence of and even in defiance of the bourgeois public.

The idea of an artist arose, we may surmise, in tribal environments where the distinction between art's producers and its consumers was shadowy at best. All tribal members collaborated in the dance, in the enactments of ritual, and the tale teller and mask maker were exemplary performers within a generally created rite. The social function of art could scarcely be an issue when all function was social, when personal gratification was inconceivable apart from the aggregate health and spiritual soundness. The old-

est survlvmg art objects are votive and totemic; sculptural and graphic representation began in service to religion, and an awesome submissiveness underlies the serene monotony of Egyptian and Chinese representational conventions. It should be noted, though, that even in immensely static Egypt, when a revolutionary Pharaoh, Akhenaten, proclaimed a new theology-a kind of anticlerical sun worship-the artists of his time responded with a new, slightly more supply and naturalistic style. Furthermore, in the tombs of the lesser nobles, Egyptian mural art becomes less Pharaonic, more playful and attentive to the

"Not until Flaubert was the notion formulated of a novelistic art that existed, in independence of ... the bourgeois public." tender details of life, to the birds and reeds in the Nile valley. Artistic creativity, that is, tends to frolic in the margins of its hieratic assignments, and a perennial skirmishing exists between received conventions and unstructured impressions.

At the dawn of Western literature, with Homer, the Old Testament writers, and the bards and balladeers whose oral compositions have descended from the smoky throne rooms of northern Europe, it is difficult to discern any chink between the assignment and the execution, between the assumptions of the performer and those of the audience. A seamless intention seems bound up in these old masterworks. As in today's symbiosis between the yelling, youthful rock star and his screaming adolescent fans, the artist enunciates the inner impulses of all, and his poetry has little more personal taint than that of the jokes and riddles which mysteriously arise and circulate among sch()olchildren even today. The bard proclaims the tribal record; he speaks, or so we imagine at this great distance, for all.

So, too, the great playwrights of ancient Greece descend to us as synonymous with their culture, their popularity certified by the very survival of their texts and by their many first prizes at the Dionysia, the spring festival at Athensthirteen first prizes for Aeschylus, about twenty for Sophocles (who never placed less than second in these competitions),

and only four for Euripides. With Euripides, the youngest of the three, we have hints of author-audience tension in the modern style: the relative paucity of his prizes, his irreverent and even hostile treatment of the gods and their myths, his cursory handling of the conventional deus ex machina ending, as if the playwright is impatiently bowing to convention, and the something morbid and quarrelsome in the psychology of his characters all suggest an artist more intent upon saying what interests him than saying what people ought to hear. The inconvenience of realism, which is to clos~ English theaters under the Puritans and to scandalize readers of Flaubert and Zola, Dreiser and Joyce, first arises with Euripides, who is said to have been tried for impiety and to have gone to live in the court of the king of Macedonia because of his unpopularity in Athens.

The Middle Ages enlisted artists, usually anonymously, in the praise and service of God; we do not hesitate to credit the inner life of the age, rather than the genius of the individual stone carver, with the sublime sculptures at Chartres and Rheims. Dante is the first writer in a thousand years to whom we easily ascribe a personality, a personal history unmistakably reflected in his work. Shakespeare is our classic folk artist, who disdained no extremity of farce or fustian to keep the groundlings at the Globe entertained. He cobbled up coarse old plots, turning their absurdities into profundities and their carpentry into poetry; he concocted roles for whatever actor needed one, such as the company clowns William Kempe and Robert Armin; he casually collaborated with infinitely lesser talents and merged the proverbial wisdom of the time with his own prodigious originality. To think of Shakespeare as so immensely obliging and yet the glory of our language flatters us, of course, and suggests that being a great writer isn't something to get all fussy and truculent about. Since he left so little biographical trace that men still write serious books maintaining he was somebody else, we have only the work as the record of the man. Those who believe that this record reveals nothing should read the late Frank O'Connor's Shakespeare's Progress; O'Connor, with many a bold reading and pugnacious opinion, sketches a turbulent, conflicted and resentful life behind the oeuvre. He

0, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. and adds this comment: "All the tragedy of the fastidious man who has to make his living in the theater is in that last unforgettable line." He might have gone on to quote the three lines that follow, and that sum up the artist's falsification by his art: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand; And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

Perhaps it needed the rise of a bourgeois audience to create a fully conscious conflict between the artist's needs and his public's. While we are aware that the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and, to a lesser extent, that of Michelangelo were led into many aborted and ephemeral projects by their aristocratic and papal patrons, it is not until Rembrandt that an artist pursues and improves his art at the distinct price of leaving his patronage behind. As Rembrandt's painting became broader, rougher, more daring and more deeply humane, his commissions from the solid Dutch burghers dried up. What did they want with these light-encrusted portraits of wrinkled Amsterdam Jews, these biblical scenes featuring big-bellied, unmistakably middle-aged women? They wanted, very sensibly, idealized portraits of themselves, with no more psychological depth than was needed t9 make the likeness vivid. According to Richard Sennett: In the 19th century, problems in communication arose because of the moral expectations the bourgeoisie had of art. Art, it was held, could refine taste, could remove one from the sordid world of small-mindedness and material striving. The Romantic musicians struggled constantly against these restraints of "good taste."

For the hard-working bourgeoisie, art became a relief from life rather than, as in less specialized times, an explanation and intensification of it. To an extent, it is still true that the arts survive as an instrument and emblem of social improvement: one goes to the museum, and concerts, and reads books, because other nice people do. One attends college partly to get the kna.ck of the arts, so one will move at ease among other people who have learned the same knack. Art functions as grease in the social wheels.

Banks and corporations are now among the chief purchasers of contemporary paintings, which hang in their offices not only as a possibly sound investment for themselves but as a kind of soothing visual Muzak to lull the nervousness of their customers, to create an atmosphere of play and alleviate the terrible seriousness with which we tend to take money.

The theatrical arts serve now as they have done for centuries as backdrop to courtships and seductions on the private as well as the business level. Art is associated with refinement, and refinement with wealth, and wealth with power.

People once read Fanny Burney and Thackeray to learn about manners and decorum in the social class a notch or two above their own; one of the charms, certainly, of going to the movies in the 1930s and 1940s was seeing how the rich lived, in their penthouses, with their tuxedos and butlers and silver cigarette cases. The recent success of television's Dynasty again illustrates how the rich, who always look well in their clothes and always find parking places in front of hotels, remain fascinating-supermen and wonder women of the consumer society. But people who read novels now do so, I suspect, more to learn how other people act in bed than at the table; our fantasies run less toward palaces and penthouses than toward the violence and paranoia of the international thriller..

People look to the arts, in any case, to supplement their lives, and when a genre ceases to provide supplements selfevidently desirable, then uneasy philanthropic and legislative effort to encourage the art, to foster its perpetuation and ensure its survival, enter in. Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to

amuse and instruct; they exist in our culture unaccredited, unrespectable and unsponsored, except by popular demand, like the novel in the 19th century, like the drama in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

An art form does not determine itself from abstract or intrinsic causes; it is shaped by the technology and appetite of the time. Very quickly, a dust of nostalgia and scholarship can deceptively accumulate upon a form, so that it seems to have been always dusty. Already, learned societies devote themselves to the early history of the comic strip, and the Hollywood movies of the studio era, turned out as giant artifacts by so-called film factories, can now be seen to have artistic qualities and, more surprisingly, an artistic integrity lacking in the more artistically self-conscious movies of today.

There comes a moment in the evolution of art when a certain thing cannot anymore be done; Busby Berkeley musicais and Walt Disney full-length animations could not be produced at contemporary wage rates, and we cannot now, except with a great effort of mimicry, produce images with the texture of those Victorian block prints that, until the invention of photogravure, were turned out by the tens of thousands. In the collages of Max Ernst and the illustrated stories of Donald Barthelme, these prints become art; "camp," in fact, is a kind of recycling of art-qualities that once seemed neutral and inevitable are the second time around revealed as full of the passion of the time, declared in a style that in retrospect brims with strangeness.

Now, where does this rather fatalistic and determinist overview of art leave the individual creative imagination? The creative imagination, I would say, functions with a certain indispensable innocence within its implacable context. Ever renewed as each generation emerges from childhood, it wants to please. It wants to please more or less as it has been pleased, by the art that touched it in its formative years. Already, a generation of novelists flourishes, Stephen King foremost, that has been deeply penetrated by the vocabulary of television; I cannot feel more than mildly alarmed, since my own generation was enslaved to the movies.

The creative imagination wants to please its audience, and it does so by sharing what is most precious to it. A small child's first instinct vis-a-vis possessions is to hug what it has tight to itself; its

socialization and its creativity begin when it pushes a lima bean or a slobbered toy truck toward a sibling or playmate.

Perhaps we can take this development a step further back: Freud somewhere claims that a child's first gift, presented to its parents, are its feces, whose presentation (in the appropriate receptacle) is roundly praised. And, as in this primal benefaction, the writer extrudes his daily product while sitting down, on a healthy basis of regularity and avoidance of strain. The artist who works in words and anecdotes, images and facts, wants to share with us nothing less than his digested life, his life as he savors it, in the memories and fantasies most precious, however obscurely, to him. Let me illus-

"In this present age of excessive information ... the writer has no clearer moral duty than to keep his imagination his own." trate all this with a brief example from my own humble creativity.

In 1958 I was a young man of 26 who had recently presumed to set himself up in a small New England town as a free-lance writer. My obligations to my career and my family, as I conceived them, were to sell six short stories a year to The New Yorker magazine. I had already written and sold a number based upon my Pennsylvania boyhood and my young married life in New York City; one winter day I happened to remember, with a sudden simultaneous sense of loss and recapture, the New Year's Eve parties myoid high school crowd used to have at a certain home, and how even after most of us had gone off to college, we for several years continued the custom, which now served as a kind of reunion.

The hero of my story is a college sophomore, already committed to a college girlfriend and to aspirations that will take him forever away from his home town.

He tells us of a moment in this hectic gathering of 19- and 20-year-olds: The party was the party I had been going to all my life, beginning with Ann Mahlon's first Hallowe'en party, that I attended as a hot, lumbering, breathless and blind Donald Duck. My mother had made the costume, and the eyes kept slipping, and were further

apart than my eyes, so that even when the clouds of gauze parted, it was to reveal the frustrating depthless world seen with one eye. Ann, who because her mother loved her so much as a child had remained somewhat childish, and I and another boy and girl who were not involved in any romantic crisis went down into the Schuman's basement to play circular ping-pong.

Armed with paddles, we stood each at a side of the table and when the ball was stroked ran around it counterclockwise, slapping the ball and screaming. To run better the girls took off their heels and ruined their stockings on the cement floor. Their faces and arms and shoulder sections became flushed, and when a girl lunged forward toward the net the stiff neckline of her semi-formal dress dropped away and the white arcs of her brassiere could be glimpsed cupping fat, and when she reached high her shaved armpit gleamed like a bit of chicken skin. An earring of Ann's flew off and the two connected rhinestones skidded to lie near the wall, among the Schumans' power mower and the badminton poles and empty bronze motor-oil cans twice punctured by triangles. All these images were immediately lost in the whirl of our running; we were dizzy before we stopped. Ann leaned on me getting back into her shoes.

The story is called "The Happiest I've Been." It was accepted, paid for, and has been reprinted in a few anthologies. As I wrote it, I had a sensation of breaking through, as if through a thin sheet of restraining glass, to material, to truth, previously locked up. I was excited, and when my wife of those years read the first draft, she said, "This is exciting." Now, what was exciting? There is no great violence or external adventure in the story, no extraordinary characters. The concreteness, the actuality, I suggest, is exciting. In 1958 I was at just the right distance from the night in Shillington, Pennsylvania, when 1952 became 1953; I still remembered and cared, yet was enough distant to get a handle on the memories, to manipulate them into fiction.

That is part one of creativity; me, my self-expression. Creativity, as I construe it, is a tripartite phenomenon: there is the artist, keen to express himself and to

make an impression. But there also has to be a genre, a pre-existent form or type of object to which the prospective artist's first relation was that of consumer, the pleasure of his consumption extending itself into the ambition to be a producer.

And attached to that genre and inextricable from its growth is the audience that finds in the contents of this form some cause for consolation, amusement or enlightenment.

For part two, the genre, there was the American short story, the New Yorker short story indeed, of which many had been written in the decade preceding 1958, but none, my happy delusion was, quite in this way about quite this sort of material. Non-Southern small towns and teenagers were both, my impression was, customarily treated with condescension, or satirically, in the fiction of the 1950s; the indictments of provincial life by Sinclair Lewis and Ring Lardner were still in the air. My self-appointed mission was to stand up and cry, "No, this is life, to be taken as seriously as any other kind." By this prophetic light tiny details, like the shaved armpit gleaming like a bit of chicken skin or the two triangular punctures in an empty oil can, acquire the intensity of symbolism. The blurred sexuality of this playful moment is ominous, for it is carrying the participants away from their childhoods, into the dizzying mystery of time.

As to the third part of the creative process, the audience beyond the genre, there was the New Yorker reader as I imagined him, needing a wholesome middle-American change from his then customary diet of Westchester adultery stories and reminiscences of luxurious Indian or Polish childhoods. I believed, that is, that there was a body of my fellow Americans to whom these modest doings in Pennsylvania would be news.

Such was the state of my imagination as I wrote this story; actually, many stories not unlike it appear in the magazine now, and perhaps always have: but in my possibly deluded sense of things the material was fresh, fresh to me and fresh to the world, and authentic. By authentic I mean actual and concrete. For the creative imagination, in my sense of it, is wholly parasitic upon the real world, what used to be called Creation. Creative excitement, and a sense of useful work, have invariably and only come to me when I felt I was transferring, with a

lively accuracy, some piece of experienced reality to the printed page. Those two triangular holes, that bit of chicken skin are worth more than any amount of so-called style or form. The will toward concreteness, the fervor to do justice to the real, compels style and form into being. No style or form exists in the abstract; whatever may be true in painting or music, there is no such thing as abstract writing. Words even when shattered into nonsense struggle to communicate meanings to us; and behind the most extreme modernist experiments with the language of fiction-loyce's Finnegans Wake; the late writing of Gertrude Stein; the automatic writing of Dadasome perception about the nature of reality seeks embodiment.

The 'creative imagination, then, has a double "interface": on the "output" side, with some kind of responsive audience, and on the "input" side, with reality itself. If either connection breaks down, the electricity ceases to flow. Both sides of the creative event demand trust: on the output side, we must hope that some sort of audience is there, or will be there. On the input, we must sit down in the expectation that the material will speak through us, that certain unforseeable happinesses of pattern and realization will emerge out of blankness as we write.

We began with Melville. His audience, in that England-oriented, semi-literate America of 140 years ago, was wandering away, but something was frazzling as well in his relation with his raw material.

Melville was interested-turned on, we might say-by the sea, and by male interchange, and toward the end of his long-silent life wrote in his obscurity one more masterpiece, Billy Budd, in line with these concerns. The vast land of America and the complexities of family life depressed rather than fired his imagination. So, his attempts to abandon his oceanic. material rebuked, he abdicated-. the professional writer's struggle and has probably made a stronger impression on posterity for it. He seems, at this distance, unencumbered by facile prolixity or mere professionalism; in his professional defeat his imagination remained his own.

In this present age of excessive information and of cheerful inaccuracy, where six shrewd or at least intimidatingly verbal critics exist for every creative spirit, the writer has no clearer moral

duty than to keep his imagination his own. In doing so, he risks becoming offensive. Listen, if you will, to the tone of this contemporary review of Moby-Dick: Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. He is gauging, at once, our gullibility and our patience. Having written one or two passable extravagances, he has considered himself privileged to produce as many more as he pleases, increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dulL ...

The truth is, Mr. Melville has survived his reputation. If he had been contented with writing ohe or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances of immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.

"0 generation of vipers," runs through the mind. All generations, each in its time, are viperish, and how the artist survives and makes his way in his own life-time is fundamentally a personal problem, with many solutions, none of them ideal. But this much seems certain: what we end by treasuring in the creative imagination is the freedom it manages to keep, regardless of contemporary response. Or, rather, the degree to which it, imagining an ideal audience, succeeds in pitching its efforts toward our own deepest response.

0

Updike's recent publications include Facing Nature (a collection of poems). The Witches of Eastwick, The Same Door: Short Stories and Hugging the Shore.

John

There is More to Atlanta Than @sg~

Coca-Cola. The drink was a success It didn't pay to lose wars in those from the start, but the company that days. When General William Sherman made it changed hands several times came down out of Tennessee like the and by the 1920s was in serious financial wrath of God, and Atlanta burned [in 1864], and Scarlett O'Hara had to go trouble. The directors called in a young man named Robert Winship Woodruff, scurrying down the road to Tara, the Coca-Cola;helped make Atlanta the who had made a name for himself economic progress of the Queen City of unchallenged metropolis of the the South was set back for 100 years. In merchandising trucks and whose father American South. And guess who 1965, Atlanta was still a modest provinsat on the board of directors. He ran the is now behind the revolution of the cial town, and there was debate as company for some 50 years, autocratically, triumphantly. to whether it would be defeated by city's new cultural identity?

Birmingham or even Chattanooga in "I am just a salesman," he used to the race to become the commercial hub of the southeastern say~a salesman of genius who gave a new dimension to the marketplace. Under his unerring guidance, Coca-Cola became United States. a symbol of an expanding and self-confident America everyTwenty years later, Atlanta is a boom city, its metropolitan population climbing toward two-and-a-half million (four million where. It became the kingpin-in hard times it was the only real support-of the economy of Atlanta and of the state of in the next century, they say). One can hardly fly anywhere these days without a stop at the Atlanta airport. New Georgia. It is said that half the rich men of Georgia owe their companies keep moving in (430 out of Fortune's 500 are fortunes to Coca-Cola; Robert Woodruff owed a superfortune.

Even till a few months before his death (at 95) last March, represented here), new buildings keep going up, along with new subway lines, new superhighways, new skyscrapers. It is the though half-blind and more than half-deaf, Woodruff was unchallenged metropolis for all the vast territory south of still following details of the company business. He had done hardly anything else since 1923. Once when one of his Washington, D.C., and east of Texas.

A couple of years ago, it consecrated its pre-eminence with subordinates, Joe Jones, asked him for a vacation, he growled, a birthday-cake-white art museum on Peachtree Street, part of "Why do you want a vacation? I've never taken a vacation in an arts complex meant to establish Atlanta as the cultural my life." The growl issued from a face deeply tanned by a two-week golf outing and a three-week dove shoot on his metropolis of the region as well.

There was, however, a time when there was no big money in Ichauway Plantation in south Georgia. Whatever these might Atlanta, no venture capital, no factories. The city was little have represented to other men, to Woodruff they were simply more than a glorified railroad station through which goods and opportunities for pushing his product. He was always entertaining potential customers or friends of Coca-Cola; "I don't go to services could be routed to the farmers of a sluggish agricultural state. It might have died of inanition if a local druggist in the parties, I give tnem," he liked to say. late 1880s had not mixed in his back room a brew among whose Right: The dazzling atrium at the entrance to Atlanta's High Museum of ingredients were the coca leaf and the kola nut. He named it Art serves as a central core for radiating galleries. Above: Architect Richard Meier (left) and Museum Director Gudmund Vigtel in front of the High Museum during itsfinal weeks of construction.

There is More to Atlanta Than @fg" Woodruff was known variously as the Boss, the Man, the Cigar, Mr. Bob, Mr. Anonymous.

The last epithet derived from the fact that early on he developed the habit of contributing large sums of money to worthy causes while keeping himself deep in the shadows. If he felt the city of Atlanta needed a park downtown, in came an anonymous gift of, say, $11 million to help clear a couple of run-down blocks and plant them in trees and sculpture.

Hospitals, universities, private individuals all received substantial sums from this nameless source, which of course could not remain wholly nameless for long. But the secret was pretty well kept within Atlanta, and the world was hardly aware of Woodruff's existence till 1979, when he made a gift to Emory University that was hard to keep under a cloak: $105 million.

He never gave one fig for art, not a single great painting ever hung on the walls of his house, his confederates have to search hard for the memory of his ever opening, let alone reading, a book. But he believed that if Atlanta was going to become the great city it deserved to be, a worthy headquarters for the Coca-Cola Company, if it was -going to attract the kind of progressive businesses that would keep it booming, it would need to offer an attractive life to the people who would be running those businesses.

Atlanta had much to recommend it to young executives.

Having been almost entirely shut out of the industrial revolution, the city had no smokestacks to pollute its atmosphere.

It had green spaces everywhere-trees somewhere in just about every block. It had pleasant people, a reasonably good climate and plenty of recreational facilities. All very well; but Woodruff knew that it needed more-it needed the fine arts.

Traditional Atlanta had never cultivated more than a nodding acquaintance with the arts, and practically none at all with the visual arts. It wasn't until 1926 that Atlanta got its first art museum when Mrs. Joseph M. High, widow of a department-store owner, died and bequeathed her house on Peachtree Street to be used for that purpose as long as it should bear the family name. It was a gracious Tudor-style house, and for almost 30 years it served Atlanta's modest needs. Mrs. High left no paintings or money to buy any. The works that were hung on the walls of the new museum were a potpourri of gifts and bequests, of no particular distinction except in the field of turn-of-the-century American painting.

There was another windfall in the 1950s when the estate of S. H. Kress, a variety-store magnate, was settled. He had bought enough canvases of old masters to make sizable bequests to museums in cities where there had been S.H. Kress stores. The best went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, but Atlanta also made off with a number of treasures, which can now be enjoyed by the public.

In 1955 the High Museum of Art was expanded by the addition of a brick and glass structure big enou~h to hold the Kress pictures. It was soon too cramped, and in a few years plans were proposed for a major arts center. But a bond issue for financing it was voted down at the next municipal election.

Undaunted, Robert Woodruff summoned some of the civic leaders to lunch and told them that if they could raise $2 million from private sources he would put up $4 million. This fund raising was well under way by the spring of 1962.

Then, in June, a plane chartered to take a group of Atlanta art patrons on a museum tour of Europe sponsored by the High crashed at the end of the runway on takeoff for the return trip from Orly, killing all passengers on board. Still, the idea of an arts center did not die at Orly; it in fact was stimulated by the crash. The survivors felt that they had to do something to create a fitting memorial for the departed.

Woodruff offered $6 million in a matching grant for a new building, then $2 million more to buy additional land around it.

A colonnaded white Atlanta Memorial Arts Center was wrapped around the old building, significantly increasing the floor space to nine times its original size, and inaugurated in 1968. The French Government presented a Rodin statue as a memorial to those who died at Orly and Woodruff presented an endowment fund of $10 million.

Almost immediately, the museum staff realized that the High would soon outgrow its space in the center. The Arts Alliance, which ran the place, had four separate activities under its wing. There was the Alliance Theater, which became one of the fastest-growing organizations of its kind in the United States. There was the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, acquiring a national reputation under the direction of Robert Shaw. There was the Atlanta School of Art, with some 600 students. And there was the High.

Woodruff to the breach once more: he offered $7.5 million in a matching grant if an equivalent amount could be raised from the public. A committee of prominent citizens, the Who's Who of Atlanta, took up the challenge. They drew up plans to incorporate the existing structure in a Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center. The theater, the school, the orchestra would fit comfortably in the space vacated by the High Museum, which would move to new quarters next door.

The new quarters would have to be something distinctive, something that would put Atlanta on the architectural map.

The building committee visited museums in dozens of other cities and looked over 75 architects before choosing Richard Meier of New York, one of the new breed of "Post-Modern" architects who have been loosening and livening the pallid cubes of the Bauhaus. There was some grumbling about the selection of an out-of-towner, and more when it was learned that he proposed to sheathe his building in white porcelainenameled steel-a material developed primarily for kitchen cookware and appliances that had in the past been used mainly in structures like gas stations and fast-food restaurants, though more recently in some major buildings. They're going to put a giant washing machine on Peachtree Street, said evil tongues in town.

Actually, as Meier points out, the porcelain has many advantages. It can be made in panels that are relatively easy and inexpensive to replace ifthey are damaged, but they are quite hard

to damage with anything less forceful than a machine-gun bullet.

It can be cleaned with a sponge. And it doesn't look at all like a kitchen appliance.

It affords a surprisingly dramatic effect, changing tbnes with the movement of the sun and clouds.

The new building had to fit into a confined space between existing structures-to "fit in without mimicking," as Meier says. He made it the same height as the old Memorial Arts Building so that it could look like a younger, more dashing brother next to it. He sheathed his lower levels in granite to create a "tactile relationship" with the brick Presbyterian church across the street. He was careful not to disturb the ginkgo tree on Peachtree Street. He didn't disturb any trees at all, as a matter of fact. But you can see trees from almost everywhere in the building. For Meier believes in relating the interior of his buildings to the external world, and in flooding them with natural light-in this case from a huge skylight and seven smaller ones and vast expanses of windows.

The working part of the museum is a fairly conventional L-shaped structure with six levels, one of them totally below ground for storage and other "invisible" operations.

The top three are divided into rectangular galleries that can display the museum's permanent collection; the uppermost has the flexibility to accommodate two traveling shows or a single blockbuster.

Flaring out from the points of the L, a curved wall makes a chastely flamboyant facade, with "flying buttresses" at the top story. You enter through another protuberant curve, shaped something like a grand piano, and find yourself in a huge atrium with ramps snaking up its curved side. The rumps are not for displaying works of art, as in Frank Lloyd Wright'S Guggenheim Museum in New York; they are just for getting up and down. They help give the museum a remarkably compact feeling. Unlike other museums, where you are apt to lose all sense of direction the first time you turn a corner, this one keeps you oriented at all times; you can see into several galleries at once and be aware of different centuries and different visions; an altogether uplifting experience.

Not the least remarkable thing about this museum is that it was finished on schedule and within budget. This feat, almost unheard of in the history of museums, must be credited to the small-town spirit of friendly cooperation that burns or at least flickers at the heart of this city. Everybody who wanted to be anybody in Atlanta got into the act; there were some 5,000 volunteers whooping up interest, raising funds, holding auctions, shows, parties. A major corporation lent an expert in constrl;lction and design who found all kinds of ways to cut costs. A plant was found outside Atlanta that could make the porcelain-enameled steel panels. The decision was made to use a concrete frame because there was more local expertise in concrete than in steel construction.

Community enthusiasm helped push the project forward at all times. Gudmund Vigtel, director of the museum, likes to boast that while the High ranks 30th in the United States in terms of operating funds, it is among the top 10 in income derived from membership.

As currently constituted, the museum is strong in three areas. It has an excellent collection of Luminists, the work of those 19th-century artists, recently risen to costly prominence, who glowingly painted the great American landscape.

It has what is probably one of the world's most comprehen-

sive collections of 19th-century American decorative arts. This is a field largely neglected by museums and by art historians, who tended to regard it as one of the low points in the chronicles of human creative endeavor. When Donald Peirce was appointed curator of decorative arts in the spring of 1980 (the High had had no full-time curators before 1979; it has three now), he found his collection consisted of a choice small group of 19th-century works made possible by Virginia Carroll Crawford, an Atlantan who collected 18th-century decorative arts.

She is still instrumental in acquiring representative American works from the period between 1825 and World War I. To eyes trained to the austerities of Danish Modern, they looked like freaks-huge, lumbering, overelaborate, conspicuous monstrosities; To the more charitable and more nostalgic eyes of today, they are masterpieces of craftsmanship and expressions of a luxuriant, sometimes exotic, imagination. No one who has ever seen a laminated rosewood sofa with velvet upholstery and applique design attributed to .John Henry Belter (who flourished in New York in the 1850s) is likely to keep it out of his dreams. Then there is the piano in carved and gilded ebonized cherry and bird's-eye maple made for the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 by Hallet Davis & Co., and an ebonized cherry cabinet with falcon finials made by the Herter Brothers in New York in 1880.

The third strength of the High is its educational program, which occupies about half of the ground floor, ostensibly for childern but so successful that half of the visitors at its various award-winning shows have been adults. The first major show of the new museum is in this department, a "major multisensory exhibition" which will go on for five years. The show is called "Sensations," and it is devoted to illustrating the functions of the five senses with a whole battery of ingenious devices-video games, kinetic environments, models like a huge one of the human ear into which the kids can ciimb and tumble, a walk-in camera obscura, musical performances and displays of works from the museum collections.

Video games and ebonized cherry pianos are valuable enough in their ¡way. They don't add up to a major museum.

Atlanta knows that sooner or later it will have to rely on bequests or gifts from collectors, and there are no major collectors in Atlanta. But nobody worries too much about that.

Atlanta has seen so many radical changes, total reversals of ancient folkways, in the last couple of decades that there is no reason not to expect some more in the future. It is only decades ago that Andrew Young, coming home from college on vacation, wouldn't stop overnight in Atlanta. Now as mayor of the city he has pushed hard to make it an international financial and commercial center.

Atlanta, says Dr. Monique Seefried, is the last place in the world where important people will take time out to listen to total strangers; that is why it is one of the few remaining places in the world where you can get things done. Seefried is a young Frenchwoman, an archaeologist, and she went one day to see the president of Emory University. It is a crying shame, she said, that you have such an outstanding collection of Old World archaeological artifacts so poorly exhibited.

The High has nothing earlier than 1400. You should have a museum of your own worthy of the collection, focusing on the vast stretch of history before that.

~"

There is More to Atlanta Than

Within a week or so-such is the way Atlanta hearkens to the Scriptural law "To them that have shall be given"-a man walked into the president's office and said he wanted to give Emory $1.5 million for some useful purpose.

The president had a useful purpose ready for him.

The city's tutelary genius remains Scarlett O'Hara, who, when she needed a new dress in which to vamp Rhett Butler, pulled down one of her mother's old velvet curtains and made herself one. Tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow Atlanta will have its collectors.

0 About the Author: Robert Smithsonian magazine.

"Unlike other museums, where you are apt to lose all sense of direction the first time you turn a corner, the High Museum of Art keeps you oriented at all times."

Top right: Among the High Museum of Art's distinguished collection of 19th-century decorative arts is this exquisite ebony chair, circa 1875.

Center: Guests at the opening of the museum chat in front of Frank Stella's

Manteneia I. Right: The entrance ramp leads to the glass-walled front of the building.

Facing page: A visitor takes a close look at Nydia,

the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii by 19th-century American Randolph Rogers.

artist

Wernick

is a frequent

contributor

to

FOCUS "I can't believe this is a factory-built house!" That's how almost everybody responded to a prototype house displayed at the recent National Association of Home Builders exhibition in Houston, Texas.

Designed by architect Barry Berkus of Santa Barbara, California, the house demonstrates a colorful, innovative approach to today's demand for single-family houses, reports Marilyn Hoffman in a recent issue of The Christian Science Monitor. "The house is small, just 166 sq. meters, but it looks, feels and 'lives' large. It has open sightlines, vaulted 3.3-meter ceilings and incorporates the indoor-outdoor living advantages of three greenhouses and three outdoor decks."

One secret of the house floor plan's success, says Berkus, is that it has absolutely no wasted space. Every centimeter is utilized. "My aim was to design and produce a house that could be manufactured on a production line, using the technology that is available today. I wanted to overcome the usual spatial limitations of modular housing and to create a design and production system that incorporated flexibility, soaring vertical space and horizontal visual excitement."

This Berkus did by designing four basic modules that can be combined in innumerable ways, and by adding the optional decks and greenhouse spaces that help produce an integrated environment. The 3.6-meter-wide host module contains the living room, dining room and a den with a fireplace. The second module has a kitchen and the master bedroom suite. The other two modules contain secondary bedrooms and a guest room.

"Manufactured housing has always promised to be the wave of the future," says Jim Birdson of the National Association of Home Builders, "but I think we are getting closer to that realization. "

Although India and the United States have been cooperating for years in a myriad fields of mutual interest, there has been a marked increase in cultural, educational and scientific exchanges between the two countries in recent months.

In September a team of American scientists visited India to hold meetings with their Indian counterparts to identify areas in which research projects could be initiated under the Science and Technology Initiative (STI) agreement reached between President Ronald Reagan and the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during her 1982 U.S. visit. STI aims at increased scientific and technological collaboration between the two countries.

Areas of cooperative research identified by the two sides include study of photovoltaic materials for more efficient harnessing of solar en-

another agreement for collaborative research in materials sciences which was recommended by the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Subcommission at its meeting in New Delhi last April.

Under the Rs. 22-million three-year program, scientists from premier research institutions in the two countries will collaborate in basic research in such vital fields as metallurgy, ceramics, chemistry and chemical engineering, electronics and lasers.

Among the 18 Indian institutions chosen are the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Bombay), Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), Central Electronics Engineering Research Im~titute (Pilani), Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Bombay), the Naval Chemical and Metallurgical Laboratory (Bombay) and Banaras Hindu University. American institutions include the National Bureau of Standards,

ergy; bacterial leaching of minerals; computer-aided designs of mineral processing techniques; and mineral processing systems with organic reagents, "These are important areas, based on the criteria of mutual benefit and scientific merit," said Dr. A.D. Krantz of the U.S. Department of Energy, who headed the U.S. delegation which included Dr. S.K. Deb from the Solar Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, and Dr. Tapan Mukherjee from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Krantz added, "Already a number of significant projects under the STI in health, monsoon studies and agriculture science are underway, and we hope that all of them will help improve the quality of life not only in India and the United States but all over the world." . In September also, India and the United States signed

Lehigh University, Pennsylvania State University and the Naval Research Laboratory.

In still another area of bilateral cooperation, the IndoU.S. Subcommission on Agriculture, which met in September in Washington, D.C., has chalked out an ambitious program of agricultural research over the next two years. The meeting, which was chaired jointly by Daniel G. Amstutz, Under Secretary for International Affairs and Commodity Programs¡ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and M. Subramanian, Secretary, Agriculture and Cooperation in the Indian Ministry of Agriculture, decided to extend and expand bilateral research in biotechnology, biological control of pests, agrometeorology and germ-plasm resource conservation and management.

It would also aim at the establishment of quality standards for all relevant inputs.

TRIUMPH OF VOLUNTARISM The Peace Corps, brainchild of the then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and President John F. Kennedy, who enVisione? it as an international youth service to provide help to developing nations, is 25 years old this year ..

The American public's response to President Kennedy's call to serve in distant lands, often under conditions of hardship and for low pay, was immediate and enthusiastic. Within less than five years of its creation in October 1960, almost 1,500 Peace Corps volunteers were working overseas.

After a quarter century, the Peace Corps can rightly be proud of its achievements. Although it prefers not to.~uanti!y. its accomplishments, the Peace Corps has educated five mll!lon children; aided in agricultural development; and helped fight tropical diseases all over the world. In the process, more than 200 of its volunteers lost their lives.

As of now, some 126,000 Americans, including former President Jimmy Carter's mother, Lillian Carter, who worked as a nurse near Bombay, have served as Peace Corps volunteers in 93 countries.

Today, the Peace Corps still retains its original vitality and vigor in the service of mankind. Every month, thous~nd~ of Americans volunteer their services to the organization.

However, to reflect the lessons the organization has learned over 25 years, it now chooses volunteers with specific skills needed by host countries. For example, when Peace Corps Director Loret Miller Ruppe went on U.S. television last year to call for 600 agricultural specialists to work in drought-stricken Africa, the Corps was swamped with 20,000 applicants, many with up to 30 years of farming experience. .

In a message to the organization lauding its work, PreSident Ronald Reagan said, "Nowhere has the proud American tradition of voluntarism been better illustrated than through the Peace Corps, which has begun a year-long observance of its 25th anniversary." He added, "Peace Corps volunteers have returned to their communities enriched by the experience, knowing more of the world, its complexities an.d its challeng~s.

They continue to communicate with people In the countries where they served, thereby strengthening the ties of friendship and mutual understanding."

J AN OBOIST'S DREAM Dreams sometimes do come true. That happened with young Pronab Patra, a young aspiring oboe player from Calcutta.

Patra, who began playing the oboe only four years ago with an orchestra in Calcutta, wanted to go to the United States to study the instrument in a music school there, but he had no money. Then Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra visited Calcutta in 1984 as part of the Festival of America ,in India. Patra scraped together Rs. 50 to see their concert.

After the show, he ran across the stage hoping to talk to the troupe's oboist, but was stopped by security guards. Undeterred, Patra called out to a violinist, beseeching him to put him in- touch with the oboist. Touched by his intensity, the violinist obliged, and soon Patra was introduced to Joe Robinson, New York Philharmonic's principal oboist.

Impressed by the young man, Robinson spent two long hours with him in an impromptu lesson. He encouraged Patra to go to America for an intensive study of the instrument.

Robinson did not forget the young Indian after he left Calcutta, and was determined to find a way to help a fellow oboist. By trading favors, he raised a tidy sum of money from the New York Philharmonic to acquire a new oboe and a library of music for Patra. Robinson also arranged to have 22 oboe reeds spe-

cially made for him and provided for private lessons twice a week. Finally, through the courtesy of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture, he arranged for Patra's air ticket to the United States. Robinson then promised to fully pay for Patra's tuition and to provide the oboist with some pocket money. Robinson refers to his efforts as "the international reed cross."

Patra flew from India to Washington, D.C., and on to the first part of his intensive training at the John Mack Oboe Camp at Wildacres in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. Later, he joined the Brevard Music Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Referring to his first meeting with Patra in Calcutta, Robinson says, "His skills were elementary and so undeveloped. Yet he showed signs of talent in terms of music affinity and melody.

And I wanted to help him reach his potential."

And of that meeting in Calcutta Patra says, "At that time I thought he was just being nice. There was no way of my going to the United States ever. I had no money and I did not know anyone who could help me. Going to America, I thought then, would remain ever a dream. I am indeed grateful to Mr. Robinson."

Upon his return home after he completes his training in the United States, Patra's goal is clear: "I have to be a good oboist for my country." He also hopes to "share the oboe's uniqueness with the youth of Calcutta, who are more interested in playing the guitar, accordion or drums.

The oboe is a very beautiful instrument. It can produce sweet, romantic or sad music of great intensity."

At the Crocodile Bank in Kovalam, south Madras, some 1,500 crocs (right, top) live and propagate their species (top) without fear of poachers, secure in the thought that in sickness and adversity they will be taken care of by theirfriend Romulus Whitaker and his men (above). At right, Whitaker initiates his little son to the world of crocs.

Crocs in the Backyard His fascination and love for reptiles brought 12-year-old Romulus Whitaker to India in 1951. Today a naturalized Indian, Whitaker, who runs a serpentarium and a crocodile bank in Madras, is a world-famous herpetologist.

What would you do if a little boy in your family was hung up on snakes, and brought them home casually as he would a dog or a cat? What would your reaction be if you opened a drawer and found a few creepy crawly things worming their way toward you? Probably a scream. "And frighten the poor little things out of their wits," I could almost hear Romulus Whitaker say. Whitaker, who carried snakes in his pockets, and one inside his shirt, ever since he can remember, shrugs it off as genetic coding.

"This affinity for reptiles is in my blood," he says with feeling.

In Hoosick, New York, the Whitakers tolerated their young son's craze for fang and claw, and were prepared to jump out of their skins once in a while, with surprises that young Rom would spring on them. "If his mother was not so supportive and encouraging, Rom might never have got to where he is today," says Zai Whitaker, Rom's Indian wife.

Young Whitaker came to India with his mother in 1951 and joined the High Clerc School at Kodaikanal. But the school could not deter him from pursuing his favorite pastime-catching snakes. He caught his first python and cobra when he was only 12, and soon had a first-rate collection of native snakes. His fascination and passion for these creatures was so great that once he made his mother, apprehensive and afraid as she was, take him to the Chamrajanagar Western Ghats of Karnataka. Then, armed with the barest of necessities-a knapsack and some

food-he disappeared into the wild all by himself and did not get in touch with his mother again for more than two months. He had been exploring the woods, working with the Mysore Zoo and with taxidermists for his living. "I was always roaming the jungles," he recalls. "They rarely saw me around the school."

After graduation Whitaker returned to the United States to enter college. But the zoology department at the University of Wyoming where he enrolled did not interest him as it did not share his passion for snakes. He soon left it to join the Merchant Marine, hoping to work his way back to India as a deckhand. However, that was not to be. So he quit the sea for snakes in 1962, finding a job at the Miami Serpentarium, run by the famed herpetologist William Haast. For the first time, Whitaker, working with someone who spoke the same kind of language that he did, felt a sense of fulfillment. The experience he gained at the serpentarium was invaluable. "Bill Haast was like a god to me," he recalls. "I cleaned the snake pits, guided tourists, helped with venom extraction, fed the snakes. The pay was nothing, but I developed my professional interest under him."

Whitaker left his Miami job in 1964 to join the U.S. Army as a medical lab technician. He finally returned to India after completing his military service in 1967. He spent almost two years in Bombay, then went to Madras where he realized his dream to set up a snake farm. "I spent nine years in school in Tamil Nadu as a child, and if you're brought up somewhere you really like it," Whitaker says. The Snake Park at Guindy, set up with financial help from the World Wildlife Fund, is run by a private trust of which Whitaker is director. Spread over a half-hectare plot of land allotted by the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, the park houses about 1,400 reptiles of 30 different species, with new additions arriving every month. Over a million visitors flock to the Snake Park each year to see the inhabitants, which include poisonous

varieties like the Russell's viper, the Krait and the saw-scaled viper. An interesting facet of the park for any visitor is the hatching of king cobra eggs; this is the first time cobras have ever bred in captivity.

In 1974, Romulus Whitaker married Zaheda Futehally, daughter of the wellknown conservationist Zafar Futehally. Zai, as she is known to her friends, was working with the World Wildlife Fund when she met Rom and, with their mutual love of animals and wildlife, their eventual union was almost foretold. The same year the Whitakers established a park for crocodiles, which were in danger of extinction. There were no more than 100 gharial, 2,000-3,000 mugger, and 200 saltwater crocodiles in India. Zai had set her heart on establishing their own crocodile bank but it hardly seemed feasible with their meager resources. However, she realized her dream when her father gave a tidy sum of money to the young couple as a wedding gift. The Whitakers purchased a three-hectare plot of land near Kovalam in south Madras, and a private trust was formed with Whitaker as honorary director.

The trust bought most of the land from them, with the Whitakers retaining a portion on which to build a house for themselves.

Built on stilts, the pretty little house nestles in an .extreme corner of the Crocodile Bank away from the glare of publicity and prying visitors. Three country dogs guard the Whitaker domain. In the open sandy backyard play their two small sons, Nikhil and Sameer, away from the claustrophobic confines of modern city houses.

The blue sea, their backdrop, is hardly a hundred meters away, and the two brothers learn how to handle the baby crocs, the turtles, and even some harmless varieties of snakes.

With his formidable reputation of catching cobras bare handed, Whitaker is a source of amazement to friends and strangers alike. The extreme conditions of weather in India hardly bother him. He walks barefoot around his Crocodile Bank,

oblivious to the scorching sand and stone, more concerned about the welfare of his beloved reptiles. A naturalized Indian now, Whitaker is an internationally acclaimed herpetologist. He has presented about 25 papers on crocodiles, and has been invited by the United Nations to visit Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Sabah and East Malaysia to assist these countries with crocodile surveys and farming. A member of the Tamil Nadu Wildlife Advisory Board, Whitaker is chairman of the Snake Specialists Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Crocodiles, the nearest living relatives of the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic age of a 100 million years ago, are high on the endangered list. This sorry projection is primarily owing to the greed of a few who kill these helpless creatures for their skin which is in great demand. According to Whitaker, a one-meter three-year-old croc fetches $100 in the international market; the figure is based on Papua New Guinea crocodile exports to France and Japan. In India, there is a market for more than just skins.

Crocodile gall bladders are believed to yield aphrodisiacs, their fat is thought to be good for rheumatism and their meat, a cure for tuberculosis. It is not surprising then that only 2 percent of hatching crocs reach adulthood in this country.

A river with predators constitutes a healthy ecological system, playing the important role of scavengers in the wild. For instance, the gharial crocodiles feed on injured or diseased fish and eat a large number of predatory fish, which otherwise would eat the young of commercially viable species.

With the ban on crocodile killing since 1972, the sale of skins has plumetted. Under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act, a thorough and effective protection has been made possible for the crocodile. Schedule I of the Act, under which three Indian species are listed, prohibits killing, trapping, transporting, or being in the possession of a crocodile or its products without a special permit. Any violation of this law can attract a penalty of up to six months' imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 2,000.

All three varieties of Indian crocs are found in the Crocodile Bank in Madrasthe mugger or marsh crocodile (crocodylus palustris), the saltwater or estuarine crocodile (crocodylus porosus) and the gharial (gavialis gangetious). The marsh crocodile is friendly by nature and not too fussy about its habitat. It can be found even 1,000

meters above the Himalayan foothills and it adapts itself to rivers, jungle ponds and even man-made reservoirs, if left undisturbed.

The mugger is easiest to breed and rarely becomes a man eater. It grows to about six meters in length.

The gharial, with its distinctive features of a long thin snout, and popping eyes and nostrils, is the sole surviving member of the Gavialiadae, but is on the verge of extinction. It is found in fast-flowing rivers and coastal mangrove swamps of north India.

"India is in the forefront of conservation of nature, and not nearly enough is done, even though we have the resources and the manpower," says Whitaker. His Crocodile

The Whitakers gave themselves the gift they most treasured-a crocodile bank-with the money Zaheda's father gave them as a wedding present.

temperature-related phenomena. Another fascinating finding on which more research is being done indicates that when the temperature is kept higher during incubation, more females than males are born.

Further experiments have shown that the eggs on top hatch out to be male crocs, while the ones below are females.

Turtles, which until recently were ignored, also get an important niche at the Crocodile Bank. It has 20 of the 30 species found in India. Dr. Ed Moll, chairman of the Fresh Water Group from West Illinois University, revealed a new side of herpetology. Sea turtles were slaughtered in large numbers in West Bengal. Three species of turtles were rediscovered in the last 12 months, thanks to the field work done by researchers from the Crocodile Bank. They are: the Cane turtle, which was not mentioned since 1912; the Batagor, not seen since 1800; and the Leiths soft-shell turtle, weighing 40 kilograms, not reported since 1924. With the new status it has received at the Crocodile Bank, it is hoped the turtle will be lifted well above the danger level.

The Whitakers have also been in the vanguard of forming a welfare cooperative for the Irulas. Because of the ban on sale of snake skin, these tribal people, excellent snake catchers who depended on this tradel for their livelihood, were faced with an uncertain future. Whitaker established the Irulas' Cooperative, teaching them scientific methods for extracting venom necessary for making snake-bite serum. The snakes are made to spit into glass tumblers and the liquid is dried and sold. A gram fetches about $55. Considering that a large number of people in India die from snake bite every year, this contribution is invaluable in taking the sting out of the bite.

By any count, Whitaker is not only a savior of these lowly, helpless creatures, but has been instrumental in creating an awareness among the people about them.

However, when asked about his contributions to the cause of reptiles, Whitaker is reticent. He merely gives one of his characteristic shrugs, and, sweeping his little son off the ground walks away with his workers who follow him for the day's instructions. I gaze at his retreating form and hope that the new generation will be as dedicated. D

Bank, about five kilometers from Madras, is the only one of its kind in the world. An important aspect at the Bank is the research that it does on reptiles in the form of surveys to pinpoint locations of the species, biological studies, documentation and dealing with such commercial aspects as how to breed them rapidly.

The 1,500 crocodiles in the Bank (in addition to the three common Indian species, there are caymen from Italy, alligators from the United States and Siamese crocs from the New York Zoological Society) are placed in different pens, and ideal conditions are created to facilitate breeding.

Experiments and studies are continually conducted on habits and responses of the crocs in cultivated atmosphere.

The findings related to crocodile studies have been particularly exciting and useful.

For the first time in the world, a doubleclutching phenomenon was witnessed at the Crocodile Bank recently. The average age of maturity of a mugger is 7-8 years, but the muggers at the Bank have created new world records. A 5-year-old mugger lays 10 eggs, and nests twice instead of once, with the result that the Bank has 17 mugger nests this year. High temperature and good About the Author: Sabita Radhakrishna is the food are ideal for prolific nesting.

Madras correspondent of Eve's Weekly and a Currently the Whitakers are collaborat- free-lance writer. A textile designer by profession, ing with Dr. Jeff Lang from North Dakota she also writes, scripts and directs television and on their research work on various aspects of radio programs.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

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"He's not what you'd call a purebred dog, but he has impeccable taste." Š

"That's him! That's the one! I'd recoKnize that silly little hat anywhere!"

1985 by National Review, Inc .. 150 E. 35th Street. New York, New York 110016. Reprinted with permission.

The Productivity Factor A leading economist explains why the prospects are encouraging for a resumption in growth of productivity, based on demographic changes and a sharp decrease in the rate of inflation.

Richard Riecken: Professor Kendrick, the U.S. productivity rate has been increasing again, after stagnating and even falling in recent years. How much of this upturn reflects the strong recovery of the U.S. economy from recession, in your view?

John Kendrick: I think that about half of the nearly 3 percent increase in productivity that has occurred over the last year and a quarter reflects increases in industrial capacity utilization stemming from the recovery and improved technology.

rules, it offsets the impact of increasing wage rates.

For example, in 1983 U.S. wage rates went up 4.8 percent, while productivity went up 2.8 percent. The 2 percent difference is the increase in labor costs per unit of output. The increasing productivity has helped to keep cost increases down, as have the more moderate rates of increase in wage rates.

Nominal wage-rate increases are now about half what they were three years ago.

Do recent forecasts of planned increases in capital spending by major American industrial companies bode well for future productivity increases?

Indeed they do. Two important surveys indicated at least a 12 percent increase in real plant and equipment spending during 1984 over 1983. That is more than one usually expects at this phase of recovery. The increase in real capital goods per worker is a significant part of productivity increases. Equipment and plant are also carriers of technological progress.

In general, are you confident that the United States is entering an era when higher productivity rates can be expected to occur regularly, or is this too optimistic?

I think that following the slowdown in productivity of the last decade, some of the negative forces are being reversed, while various measures have been taken that will positively contribute to stronger productivity growth.

During the 1970s, we had a big upward surge in the percentage of youth in the labor force. These workers are now growing older and entering the prime working age, which is a, positive factor. Also in the last decade, there was an influx of unskilled, low-productivity workers from agriculture to industry who had to be trained. Those shifts have largely ended.

The cost increases to business resulting from regulations that mandated cleaner air and water and improved health and safety conditions in the workplace during the 1970s probably reduced productivity growth by 10 percent. Now that some of these regulations are being rationalized and reduced, a negative force is being lifted.

Finally, I think that the role of the government has been more constructive. The Federal Government has recognized that we need to do things to reverse the productivity slowdown, and it has taken steps to reduce inflation. This has helped to stimulate business investment.

In addition to cyclical factors, what reasons are there for the recent upturn in productivity?

There are basic long-run forces behind technological progress that reduce costs per unit of output, which is'the opposite side of the productivity coin. Research and development (R&D) spending has been going up strongly. Also, the Reagan Administration has tried to reduce regulations, which has led to increased competition and helped to level out the compliance costs per unit of output.

The lowering of inflation since 1981 has been a very positive force. The price level has been going up by around 4 percent on average at an annual rate, which is much more favorable to investment and productivity growth than the previous doubledigit rate.

Higher capacity utilization is a cyclical factor, but with that comes higher profits. With the greater volume, business is spreading overhead over more outputs, bringing profits back to what they were-or even higher than-before the recession.

Higher profits are both a stimulus to new investment and a source of funds. Retained corporate profits can be plowed back into new plants and equipment. And the increase in investment is related to the recovery of industrial profitability.

Some American industrial trade unions have been accepting pay cuts or revised work practices calling for greater output efforts. How do you assess the importance of these events?

They are important in helping to bring down inflation. To the extent that unions are willing to cooperate with management in raising productivity in order to help the nation's competitive position in world markets, by removing some restrictive work

Would steady increases in productivity defuse some of the protectionist sentiment that has arisen in the United States?

Yes. There is no doubt that recovery in productivity and in real GNP (gross national product) should help to defuse some of the protectionist sentiment. Because the durable goods industries such as steel and autos are especially hard hit in a recession, there is always a cry for increased protection. As American economy continues its recovery, as world trade recovers and our exports recover, there should be less political pressure for protection. But we must live with the fact that there are always some industries that do less well than others and shrink in size while others expand. That is part of the competitive system.

The best measure of productivity is a ratio of outputs in physical volume terms to all of the associated inputs in physical terms. Labor is the most important cost of production, and we usually measure labor input in terms of labor hours worked. We look at the real phenomena-physical volume of output in tons of steel, for example, and at physical inputs in terms of hours of labor, hectares of land used for agricultural or mineral production, and real capital inputs, by which we mean plant-hours or machine-hours or equipment-hours.

We relate output to all of these inputs in order to see what the net savings has been in real costs per unit of output. Normally, there is a net gain in labor saving when equipment is substituted and labor can be shifted to other kinds of production in order to provide a larger total production.

The most important element in cost saving is technological advance, particularly that which cuts costs. The other form of technological advance is new and improved products.

You increase efficiency more in the early stages of production, when you are learning how to produce new goods. So development of new products helps to keep productivity going up rapidly.

To get technological advance, you.need a more educated work force, which means training scientists, engineers and business managers. On average, Americans are becoming better educated nowadays. Schools of business administration are turning out more and more trained business executives. And the average American has had a year or so of either college or technical school training beyond high school.

Education and training are what we call intangible investments. In addition, we have factors such as health and mobility.

People move from a lower-paying job to a higher-paying job, perhaps moving from one part of the country to another. This helps increase productivity because technology shifts the location of industry as well as its efficiency.

There has been a prominently expressed view that after the first oil-price shock, higher energy prices forced U. S. firms to substitute labor for capital, which caused productivity to decline.

What is your view?

The greatly increased energy prices because of the 1973 oil shock contributed to acceleration of inflation. This was bad for the economy because businesspersons and even consumers had to spend more time figuring out how to overcome the negative effects of rising prices. Moreover, rising inflation tended to reduce real profit-the rate of return-on new investment because depreciation allowances on equipment were not adequate when based on the original cost of the equipment.

Since 1979, the real price of petroleum has declined, so this element is now being reversed. But I think it did contribute to the slowdown in productivity in the latter 1970s.

Did the entry of massive numbers of unskilled young workers who were part of the post-World War II "baby boom" generation, as well as the entry of women to the work force-seeking jobs for the first time-affect productivity over the last decade?

Yes. It takes years to become skilled in a particular trade or profession, and young people, despite their great energy, need time to gain experience. The youth bulge in the U.S. labor force reduced average experience and therefore average productivity, as did the significant increase in the female proportion of the labor force. Many of these women had interrupted their

careers for childbearing or childrearing and thus had less experience than men. As young people and women gain more experience, this should have a positive effect on productivity.

Would you explain why productivity growth rates are important to workers, businesses and governments worldwide?

In order to consume more, we have to produce more. And in order to raise real income per capita, we have to increase production per capita.

The growth of labor, capital and land inputs has not been greater than the growth of the population.

Therefore, the increase in output per unit of input, or productivity, has been the main factor behind rising real incomes per capita . . Differences in productivity growth by industry-which are considerable-also affect 'economic structure in that they affect the allocation of workers among industries. For example, the number of people in agriculture has fallen because of productivity increases in farming. The percentage of the labor force in the service industries is rising, partly because productivity had been growing less rapidly in services, but also because growth in real income has increased demand for services. So productivity affects both the total economy and its composition.

What is your current short-term forecast for the U. S. economy and for the productivity growth rate? What key immediate factors have the major impact on your thinking?

In 1985, the increase in real GNP probably will be about 4 percent, in which case I think productivity growth will slow down to around 2 percent or so. But that is respectable.

The factor that is stimulating the growth 9f demand generally, as reflected in real GNP, is the fact that inventories are still quite lean. Business has to build up its stockpiles of raw materials, processed goods and even finished goods, and that increases demand for production.

Also, we have fairly stable governmental expenditures and very strong private investment.

Finally, I think U. S. exports will be doing better in the year ahead as the recovery becomes stronger in other countries. The United States has been the engine of recovery since the beginning of 1983. Now I think we will see stronger growth of output in the Federal Republic of Germany, Britain, Japan and many of the other major countries, as well as in the less developed countries (LDCs), because the developed countries will provide larger markets for their raw materials outputs.

What impact will increased "participatory ownership" of businesses by employees in the United States have on the economy and productivity?

With the productivity slowdown, the managements of American companies increasingly have tried to involve workers in making suggestions for improving efficiency; after all, nobody knows his or her own job better than the individual.

There has been a shift in management style in industry from the authoritarian chain of command to a more participative model that includes lower levels of management and workers generally in decisionmaking.

Of course, somebody still has to make the ultimate decisions, and this responsibility rests with top management.

Nevertheless, there has been an increase in joint labor/management productivity committees and in various kinds of financial incentives for workers, including employee stock ownership and profit sharing.

Are there major structural changes-not necessarily directly related to productivity-occurring in the U.S. economy that need to be reviewed and considered by analysts worldwide, as well as in the United States?

Yes. Some of these, such as the shift to services, are quite well known. A more dramatic change has been the increase in the importance of foreign trade to the United States over recent years. Foreign trade used to account for about 10 percent of GNP; it is now double that.

Still other changes include demographic shifts. In the years ahead, particularly 1990 and beyond, the United States can expect to experience a slowing in the growth of the labor force and employment. We will have further increases in the number of women in the labor force. We will have an older population, as well as a better educated one, which affects lifestyles and consumer demand.

How will worldwide competition be influenced by changes in the levels and the percentage growth rate of productivity in the United States and the world? Would you review some worldwide changes that are taking place and identify specific governmental actions that aid or -hinder productivity growth?

Obviously, the stronger growth of productivity and real GNP in the United States and other countries is going to increase international trade and investment. Beyond that, it will increase the real incomes of almost all the people in the world.

One thing that has been extremely important over the last 25 years has been the catching up of other countries with the United States technologically-.-.:...thegreater development of formerly underdeveloped countries. Recent studies have shown improvements in real income per capita in most countries, and only about 5 percent of the world population now lives in stagnant economies where real income has not grown or has fallen.

We have also seen a great increase in the scope of multinational corporations. These companies have been a great carrier of technological progress; they have brought capital and technical and management know-how into the countries where they operate. Also, many countries now require joint ownership of a company's subsidiary that is operating within its borders. I think these jointly owned companies are helping in the development process, and they can be more responsive, perhaps, to local needs and demands than purely foreign operations would be. There has also been a tremendous flow of capital, both government and private, into the less developed areas, and this has helped in the development of these countries.

Governmental actions that have hindered productivity growth include trade restrictions and, sometimes, restrictions and controls on capital movements. Nationalization of companies often creates problems in securing efficient management.

But protectionism is perhaps the most serious obstacle to John Kendrick is professor of economics at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has been a member of the President's Task Force on Economic Growth (1969) and chief economist for the U.S. Department of Commerce (1976-77).

Richard Riecken is senior editor of Economic Impact.

development of the international division of labor. Almost all countries protect their own agriculture, and many have tried to build up a basic iron and steel industry through protection, ,which has led to overcapacity in this industry. It would be better if countries responded more to market forces in their economic decisionmaking.

Are there any special factors that influence productivity in developing countries more so than in developed countries? What should the less developed countries consider in order to increase their productivity and overall economic growth?

The particular problem of the less developed countries usually has been inadequate saving and investment, so that these countries have had to encourage foreign investment to supplement their own sources of funds and encourage development. However, this capital is not of much value unless the local population is getting the necessary training and education to use it constructively. You have certain basic requirements for education and for infrastructure before you can really go very far in industrial development.

Tariffs and protective markets possibly can help the LDCs develop certain industries. But it is important to lower these barriers after the industries become competitive, both to help efficiency and help keep internal prices down.

Also, the tendency in LDCs toward import substitution-to particularly favor industries that are producing goods that otherwise would have been imported-tends to create negarive trade balances and reduce the inflow of capital, which leads to financial problems. Some of the more successful developing countries have found it beneficial instead to encourage exportoriented industries that bring in foreign exchange and capital.

What is government's role in aiding productivity growth?

I think the most important roles for government are to create a stable framework for operation of the enterprise system, to harness the desire of individuals to improve their own economic status and productivity by providing a safe environment for investment and work, and to pursue generally predictable policies and not unduly hamper enterprise by high taxes or taxes that discourage savings and investment.

What shifts in trade, investment, capital or loans, management, technology transfers and other factors do you see in the next 10-15 years as a result of productivity improvements in the United States and the rest of the world?

As I mentioned earlier, I think we are moving toward a more affluent world-one in which there are fewer disparities between richer nations and poorer nations. I see technology transfer as being particularly important in this regard. In addition to transferring technology through multinational firms, the United States has been licensing patents to foreign firms, exporting capital goods and helping in the education of engineers, managers and scientists in other countries. American efforts to spread advanced technology should contribute to a far more productive world economy in the 21st century.

One additional element that should be highlighted is the inventor, the innovator, need to nurture the entrepreneur-the the businessperson who takes risks on new products and new cost-reducing processes. Encouraging a spirit of risk-taking and of innovation is essential for progress.

'0

concert already knew-that these young men can sing. Notes choir member Bryan Leach, "Sometimes people think they can't sing. I thought I couldn't. But Turnbull showed me I could. He says he could teach a door knob how to sing and I think he could."

Whether doing Vivaldi's Gloria, a Bach cantata, Pergolesi's The Magnificat, Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, Duke Ellington's Take the 'A' Train, Billy Taylor's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free, Thomas Dorsey's Precious Lord, or Lee Cooper's and Linda Twine's We Are Heroes, the choir shows over and over again why music lovers across the country flock to their concerts.

We Are Heroes ("Black boys are born of heroes, ancient heroes, biblical heroes, historical heroes, present-day heroes, explorers, scientists, navigators and such, all Black boys are born of heroes ... "), now almost their signature song, inspired their motto: "As a member in good standing of the Boys Choir of Harlem, I am a hero. Heroes are winners. They develop and protect their talent. They work hard in school. They help each other. Heroes are the future."

The youngsters in the Boys Choir of Harlem have a future because of a prOductive past. Founded in 1968 by Walter Turnbull and Ruth Nixon as the Ephesus Boys Choir, a program at the Ephesus Seventh Day Adventist Church in Harlem, the choir initially performed to large, appreciative and enthusiastic audiences throughout the New York City metropolitan area. "We founded it," says Turnbull, "because we strongly believed that Harlem boys would get pleasure from singing and because we were convinced that it would provide an educational and creative outlet for the broadening of the children's aesthetic perceptions. We were also motivated by a love of children."

Since being incorporated as the Boys Choir of Harlem in 1975, the group has steadily progressed from being "a good idea" to becoming a bustling arts institution with a comprehensive training program. Sixty percent of the choir's funds, according to managing director Don Grant, come from public (government)

sources. The rest is raised from private donations and earned income from ticket and product sales. Besides the choir, components of the program include counseling, tutoring and recreational services designed to develop the youngsters socially, academically and physically. It also includes a summer camp with an intensive musical traming program.

To become and remain a member of the choir, a boy must be committed, since the competition is tough and Turnbull, as the street saying goes, "don't play no games." On the walls of his office is a sign declaring, "It's difficult to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys."

Turkeys don't last long with the Boys Choir of Harlem.

Once accepted into the choir, a boy must have the active participation of at least one of his parents or guardians, maintain at least a "c" grade in all school subjects, attend three after-school rehearsals weekly in addition to extra rehearsals and live up to the choir's motto.

Does this regimen create little robots who burst out in song at the wave of a conductor's wand? The answer is an emphatic "No." Like most other 10- to 17-year-olds, the choir members will jive around if given half a chance. Ernie McClintock, who directs their very popular "Jazz and Gospel Revue," was overheard saying at one performance: "Look at them up there singing and acting like little angels. During rehearsal I was ready to strangle at least ten of them." And Turnbull, knowing the problems that can result from inflated egos and how competitive the boys are with each other, makes sure that "none of them thinks he is irreplaceable."

The lyrics from one of the songs in their repertoire best describe the members of the choir: "We are children of the sun," they sing exuberantly, "full of energy and fun .... Sun children have spirit; Sun children have soul; Sun children are ambitious; Sun children have goals; Sun children will make-the world a better place .... There's no end to what we can do. Teach us; help us; see us through. Sun children are strong; Sun children are loud; Sun children are bold; Sun children are proud."

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Apart from giving the boys a chance to sing, the Boys Choir of Harlem also offers free courses in piano and handbeU-ringing.

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The scientific method, says the author, must be used to derive the correct conclusions from observed phenomena. The danger of ignoring the method would mean perpetuating old wives' tales.

emp plants grow on the planet Jupiter.

Nutmeg is good for brain diseases. Flies, insects and other forms of life are created spontaneously by decaying meat.

Each of these totally incorrect statements was once held as truth by learned people, including scientists. And each was basec\, not on superstition and ignorance, but on reason and observation.

When Galileo discovered in the 17th century that Jupiter possessed four moons, the great mathematician and physicist Christian Huygens applied his reasoning power to the question of "Why four instead of one?" He asked himself, "What is the purpose of a moon?" Well, the "purpose" of Earth's moon was to help sailors navigate. If a planet has four moons it must therefore have a lot of sailors. Sailors mean boats. Boats mean sails. And sails mean ropes. Ropes are made of hemp.

Therefore, it is obvious that Jupiter must have many hempproducing plants.

As for nutmeg, its convoluted surface resembles the surface of the brain. According to once-respected principle of drug therapy called "the doctrine of signatures," a thoughtful Creator had provided clues to help treat disease. For example, since the leaves of the cyclamen plant roughly resemble the human ear, they should be used for ear afflictions. By the same token, the nutmeg, given its cerebral shape, was the obvious drug of choice for brain disorders.

When the Voyager 1 and 2 satellites raced past Jupiter in 1979, the number of moons detected around that planet had risen to 14, but no one talked about hemp. And today we know that nutmeg has no therapeutic value (although if consumed in large amounts it can severely damage the liver).

The conclusions once accepted about nutmeg and the brain and hemp on Jupiter have something in common. They were derived by a reasoning process that involved "seeing through the intellect" to discern what something is "for" or what "should be," rather than "seeing through the eyes" to determine what something actually is. This process of finding out what something actually is we call the scientific method.

Indeed, science itself is, simply put, a way to discover evidence, a way that includes an objective, logical and systematic method of analysis.

But even the best methods can be improperly used. One of the best examples of both the proper and improper use of the scientific method involved an attempt to settle, once and for all, the question of whether living things could spring

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up from nonliving matter~ spontaneous generation.

Belief in spontaneous generation was founded on observationinaccurate observation.

People saw that certain lower forms of life appeared in water, soil and decaying organic substanc6s of many kinds.

Soon it was accepted as truth that worms and caterpillars came from dew on cabbage leaves, houseflies from wet wood, moths from woolen garments, anchovies from sea foam and mice from river mud. Certain substances seemed to be potent producers of life, such as rotting wood, animal hair, stagnant water, paper and the carcasses of animals.

By the 1800s, skepticism regarding spontaneous generation was growing among a few scientists, particularly since invention of the microscope had revealed the existence of bacteria. By mid-19th century some biologists had concluded that spontaneous generation was nonsense and were ready to prove it.

Foremost among the skeptics was Louis Pasteur. He was challenged by another eminent scientist, F.A. Pouchet. Both Pasteur and Pouchet conducted experiments.

Both used scientific methods and scientific apparatus.

Pouchet's tests with various substances "proved" that life sprang up spontaneously; Pasteur's proved the opposite. How could this be possible?

Well, Pasteur completely sterilized all his materials in boiling water; Pouchet did not. Pouchet's experimental apparatus could not prevent microorganisms and dust particles in the air from reaching the experimental substance, while Pasteur succeeded in devising an apparatus that excluded air. The point is, both were using the scientific method of experimentation, observation and logic-but one used it correctly and the other did not. Pasteur produced evidence; Pouchet produced nonsense disguised as evidence.

Using the scientific method correctly, so that it yields evidence and not nonsense, always poses a challenge to researchers conducting an investigation, particularly when higher forms of life are being studied. Sometimes, even modern scientists fail the challenge. Today, as in Pasteur's day, constant vigilance and extraordinary effort are required to produce a scientifically valid result from an experiment.

Thus, when the National Center for Toxicological Research of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducts an experiment to see if a certain chemical causes cancer in mice, extraordinary efforts are made to make sure that whatever ill effects the mice exhibit are the result of just one thing-the specific chemical being tested-and nothing else, such as genetic predisposition of the test animals, or pollutants in the air, or contact with the

animal handlers. To eliminate these variables, both the mice that receive the chemical (the experimental group) and the mice that do not (the control group) are genetically similar; the environment of both groups is carefully controlled-incoming air is filtered, temperature $lnd humidity are constantly monitored, lights for both groups go on and off at the same time each day. Um;pntaminated equipment, bedding and water are the same for both groups. Even the "interior environment" of the animals is scrutinized, with tests for 33 parasites, 20 types of bacteria, 13 fungi and 13 viruses. If any of these intruders are found, the affected mice are eliminated from the study.

Scientists working with the mice undergo a complete physical examination, wear sterilized clothing and engage in the equivalent of a surgical scrub before contact with the animals.

The effort to find just one thing, by excluding any other variables, also includes the chemical being tested. Extreme care is taken so that the animal feed and the test chemical mixed with it are pure and uniform. Finally, the animals are sacrificed at specified intervals, during which observations of a total of 48 organ and tissue samples are made.

It is obvious that finding evidence rather than nonsense is extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, even when the study only involves small laboratory animals. When the study involves humans the difficulty is greatly compounded.

First, while humans are involved in various experiments, such as in the final phases of testing new medicines, there are-and must be-strict limits on the kinds of experiments and the conditions under which they can be carried out. These conditions are expressed in international codes, specifically those of the 18th World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which were revised and expanded in 1975 by the 29th World Declaration of Tokyo. To meet these standards, medical institutions that receive federal research funds must set up special committees of scientists and laymen to approve any human experiment. And, in the United States, proposed experiments that involve a new drug or a medical device with a significant risk must first gain approval of the FDA. Such safeguards protect the subjects in the experiments but often make the research more difficult to carry out.

Second, it is impossible to design human experiments with the same restrictions employed for animal experiments. For example, we cannot obtain the kind of detailed knowledge about human genetic history that is routinely available for various laboratory animals, so genetic variation is largely an unknown. Further, we cannot isolate humans in a controlled laboratory setting for lengthy periods to eliminate environmental variables. This does not mean that the search for evidence is impossible with humans, only that this kind of search is extremely difficult.

To overcome these obstacles while adhering to the scientific method, several techniques have evolved, some of which provide more compelling evidence than others that the particular variable-the one thing being sought or tested-act4ally caused the observed effect. The highest quality of evidence comes from a properly conducted clinical trial. Just as with the mice in the cancer study, this form of experiment involves two groups: the test or experimental group, which receives the new drug or whatever it is that is being tested, and the control group, which does not. To ensure maximum similarity, members of both groups are randomly chosen from the same pool of

candidates. Since, unlike laboratory animals, the behavior of human subjects can be affected by knowledge about the nature of the experiment, it is necessary to give the control group a placebo, a substance not known to be effective in dealing with the condition being observed yet superficially similar in every way to that being given the experimental group. (There is one exception: testing a new drug on patients already seriously ill.

In such cases it is ethically impermissible to use a placebo that has no therapeutic action. In such cases a "control" drug-one that is not experimental and whose effects are known and measurable-is used instead of a placebo.) In addition to using a placebo, it is also necessary that not only the participants but also those measuring the effect of the test not know (are blind to) who is in the experimental group and who are the controls.

This is the so-called "double blind" clinical trial.

An example of proper use of a clinical trial to establish the effect of a single variable was a study to see if lowering cholesterol intake reduced the risk of coronary heart disease in men between 35 and 59 who already had high cholesterol levels.

Some 480,000 men volunteered for the program, of whom 3,810 were chosen. To ensure only one variable was involved, all

Many of the greatest scientific advances have resulted in overturning what had been accepted as fact-for example, that life does not spring up spontaneously, that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

VOlunteers who had other health problems, such as a history of angina or abnormal electrocardiograms, were not allowed to participate. Individuals were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. For an average of 7.4 years, the experimental group received a cholesterol-reducing drug (cholestyramine), while the control group received a placebo dispensed in an identical packet. Both groups followed a moderately low-cholesterol diet. Participants visited clinics every two months to receive new supplies of the medication (or placebo) and to take various tests. At the end of the study, those receiving the medication had significantly lower cholesterol levels and suffered 24 percent fewer deaths from coronary heart disease and 19 percent fewer nonfatal heart attacks compared to the control group.

What is the one thing found in this careful and extensive clinical trial? That reducing cholesterol lowers the risk of coronary heart disease? No. The test included only middle-aged men. That a low-cholesterol diet lowers the risk of coronary heart disease in middle-aged men? No. Only that the drug and the diet together lowered the rate of coronary heart disease. To find out the effect of diet alone on middle-aged males, another study would have to be conducted in which the experimental group followed a low-cholesterol diet and the control group did not. (This would not only be very difficult to do, it would raise serious ethical questions as well.)

Where clinical trials are not practical, there are other way,S to employ the scientific method, such as the cohort study, the cross-sectional survey and the case-control study. In cohort studies-which look forward in time-a group of people is observed over a long period, perhaps many years, to see what

habits or characteristics affect their health. Cohort studies have been used, for example, to study the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

The cross-sectional survey-which, like a snapshot, "freezes" a specific moment in time-aims at finding the same kind of relationships that might be shown by the "moving picture" of the cohort study, but at far less cost. In a cross-sectional survey, a specific group is looked at to see if a substance or activity, say smoking, is related to the health effect being investigated-for example, lung cancer. If a significantly greater number of smokers already have lung cancer than those who don't smoke, this would support the hypothesis that lung cancer is caused by smoking.

While the cohort study looks forward, and the crosssectional survey looks at the present, the case-control study looks backward, comparing the characteristics of one group (such as those with lung cancer) with another group (those who do not have lung cancer) to see if there are differences (such as smoking habits).

Since it is impossible to say with total certainty that just one' thing has been uncovered, the evidence found in these kinds of studies is generally less strong than that from more wellcontrolled experiments such as clinical trials. It is not possible to say the evidence is absolute proof that a substance or activity causes a certain effect. It is only possible to say that certain health effects are associated with the substance or activity under study. Sometimes this association is so strong that the hypothesis is considered proven.

As with Pasteur's and Pouchet's experiments concerning spontaneous generation, all of these types of studies can be done well (and thus produce some form of scientific evidence) or done poorly, in which case we have nonsense rather than evidence. Too often what is hailed in press or TV reports as the latest "scientific fact" turns out not to be fact at all, but rather the result of an error in applying the scientific method.

A recent example concerns a study done at Oregon Health Sciences University by Dr. David McCarren and others and published last year in Science magazine. The study concluded that low calcium intake was associated with high blood pressure and that, contrary to what was commonly believed, high sodium intake was associated not with high blood pressure but rather with lower blood pressure.

Many of the greatest scientific advances have resulted in overturning what had been accepted as fact-for example, that life does not spring up spontaneously from dung heaps and that the Earth is not the center of the universe. So the fact that this scientific test overturned a commonly accepted view could have been in the great tradition of science in which there are no final facts, only tentative ones always open to challenge and revision as new knowledge arises. An important question, however, was: How was the test conducted? Did it in fact find, or come close to finding, just one thing-that those with high blood pressure consumed less sodium than those who had lower blood pressure?

The evidence supporting the high sodium/lower blood pressure conclusion was derived from a type of cohort study. It involved measuring the levels of 17 nutrients (including calcium and sodium) in the diets of some 10,000 people with no history of high blood pressure. But subsequent examination of how the study was conducted raised serious questions about the quality

of the evidence, or even that it was evidence at all. FDA, the National Center for Health Statistics (the source of data used in the study) and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute evaluated the use of the statistics and found "major conceptual and statistical problems in the author's approach."

These problems, the agencies found, produced "inappropriate conclusions." Specifically, the study was found to contain three errors that made it difficult to say what, if anything, had been found regarding the relationship between blood pressure and sodium.

The first error involved the HOW of measurement-the blood pressure readings themselves. A blood pressure reading is usually a measure of systolic pressure (when the heart is actively pumping blood into the arteries) and diastolic pressure (when the relaxed heart is receiving blood from the veins).

However, this study considered only the systolic pressure, even though doctors consider both numbers clinically important.

The second error involved the WHAT of measurernentthe amount of sodium in the foods consumed.

The study confined itself to the amount of sodium in the foods before they were prepared, not the often considerable amounts that might be added during cooking or at the table. The study also ignored the varying levels of sodium in drinking water and even in some medicines that the participants may have been taking.

The third error involved the WHO of measurementfailure to consistently control or make allowances for such variables among the participants as age, race, sex and weight.

For example, wh~n age was considered, the findings showed that sodium is in fact directly associated with high blood pressure, contrary to the conclusion reached by the scientists who conducted the study.

One of the reasons a controlled experiment is viewed by scientists as an effective way to arrive at fact is that it can be repeated by other scientists to see if the results can be duplicated. If such a challenge is met and the same experiment conducted by different and perhaps very skeptical scientists yields the same findings, then the results are accepted.

On the other hand, results from nonexperimental methods, such as case-conrrol or cohort studies, are usually validated by closely checking such factors as the way the data were collected and analyzed and whether the data were sufficient to support the conclusion.' In the study that concluded that lowering cholesterol levels would reduce the risk of heart disease, the data, the method and, hence, the conclusion passed this test.

But the sodium/high blood pressure study failed to pass the scrutiny of other scientists; so the conclusion from other studies, that high blood pressure is directly related to sodium intake, still stands.

The advance of scientific knowledge is based on employing the scientific method and logically analyzing the results. Not all such studies will stand the scrutiny of other scientists; some startling new findings will go the way of spontaneous generation and nutmeg therapy for brain disease. But without such studies, and the scrutiny of their findings in the scientific community, there would be precious little growth in knowledge at all, and we might still be trying to estimate the size of this year's hemp crop on Jupiter.

0 About the Author: Tim Larkin, a former employee of the US. Food and Drug Administration, is a free-lance science writer based in Easton, Maryland.

New lools for leeth Sophisticated hardware, safer pain¡killers and a whole new range of dentistry products have made dental care easier, faster, almost painless. And an emphasis on preventive measures has led to a decrease in tooth and gum disease.

Throughout the world, tooth repair has been a slow and painful process-one . that many chose to avoid except in emergencies. And because of ignorance and neglect, many people have faced old age without their natural teeth.

Thanks to major advances in American dentistry in the past few decades, the quality of the smile has improved dramatically in the United States, as it has in the rest of the world. More sophisticated hardware, safer pain-killers and better understanding of patient psychology have made dental care easier, faster and much less stressful than in the past. "When I was a kid, the dentist completed one filling during each visit, so it took me six months to get done," says Burton Press, president of the American Dental Association. "And even though he was a nice man, I thought it was supposed to hurt.

Today, I could probably get all the work done in one visit and never feel a thing."

For any patient that is good news.

As dentists became more adept at treating disease, they could devote more time to counseling patients about daily carefor their teeth. This increased emphasison preventive dental care, along with such public health measures as fluoridated drinking water and toothpastes, has led to a dramatic decrease in tooth and gum disease. Tooth decay, the leading chronic disease in childhood, has declined by a third among American schoolchildren in the past ten years.

According to a nationwide survey by the National Institute of Dental Research, 37 percent of children aged 5 to 17 have no decayed, missing, or filled permanent teeth, up from 28 percent in the early years of the last decade.

There are signs that better dental hygiene is beginning to payoff among adults as well. In the early 1960s, according to the American National Center for Health Statistics, only about a quarter of adults in the United States were free of signs of periodontal disease, an infection of the gums and jawbone that is a major cause of tooth loss in later years. A decade later, the figure had improved to 45 percent. Because of better dental care, more people are keeping their natural teeth all their lives. The percentage of the . population wearingJull dentures declined from 35 percent in 1960 to 24 percent in 1970, and the downward trend appears to be continuing.

In part, these statistics reflect rising dental awareness by the average American since World War II. Every schoolchild-and indeed almost anyone who visits a dentist-learns that the villain in dental disease is plaque, a sticky, colorless film formed on the teeth and around the gumline by bacteria that normally live in the mouth. As bacteria act on sugars in food, they produce acids that adhere to the tooth surface and slowly dissolve the enamel, causing cavities. Periodontal disease starts when bacteria in plaque infect gum tissues and destroy the fibers that connect the gums to the teeth. As the gums recede over many years, plaque moves to the tooth root, attacking connective tissues that fasten teeth to the jawbone, and finally attack the bone itself. Teeth lose their support, shift and eventually fall out. .

Because bacteria can regroup into destructive colonies within 24 hours, dentists stress the importance of removing plaque from all tooth surfaces at least once a day. Most dentists now show patients how to use a toothbrush properly to clean the outer, inner and chewing surfaces of teeth and along the gumline. They also instruCt patients in the use of dental floss, a tough, threadlike material that can be slipped between teeth to remove plaque from areas the brush cannot reach.

Some people use special disclosing solutions that stain any plaque remaining on the teeth, immediately revealing areas that have been missed in cleaning. Other consumer products available in the United States for home dental care include electric-powered toothbrushesoften easier for a child to use-and oral irrigating devices that shoot jets of water into the mouth to dislodge food particles.

As a result of public education, Americans are also well aware that sugar is an enemy of teeth because it nourishes bacteria responsible for dental disease.

The single most important factor in the decline of tooth decay in the United States, however, has been the increased use of fluoride, a natural element that can markedly strengthen the tooth's resistance to bacterial acids. In children, ingested fluoride is incorporated into teeth as they develop, giving the enamel a protective plating. But the topical effect is just as important. As fluoride flows over teeth, it is absorbed into the plaque,

This equipment, photographed in a dental clinic in New Delhi, is used to apply fluoride. Fluoride solution or gel isfilled into jawshapedsponge trays (foreground, left) which are then pressed over the teeth. A current breaks the flouride into ions, helping make the enamel of the teeth resistant to decay.

where it apparently disrupts the bacteria and interferes with their ability to produce acid. In January 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city in the world to add fluoride to its public water supply. Today, about half the people in the United States have fluoridated drinking water. In those communities that do have this facility children have 65 percent fewer cavities, and adults, 40 to 50 percent fewer decayed, filled, or missing teeth.

Fluoride toothpastes, introduced in the 1960s, represented a second important breakthrough. When they are used along with fluoridated water, they can reduce the incidence of decay an additional 20 to 25 percent. Other fluoride products include dietary supplements-drops for infants, chewable tablets for older children-and fluoride mouth rinses.

More than 13 million American schoolchildren now rinse with fluoride each week or take daily fluoride tablets, particularly in areas without fluoridated drinking water. For additional protection, the dentist may paint topical fluorides directly on teeth during regular checkups. A child who is highly susceptible to decay can be fitted with a device filled with fluoride gel that can be worn in the mouth at home for a brief time each day.

Dental researchers are now trying to perfect a slow-release device that will keep fluoride in the mouth constantly.

The most promising-a bean-shaped pellet that can be attached to a back tooth-may be on the U.S. market within a few years.

Americans also learn at an early age that dental care is not complete without regular professional checkups, preferably twice a year. In this way, the dentist can monitor homecare efforts, use special probes and X-rays to check for early signs of decay and periodontal disease, inspect the mouth for cancer or evidence of other systemic disease and clean the teeth of hardened plaque that is impossible to remove at home.

As a child begins From a range of artificial veneers, dentists choose one 10 to get his permamatch the patient's natural nen t teeth, a dentooth and paint it on to shells tist may also apwhich are bonded to the tip of ply plastic sealants damaged or discolored teeth by to the molars, an ultra violet beam. where 50 percent of all tooth decay occurs. Teeth are first cleaned and etched with mild acid to improve adhesion.

Sealant is then painted on and exposed briefly to ultraviolet light, which hardens it to a transparent finish. Although sealants eventually wear off, one application may be sufficient to cut decay in half for eight to ten years.

In 1980, there were 59 dentists for every 100,000 Americans, compared with only 47 for every 100,000 people in 1970.

The typical dentist has completed four years of dental school in addition to four years of university as an undergraduate;

he or she is then equipped to provide a full range of routine dental care. More complicated cases are referred to specialists who have had two to three years of additional training and who limit their practice to certain types of patients or certain dental problems. These specialists include pedodontists, who treat only children; endodontists, who perform rootcanal therapy on badly diseased or injured teeth; periodontists, who treat gum disease; orthodontists, who fit braces and other appliances to correct misaligned teeth; prosthodontists, who specialize in patients who need partial or complete dentures; oral and maxillofacial surgeons, who reposition jaws to improve facial appearance and make teeth work better; and oral pathologists, who are skilled in diagnosing major health problems that manifest themselves through changes in the mouth.

The majority of American dentists buy their own equipment and set up individual practices in private offices. Their caseloads consist of regular patients who schedule appointments for periodic checkups or treatments.

But since the mid-1970s there has been a growing trend toward walk-in dental clinics in large health centers, shopping malls and major department stores. Some of these clinics are franchise operations, similar to restaurant chains, in which a parent corporation provides overall management and advertising.

Convenience is the hallmark of the new dental centers, which are open -evenings and weekends, accept credit cards for payment and do not require advance appointments.

Because they are group practices-in which a number of dentists share space and equipment and spread costs over a large number of patientstheir fees are often 40 to 50 percent less than those of dentists who work alone.

Students in American dental schools learn how to fix teeth and how to make patients feel comfortable and at ease.

Students are urged to avoid such emotionally charged words as "hurt" or "pain" and always to acknowledge a patient's fears. They learn to read nonverbal cues to a patient's emotional state and how to conduct relaxation exercises.

Some dentists now rely on hypnosis to calm fearful patients, although this is not routinely taught in dental schools.

Dentists also learn the importance of office design. Michael Geboy, a psycho 1-

ogist on the staff of the Georgetown University School of Dentistry, says, "Dentists hire space planners and design architects to help them design their offices, and there is a tremendous amount of research those people use to help them determine what effect certain colors or certain arrangements of furniture will have on people. Blues and greens are soothing, for example, while reds, which are emotionally arousing, are taboo in the dental office. We try to make equipment less obvious and keep instruments out of the sight of patients. These are all design features that help promote a relaxing psychological atmosphere."

When visiting a typical dentist in the United States, one first enters an attractively furnished and carpeted waiting room with piped-in music and magazines to read. Some waiting rooms offer computerized video games to help younger patients relax while they wait. The dental office itself is usually color-coordinated with scenic wallpaper or paintings to provide visual distraction.

Relaxing music plays in the background, and if the procedure is lengthy, the dentist may offer stereo headphones to the patient.

The dental chair is a comfortable-looking lounge that reclines so the dentist can sit while he or she works.

During a regular checkup, the dentist thoroughly examines teeth, gums and soft tissues of the mouth. On an initial visit, he also takes a complete dental history and a full-mouth set of X-rays, which can reveal cavities between teeth and under the gumline, bone damage from periodontal disease, impacted or abscessed teeth and delayed tooth eruption.

After the examination, the dentist discusses treatment with the patient that may be necessary and offers guidance on home dental care. An assistant, a dental hygienist, then cleans the patient's teeth, carefully scraping hardened plaque away from the gumline and polishing all tooth surfaces. Repair work, such as filling cavities, is scheduled for a later visit.

Because of improved technology, diagnosis and treatment are less of an ordeal than in the past. Super fast X-ray film provides extremely detailed images with less than a third of the radiation exposure needed just five years ago.

Panoramic X-rays, which require nothing to be placed in the patient's mouth, are now available to screen for such things as gum disease, sinus problems, fractures

and impacted or faulty wisdom teeth.

To spare patients from pain-and fear of pain-American dentists routinely use local anesthetics during tooth repairs.

Topical anesthetics numb the skin inside the mouth before the n~~~l~~is given, making injections much le~s':unpleasant.

Newer advances-such as tiny needles that can numb an individual tooth and an air-gun device that shoots a pain-killer into tissue without a needle-are refining the process even further. Besides administering a local anesthetic, many dentists now ask their patients to inhale nitrous oxide gas, a sedative that int'luces a pleasant euphoria.

By far the greatest advance in dental hardware in the past 25 years is the high-speed, air-powered drill with burrs that rotate at 350,000 revolutions per minute, 50 times faster than older models. The dentist can now cut through tooth enamel-the hardest living substance-as easily as cutting through soft butter with knife. Many drills have a spray device that squirts cooling water on the tooth and a fiberoptic light tube that illuminates the area being worked on.

These high-speed drills-fast, quiet and vibration-free-have dramatically reduced the time and trauma in tooth drilling.

Because the body cannot repair a tooth cavity, the dentist must drill out the decayed part and fill the hole with restoration material. In back teeth, this usually is an alloy of silver and such other metals as mercury, tin, copper and zinc.

For front teeth, dentists use toothcolored composite resins made of acrylic and a filler of barium, lithium, quartz or silica. These resins are bonded to the tooth by the same acid-etch technique used to apply sealants to children's teeth.

If decay penetrates to the interior pulp of the tooth, which houses nerves and blood vessels, or if the pulp has been injured by a blow, root canal therapy is necessary to save the tooth. In a minor surgical procedure, the dentist or endodontist removes all damaged pulp, cleans and sterilizes the pulp chamber, fillsit with an inert material, and seals it to prevent re-infection. The crown of the tooth is then restored. Although a tooth without pulp is not totally alive, it remainsfirmly attached to the jawbone and continues to function normally.

Unlike tooth decay, periodontal disease can be reversed in early stages /'

through prompt treatment combined with meticulous oral hygiene. In mild cases, the dentist simply scrapes hardened plaque from tooth roots under the gumline and smooths tooth surfaces so that plaque cannot easily re-adhere. If the disease is a bit more advanced, the dentist also may have to scrape infected tissue from pockets that have formed around the gums.

The patient may be instructed to massage' a paste of baking soda, salt and hydrogen peroxide into the gums to fight bacteria and help shrink swollen tissues. If diseased gum pockets are deeper than a half centimeter, the dentist or periodontist may have to remove some gum tissue surgically or fashion a new gumline to eradicate the infection.

Through various restoration techniques, dentists can salvage teeth that are chipped, fractured or badly deteriorated by disease and repeated fillings. The most permanent method for restoring form¡ and function to damaged teeth is capping-a complicated procedure in which teeth are ground down to about two-thirds their original size and then fitted with artificial crowns made of porcelain or acrylic fused to gold or other metal.

Today, an increasingly popular-and cheaper-alternative to capping is painting a thin veneer of composite resins onto acid-etched surfaces of discolored or damaged teeth. Although the veneers eventually wear off, many Americans prefer to have them replaced periodically rather than go to the trouble and expense of having their teeth capped.

The same technique, known as bonding, also is an effective way to "glue" an artificial tooth or bridge made of composite resins to neighboring teeth with no damage to natural teeth. With conventional bridges, two healthy teeth must be ground down and fitted with caps to provide adequate support for artificial teeth.

American dentists try to preserve natural teeth-or parts of them-as far as possible. "A tooth, after all, is an organ-a living part of the body-so it is much more efficient than anything we could put in artificially," says Kenneth Lynn of the National Institute for Dental Research. "Even if the crown of a tooth is lost, the root can provide an anchor for a partial denture or bridge that is more satisfactory than just placing artificial teeth on soft tissues." Full dentures are

the last resort in tooth replacement, because when all the natural teeth are gone, there is reduced sensation of chewing, about a 60 percent decrease in chewing efficiency and some loss of taste because so much of the mouth is covered by plastic. One alternative to removable dentures, which may eliminate some of these problems, is the dental implantartificial teeth fastened onto metal posts that are sunk into the gum tissue and the bone beneath. So far, however., the implants are not in widespread use.

As dental disease has declined, Americans have become more concerned with improving the appearance and function of their teeth. Orthodontic treatmentrepositioning teeth by means of pressure exerted by wires, bands and bracketshas become routine for children and teenagers. In recent years, unsightly metal braces have been largely replaced by tooth-colored plastic or metal brackets that are bonded directly to teeth ..Braces also have become more comfortable as orthodontists have learned that teeth will move just as much in the same amount of time with 30 or 40 grams of force as with 600. Improved technology and realization that it is never too late to straighten teeth are persuading more and more adults to have their teeth aligned. At least one of every ten orthodontic patients in the United States is an adult.

Scientists are constantly searching for more effective ways to control dental disease. By the 1990s there will likely be an oral vaccine to help protect against some of the organisms that cause tooth decay. Eventually, mouthwashes and toothpastes-and even candy and soft drinks-may contain an ingredient isolated from¡ saliva that neutralizes the acids produced by decay-causing bacteria. Other mouth rinses may replace hostile mouth bacteria with mutant strains that produce much less acid-and thus less tooth decay.

Scientists stress that no single approach will magically cure dental disease.

Despite impressive advances in treatment and research, such humble basics as daily brushing, flossing and use of fluoride remain the most important tooth-saving measures.

0 About the Author: Phyllis E. Lehmann is a free-lance writer whose articles on health and nature have appeared in several American magazines.

Underwater Eden The Johnson-Sea-Link-II (left) prepares to embark on a deep-sea expedition in the Bahamas in search of echinoderms. Using the unique submersible, scientists have discovered exotic marine creatures

such as (center, left to right) the Linckia starfish, the Comactinia featherstar, the Endoxocrinus parrae sea lilies (their arms form feeding fans to catch small animals drifting by) and Coelopleurus floridanus (left), a colorful sea urchin.

But the most spectacular discoveries have been brittlestars like the Asteroporpa (right), which lives at depths of 200 meters.

F

or the past two years, biologists from the Harbor Branch Foundation Inc. in Fort Pierce, Florida, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., have been using a unique research submersible to investigate an exciting world of colorful marine creatures living on the vast underwater mountain range that forms the Bahamas' landmasses, less than 200 kilometers off the coast of the United States.

The rich, diverse echinoderm fauna in this area had never been explored firsthand until these trips, though scientists have long known about the creatures living there.

More than a century ago, researchers collected specimens in the area using dredges.

The dredges, however, often brought up dead, damaged animals, which gave little information on their delicate structures or unique life styles.

Underwater vessels like the Harbor Branch's submersibles, Johnson-Sea-Link-I and -II, have now opened up this colorful old world. Although some subs can reach (.~

Left: Porter Kier peers at the underwater garden from a porthole in the submersible.

Below: Gordon Hendler, David Pawson and John Miller admire their haul of basketstars.

greater depths-Alvin, for example, can go to 4,000 meters, whereas Johnson-Sea-Link can dive only to 800 meters-Harbor Branch's subs are more versatile, having been designed and engineered for scientific exploration. A clear plastic sphere, or "fishbowl," comprises the forward chamber; in the back is a metal tailor "dive" compartment, which has the capability to launch or receive a diver while underwater.

The sub, which carries two crew members and two scientists, is launched and recovered from an oceanographic ship, the R/V Johnson.

Its specialty is its spectacular agility on steep 60- to-80-degree slopes. It also provides an unsurpassed 180-degree visibility to the pilot and scientist in the fishbowl.

Sea-Link-II is also fitted with a full array of sophisticated scientific instruments, including devices for plucking animals from the rugged sea floor or slopes and bringing them back alive in nearly pristine condition for further study, a unique laser-aimed camera for still photography and an underwater videotape camera yielding tapes of broadcast quality-one of only two in the world.

Working with these facilities at depths of several hundred meters on the underwater mountainsides, which appear to be particularly bereft of other large lifeforms, "we have found an incredible Garden of Eden of echinoderms doing all kinds of incredible things," says David L. Pawson, a zoologist at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.

Normally, echinoderms are anything but flashy. Small enough to be held in the palm of a hand, they can be found in marine habitats all over the world, from ankle-deep waters to the ocean's abyssal trenches, living a sedentary life, usually on the sea floor. But the animals on the Bahamas' slopes look and behave differently from their shallowwater counterparts, according to John E. Miller, the Harbor Branch biologist who has led the Bahamas expeditions.

Miller and Pawson, who had worked together for many years and are specialists on sea cucumbers, sea lilies and featherstars, enlisted two colleagues from the Museum of Natural History: Porter M. Kier, a sea-urchin expert, and Gordon L. Hendler, a zoologist who studies brittlestars and basketstars. All have worked extensively on shallow-water echinoderms in the past, giving them an excellent basis for making comparisons with deep-water species.

On their first dive in 1983, the scientists

were "astounded by the diversity and number of echinoderms," Hendler reports. In just one cruise, in April 1984, they collected approximately 80 species of echinoderms500 specimens in all. Till late last year, the Bahamas survey had yielded nearly 120 deep-water species-some totally new to science. Some of the most interesting discoveries involve the most abundant echinoderms in the study area-the brittlestars.

These five-armed echinoderms, which normally use a rowing motion of their arms to scoot along the sea bottom, actually swam when they were disturbed by the sub's manipulator arm. One brittlestar species, which has longer spines on its arms than those on shallow-water brittlestars, positions its arms in a "cagelike" or basket arrangement, apparently to entrap small creatures; the individuahsticky spines catch even smaller food partic(es.

Structural differenceS between shallowwater and deep-sea echinoderms are also pronounced among sea urchins. One species has small balloon-shaped sacs around its spines-possibly to provide buoyancy. The sea lilies here show totally unexpected behavior. Abundant in shallow marine waters during the Paleozoic Era, some 260 to 500 million years ago, sea lilies are the only living echinoderms attached to the seabed by a stalk. Most scientists have believed that these animals are completely sedentary throughout their adult life. "But sea lilies placed on the ocean floor after removal from their perch often use their featherlike arms to crawl," says Miller, suggesting that they may be able to "seek out another suitable rock and attach themselves using hooklike structures on their stalks."

The scientists are now compiling an atlas of the Bahamas echinoderms, illustrated with color underwater photographs. "These animals have been around for hundreds of millions of years," says Miller. "They clearly play an important role in the overall ecology of the deep sea. We feel as if we've just touched the tip of the iceberg. Why don't they react to our camera lights? Why do we see so little evidence of predation? What do they eat? Where are their young? Why do we find so many brittlestars living underneath sponges or wrapped around other animals?"

All four scientists are looking forward to future dives that may answer these 0 questions.

About the Author: Madeleine Jacobs is with the Smithsonian News Service in Washington, D.C.

Christmas in Williamsburg In Williamsburg, Virginia, carefully restored to catch the mood of 18th-century America, Christmas is a time for an old fashioned fair where craftsmen sell such items as hand-dipped candles. There are also a colorful fife-and-drum parade, gaily decorated doorways in each house, quaint colonial games and travel by horse-drawn sleighs.

Christmas is very special here.

The Festive Mood The Festival of India continues to enthrall Americans-in Ohio an exhibition of Mughal art draws unprecedented crowds; in New York The Golden Eye exhibition presents an unusual experiment in international understanding-designs by such innovators as Mjlton Glaser, Charle_s Moore, Ivan Chermayeff and Bernard Rudofsky adapted by traditional Indian craftsmen into creations of stunning beauty.

The Birdman of America On the 200th birth anniversary of John James Audubon, SPAN recalls the life of the legendary artist whose paintings of birds in his book, the Birds of America, have been called "the greatest monument ever offered to Nature

by Art."

The Secrets of Cancer Cells A greater understanding of what causes a cancer to grow is bringing scientists closer to a cure. Researchers are already sure of some things: that cancer is increasing in frequency only because more people are living long enough to contract it; if smoking were eliminated, cancer deaths would drop by 30 percent; cancer occurs at dramatically different rates in different geographical locations.

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India Day in New York Colorful floats (top and upper far right), vibrant dances and an air of enthusiasm marked the India Day parade in New York in August, organized by the city's Federation of Indian Associations to celebrate the 38th anniversary of India's Independence. The marchers, led by Mayor Edward-I. Koch, the Chief Guest (with upraised hands in the picture above) and Grand Marshals film star Shatrughan Sinha and General Jagjit Singh Aurora (retd.), walked down 20 blocks of Madison Avenue to reach the review stand. A street fair and' cultural program followed the ceremonies. As Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi noted in his message to the organizers: "This year's parade assumes special significance because it is being held in the year of the Festival of India." The talk of the town was "India!" The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (right, above) displayed artifacts, like the rock crystal elephant at right, from the 14th to the 19th century. "India!" opened with an Indian dance recital by an American, Janet Fine (far right)-an apt symbol of the Indo-American spirit of the Festival of India in America.