SPAN: September/October 2002

SPAN Publisher Robert C. Schmidt

The Human Brain

By John Hockenberry

Editor-in-Chief David Kennedy

Born to Run

By Evan Ratliff

Editor Lea Terhune

Hiring Workers with Disabilities

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

By Meredith Armstrong Whiting

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

DARPA'sIngenious Technologies

By David Talbot

Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Deputy Art Director Sharad Sovani

The Case for Funding Curiosity

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Blogs: Where the Action Is

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

By A. Venkata Narayana

Research Services

Living Memories

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

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The Ghat of the Only World Front cover: Delhi photographer Amit Pasricha took this photo while attending a Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine.

This shot was taken at a nearby home for the disabled. The Maine Photographic Workshops, among the best of its kind in the U.S., offers courses from beginner to professional level and explores different kinds of photography, including digital imaging and video. Info at www.theworkshops.com

Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn

By Amitav Ghosh

When Magma's on the Move

By Mark Wheeler

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited

manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. QuelY letters are accepted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

A Mars Never Dreamed Of

By Kathy Sawyer

A LETTER

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s the year cycles around to September, the memory of the attacks in the United States is still hard to shake. Images stay in the mind: the crumbling Twin Towers of the World Trade Center-although the site has now been cleared; the gaping hole in the Pentagon-which is now largely reconstructed; and the hijacked plane that was taken down by brave passengers before it could claim even more lives. The bald facts of September 1 I th changed many things across the world, placed new international focus on South Asia and stimulated new kinds of cooperation between countries.

Commemorative events are planned in the United States. A stamp honoring those who gave their lives on September 11th has been . . ~ released. A special traveling photo . .HERO', i exhibition is in India: "Eleven" shows }, U j A: ~ the World Trade Center through the ; lenses of eminent photographers. ~ SPAN offers a preview of some of ~ . $ those images.

Our autumn focus, however, is on $ threshold developments in science and technology. Our cover feature high• _ ~ i lights scientific breakthroughs that make the bionic man more than just a TV character. Physically disabled people are getting wired. They are doing it to push the limits of interaction between body and machine, so even the completely paralyzed can regain some quality of life. John Hockenberry, himself confined to a wheelchair, explores the revolutionary possibilities in "The Human Brain." Microchips embedded in artificial limbs are the new dimension in prosthetics. Author Evan Ratliff talks to the users and makers of these "smart" prostheses in "Born to Run." "Hiring Workers with Disabilities," by Meredith Armstrong Whiting, tracks corporate development of a long-ignored resource. Not only is it "the right thing to do," but it's good business.

The chipmasters aren't the only ones translating scifi into reality. NASA does it again with recent unmanned explorations on Mars. More facts about the Red Planet are being gathered from these missions than scientists know what to do with-and the data holds some surprises. "A Mars Never Dreamed Of," by Kathy Sawyer, and NASA photos offer stunning glimpses of that planet of mystery and conjecture.

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EDITOR

Our own planet is dotted with volcanoes.

Seismologist Dave Hill scouts California's Long Valley for clues to why, when and how volcanic activity occurs. Like the Himalayas, the Sierra Nevada Mountains are earthquake prone. Mark Wheeler takes us into the Long Valley, where the earth trembles daily and molten magma flows beneath the ground, in "When Magma's on the Movt>."

DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, nurtures innovations that have ramifications for everyone. The Internet is but one. Small remote-controlled data collection devices useful in intelligence gathering may soon monitor crop conditions, pollution, even cells in the human body. David Talbot surveys the latest gizmos in "DARPA's Ingenious Technologies."

All such discoveries are made through curiosity, an incentive passion that doggedly pursues an object for the sake of just finding out. In "The Case for Funding Curiosity," Siddhartha Mukherjee describes how lone wolf researcher John Collier's IS-year study of the anthrax bacillus came in very handy after the anthrax bio-terror attacks last year.

In "Living Memories," Michael Hawley celebrates the multiplicity of life forms and explores ways to keep track of them, such as the All Species Foundation, which records the world's genetic information via the Internet. There is probably a blog about it, too. Blog?

OK, weblog. Learn more about this trend in personalized Internet reportage in "Blogs: Where the Action Is," by A. Venkata Narayana.

Last December, a man with a haunting way with words quietly passed away in Amherst, Massachusetts. Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali could equally qualify as a poet laureate in Kashmir or in his adopted country, the United States. He lived in the U.S. as a boy, when his father, Dr. Agha Ashraf Ali, was a Fulbright fellow at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. As an adult Shahid returned to stay.

He earned his PhD and MFA, he taught at various universities, and he made history by introducing the ghazal form to mainstream American poets and students. He composed poems of extraordinary beauty.

Amitav Ghosh writes of his friend Shahid in the tribute, "The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn."

Happy reading!

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hen you think disability, think zeitgeist. I'm serious. We live at a time when the disabled are on the leading edge of a broader societal trend toward the use of assistive technology. With the advent of miniature wireless tech, electronic gadgets have stepped up their invasion of the body, and our concept of what it means and even looks like to be human is wide open to debate.

Humanity's specs are back on the drawing board, thanks to some unlikely designers, and the disabled have a serious advantage in this conversation. They've been using technology in collaborative, intimate ways for years-to move, to communicate, to interact with the world.

When you think disability, free yourself from the sob-story crap, all the oversize shrieking about people praying for miracles and walking again, or triumphing against the odds.

Instead, think puppets. At a basic level, physical disability is

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really just a form of puppetry. If you've ever marveled at how terfaces. The soft-spoken doctor wouldn't describe anything he does as show business, but to me the results of his work sound someone can bring a smudged sock puppet to life or talked back like a real-world version of the nifty plug Neo/Keanu sported in to Elmo and Grover, then intellectually you're nearly there.

Puppetry is the original brain-machine interface. It entertains be- The Matrix.

"We simply make a hole in the skull right above the ear, near cause it shows you how this interface can be ported to different the back end of the motor cortex, secure our electrodes and other platforms. hardware to the bone so they don't migrate, and wait for a sigIf puppetry is the clever mapping of human characteristics nal," Bakay says. The implant is an intriguing hybrid of electrononto a nonhuman object, then disability is the same mapping onto a still-human object. Making the body work regardless of ics and biology-it physically melds with brain tissue.

"We use a small piece of glass shaped like two narrow cones physical deficit is not a challenge I would wish on anyone, but into which a gold electrical contact has been glued," Bakay says. getting good at being disabled is like discovering an alternative platform. It's closer to puppetry than anything else I can think of. "The space in the cones is filled with a special tissue culture, and the whole thing is placed inside the motor cortex." The tissue culI should know: I've been at it for 25 years. I have lots of moving ture is designed to "attract" brain cells to grow toward the conparts. Two of them are not my legs. When you think John tact. When brain cells meet gold, the electrical activity of Hockenberry, think wheelchair. Think alternative platform.

Think puppet. individual cells is detectable across the electrode. Gold wires Within each class of disability, there are different forms of carry signals back out of the skull, where they are amplified. This puppetry, different people and technologies interacting to solve produces a far more sensitive and usable signal than you get from various movement or communication problems. The goal, al- surface technology like the taped-on electrodes used in EEGs. To get a broad sense of what the patient's brain is doing, neuways, is to project a whole human being, to see the puppet as a rologists perform magnetic resonance imaging and compare character rather than a sock or a collection of marionette strings. changes in the motor cortex with voltages monitored through the When you meet Johnny Ray, it's a challenge to see the former drywall contractor and amateur musician trapped inside his body, electrodes. Then the doctors get really clever. The patient is enbut he's there. Ray, a 63-year-old from Carrollton, Georgia, suf- couraged to think simple thoughts that correspond to distinct conditions and movements, like hot/cold or up/down. Gradually, fered a brain-stem stroke in 1997, which produced what doctors the doctors extract and codify electrical patterns that change as a call "locked-in syndrome": He has virtually no moving parts. patient's thoughts change. If a patient can reproduce and trigger Cognitively he's intact, but he can't make a motion to deliver that the signal using the same thought patterns, that signal can be message or any other to the world.

Getting a puppet with no moving parts to work sounds like a identified and used to control, say, a cursor on a computer screen.

The technique is very crude, but what Bakay and his colleagues task worthy of the Buddha, but a pioneering group ofneuroscienhave demonstrated is a truly alternative brain-body interface tists affiliated with Emory University in Atlanta has taken a credible stab at it. In a series of animal and human experiments dating platform. back to 1990, Philip Kennedy, Roy Bakay, and a team of researchers The implant put Ray's motion centers back have created a basic but completely functional alternative interface usinto play. Adapting to the ing electrodes surgically implanted new platform, Il1lfiiยง) in the brain. In 1996, their success with primates convinced the U.S. cdlcemmcmIffiiยง)urflillucecdl Iill ffllceRJIIillfillfilly standard worthy Food and Drug Administration of Java or Linux.

(FDA) to allow two human tests.

The first subject, whose name was Ray's implant was instalJed in 1998, and he survived to start withheld to protect her privacy, was a woman in the terminal working with the signals, which were amplified and convetied to stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease); she died two months after USB input for a Dell Pentium box. In the tests that followed, Ray the procedure. The second was Johnny Ray. his Kennedy, who invented the subcranial cortical implant used in was asked to think about specific physical motions-moving these operations, wanted to create a device that could acquire a arms, for example. Kennedy and Bakay took the corresponding signal and programmed it to move the cursor. By reproducing the signal from inside the brain-a signal robust enough to travel same brain pattern, Ray eventually was able to move the cursor at through wires and manipulate objects in the physical world.

Making this happen involved creating new access points for the will to choose screen icons, spell, even generate musical tones.

That this was in fact an alternative platform, a true brain-mabrain, in addition to the natural ones (defunct in Ray's case) that chine interface, was demonstrated after months of tests, when produce muscle motion. Bakay has since moved to RushRay reported that the thoughts he used to trigger the electrodePresbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, where he's changing. He was now activating pati of an institute devoted entirely to alternative brain-body in- imagined arm motions-were

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the electrode by thinking about facial movements, and as he ma- arsenal of customized machines (wheelchairs, grabbers, cordless nipulated the cursor, doctors could see his cheeks move and his phones, remote controls, broomsticks with a bent nail pounded eyes flutter. Kennedy and Bakay had predicted that Ray's fo- into the end). At times I've seen my own quest for new physical cused mental activity might result in neurological changes, but to ability in odd places-a musician seeking virtuosity, an athlete see actual facial movements was a surprise. It didn't mean that seeking perfection. I've become convinced that the process of his paralysis was receding, rather that his brain had tapped into fine-tuning one's mobility through practice and the use of tools is as old as humanity itself. I've come to believe it is identical to an capabilities rendered dormant by the stroke. The results showed infant's task of developing coordination while facing near-zero that Ray's thoughts about motion were triggering clusters ofmotor neurons. available functionality of legs, arms, and muscles.

How? Kennedy and Bakay presumed the implant had put variThere is no better puppet show than watching your own children teach themselves to walk. In my case, it involved watching ous motion centers in Ray's brain back into play. Disconnected from the body/hardware they once controlled, these neurons now Zoe and Olivia, my twin daughters. Their strategies were complicated improvisations that proceeded from observing the world had a crude way to interact. Adapting to the new platfOlm, Ray's brain was demonstrating a flexibility standard w011hy of Java or around them. Olivia made especially good use of her hands and Linux.

As the brain cells in and around Ray's "He claimed he had a way I cc(Q)ll1lllcrJ] implant did what he asked them to do, the cc(Q)ITIlllII'(Q)ll@l WII'ยง(Q)II' @lITIlcrJ]@nce mmll1lยงccllceยง imagined sensation of moving his body parts gradually disappeared altogether.

I thought (Q)fr' mmy @@lITIlcrJ]JJll1lยงl1 lmy One day when his skill at moving the cursor seemed particularly adept, the docit was BS. You know, brain science." tors asked Ray what he was feeling.

Slowly, he typed "nothing."

Ray was interacting directly with the cursor in a way similar to arms, grabbing tables, drawer handles, and the spokes on my wheelchair to pull herself upright, where she would stand in how he might once have interacted with his hand. "People don't place for long periods of time, feeling the potential in her chubby think, 'move hand' to move their hands unless they are small little legs. children just learning," Bakay explains. "Eventually the brain Zoe spent weeks on her stomach flapping like a seal, hoping just eliminates these intermediate steps until the hand feels like a somehow to launch spontaneously onto her feet. She did not see part ofthe brain." The description reminds me of how I've heard Isaac Stern describe his violin as an extension of his body. I think her legs as helpful, and to her credit, in our house walking was of my wheelchair the same way. merely one of two major models for locomotion. One morning, The fact that Ray's cursor is indistinguishable from almost any well before she was two years old and long before she walked, I other prosthesis raises an important philosophical question: placed Zoe in my wheelchair and watched as she immediately Because of the implant, is a Dell Pentium cursor now more a part grabbed the wheels and began to push herself forward as though of Johnny Ray than one of his own paralyzed arms? she'd been doing it for years. She had even figured out how to use the different rotation rates of the rear wheels to steer herself.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is interested enough in this technology to have provided $1.1 million in seed funding Zoe had grasped that the wheelchair was the most accessible mothis case, an infant-who couldfor an additional eight human tests this year. Bakay hopes the tion platform for someone-in n't use her legs. She smiled as she looked at me, with an next patients won't be as profoundly disabled as the first two. expression that said something like, "Give up the wheels, Mr. "The more kinds of applications we find for this," Bakay says, "the more we learn about it."

Chairhog."

Zoe and Olivia walk perfectly now, but their choices in those From my perspective as a wheelchair puppet, life is a question formative weeks were startlingly different. In both, the same of optimizing the brain-machine interface. In the beginning, this was far from obvious to me. My spinal cord was injured in a car brain-machine transaction was at work creating functionality from what was available. Engineers and designers have discovaccident when I was 19-an utterly random occurrence in which a woman picked me up while I was hitchhiking and later fell ered that this is a process as distinctive as fingerprints. Every perasleep at the wheel. She died. But I emerged from her crumpled son solves problems in his or her own way, with a mix of technology and body improvisation. The variables are cultural car, then from a hospital, and resumed my life. I looked for a way to describe what I was doing: Rehabilitation was a word for it. and psychological, and precise outcomes are difficult to preCourage was a word for it. Coping was a word for it. But none of dict-but they detetmine what technology will work for which those labels even approached the reality of what relearning physperson. Think puppetry as a universal metaphor for the design of icallife was all about. machines.

Jim Jatich has been a cyborg puppet for years now and is proud Since then I've been improvising motion by merging available of it. A 53-year-old former engineering technician and draftsman body functionality (arms, hands, torso, neck, head) with a small

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jected line. The goal was to have the computer search for distinct, recallable brain-wave patterns that could be used to control any number of devices that could be connected to a chip.

Jatich says there was nothing portable about the equipmenthe found the electrode skullcap cumbersome and the whole system a bit rickety. "Cell phones down the hall at the hospital would cause the thing to go blank every once in a while." But the enterprise did deliver a breakthrough he hadn't anticipated.

"When 1 got downstairs after the first couple of experiments," he says, "1 was sitting outside, waiting for my ride, and it hit me.

1 had caused something to move just by using my mind alone.

The tears streamed down my face, because it was the first time 1 had done that since I got injured." Jatich says he felt like "a kid being handed keys to a car for the first time."

Going from manually controlled FES to brain implants that bypass the spinal cord to produce muscle movement would represent a significant leap. But Ron Triolo, a professor of orthopedics and biomedical engineering at Case Western and a clinician at the Cleveland FES Center, thinks this is possible. He sees this leap as the possible fulfillment of FES's many, often outsize, promises for people with When I used the Ibot for the first disabilities. The challenge is immense, but, time, the chip was making the wheels as Triolo puts it, "Failure is closer to success move, but my fulIF@JfiIffi9ยง CQ)'WIffi ยงceIffiยงce CQ)ff than doing nothing. I've seen some of the preliminary work on cortical control and it's merged instantly with impressive. Clearly, it's going to payoff eventually." the machine. Its decisions Since Jatich's first implantable hand device was installed, the technology for nerve stimuseemed to be mine. lation has advanced to the point where the reliable, long-lasting electrodes in both of his hands are barely visible, require practically zero maintenance, and directly. "This one sounded real crazy," Jatich says. "He claimed he had a way to see if! could control first a computer cursor and have become more or less permanent parts of his body. For the last then maybe the muscles of my hand, just by thinking. 1 thought it 15 years, he's used a shoulder joystick controller to move his right hand. Controlling his left hand is an IJAT, or implantable joint was BS," he says with a wink. "You know, brain science."

Researchers placed a skullcap containing 64 electrodes on angle transducer, which employs a magnet and sensor attached to the bones of the wrist. Slight movements trigger complex handJatich's head. These produced a waveform of his brain activity, grasping motions. The computer mounted on the back of Jatich's though the signal was much weaker than the one obtained from Johnny Ray's cortical implants. Like Ray's doctors, the re- wheelchair stores the software that helps produce as many as five different motions, which he can specify depending on whether he searchers asked Jatich to concentrate on simple but opposite concepts like up and down. They carefully observed the EEG for wants to hold a pencil and write or grasp a utensil and feed himself-eapabilities he would not otherwise have at all. readable changes in brain patterns. They used software to meaOver the years, Jatich has gone from being a person completely sure the maximums and minimums in his overall brain wave and dependent on others to having some degree of autonomy. His to calculate the moving averages in exactly the same way stock grasping ability means he can use a computer and feed himself, analysts try to pull signals from the jagged data noise of the stock market. A pattern was identified and fashioned as a switch: among other simple tasks. In the past few years, Jatich has been able to do some mechanical drawing, using his hand devices along Above the average equaled on; below the average, off. With this with commercially available computer-aided design systems. switch they could control a cursor's direction and, as a hacker Thinking about taking the next step-an implant that might almight say, they were "in."

While Jatich's doctors worked to optimize the software, he low him to connect his brain, via computer, to his electrode-filled hands-excites him. "You could sure get a hell of a signal from concentrated on a wall-size computer screen. Monitoring the surface ofthe brain as compared to the electrodes in that ugly changes in his EEG and modifying the programming accordingly produced a kind of biofeedback. Gradually, like Johnny Ray, skullcap," Jatich says. He speaks as though he's talking about a science fair project and not the tissue under his own cranium. "I Jatich was able to move a flashing cursor to the middle of a pro-

from Akron, Ohio, Jatich is a quadriplegic who first donated his body to science back in 1978. A near-fatal diving accident the year before left him without use of his legs and hands, and with limited use of muscles in his arms and shoulders.

The computer term expansion port was unknown back in the late 1970s, but Jatich's doctors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland arrived at the same idea. They imagined building an alternative path around Jatich's injured spinal cord to restore a local area network that could be controlled by his brain.

In a series of operations and therapies starting in 1986, Jatich became the first human to receive surgically implanted electrodes in his hands to mimic nerves by stimulating the muscles with tiny bursts of electricity. The process is known as functional electrical stimulation, or FES. By using a shoulder-mounted joystick to trigger patterns of electrical impulses, Jatich was able to open and close his hands. Others have since used the technology to move leg muscles and allow the exercise of paralyzed limbs.

Two years ago, a research assistant named Rich Lauer came to Jatich with the suggestion that he think about tapping into his brain

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The IST-JO implantable stimuator telemeter in Jim Jatich:S shoulder.

would have to think hard about it, but if they could deliver on their promises, it would be great. I would do it in a minute."

Suddenly, million-dollar grants are being thrown around to investigate the possibilities of direct interaction with the brain.

While much ofthe study is geared toward finding ways to reopen avenues closed by massive paralysis, it also raises the possibility of creating alternative brain outlets to the world in addition to the ones we were born with. The FDA won't allow it yet, but there's no scientific barrier preventing some brave pioneer from adding a new ability-for instance, a brain-controlled wireless device to regulate climate and lighting in one's home. In November, British cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick plans to have a chip implanted next to his arm's central nerve bundle so he can experiment with sending and receiving digital signals.

Deep brain stimulation is the overarching term for the therapies in development, and specific projects are under way to address severe nervous system disorders like Parkinson's disease, TBI (traumatic brain injury), and other locked-in syndromes. The NIH has embarked on an aggressive program to develop cortical control devices as the first truly practical neuro-prostheses. This is a kind of low-bandwidth alternative to the field of spinal cord research focused on repairing injured spinal tissue and restoring the original brain-muscle connection.

Dubbed "the Cure" by its passionate supporters, savvy marketers, and fundraisers, this vision of spinal cord repair has a much higher profile and is far better financed than FES and other alternative-interface explorations. The Cure has Christopher Reeve as its cash-gushing poster boy. FES has Jim Jatich. Cortical implant technology has Johnny Ray. Certainly, anyone who wakes up with a spinal cord injury is inclined to hope for a cure above all other options. But one would expect medical research strategies to be more detached from the emotional trauma of disability. As someone who has lived in a wheelchair comfortably for a quarter century, it is hard to justify why the Cure would be so favored over its alternatives.

Rush-Presbyterian's Roy Bakay expresses some frustration that his efforts directly compete with the Cure movement for funding. "We can do things for people now, whereas spinal cord research isn't going to pay off for a very long time, if at all. I'm not saying that spinal cord research shouldn't be conducted, just that [deep-brain stimulation] may be a more immediate solution for getting the brain to interact with the outside world." Others report that Reeve's visibility has made it more difficult to find people willing to try new technology involving surgery or implants.

"They say they want to keep their bodies in good shape for when the Cure happens," says Jatich, who often counsels people considering FES. Reeve was injured in a 1995 horse-riding accident; he can't move anything below his neck and needs assistance to breathe.

Despite declaring shortly after the accident that he would someday walk again, Reeve is not pro-Cure to the exclusion of all other options. He has carefully maintained that he supports any endeavor that might help people with disabilities. He has muted his personal predictions about walking again, though he is still dedicated to the Cure. The movement Reeve helped create represents those who believe the body is the brain's best interface to the outside world. Certainly, there's nothing on the market to give the fully functioning body any serious competition. Yet for people without one, supplementing bodies with onboard technology to increase functionality is a way around the wait for a full cure.

It's a familiar trade-off: As every technology develops, there is the tension of using the interesting but cumbersome first-wave device versus waiting until the tech is small enough, convenient enough, or integrated enough with the body to bother with it.

This trade-off has been debated within the disabled community for generations, and it is just starting to be reflected in the broader culture.

The field with perhaps the best track record in dealing with complicated brain-machine interfaces is communications technology for the sensory- and voice-impaired. It's also the area in which the trade-offs between functionality and ease of use are most critical. With computers, turning text into voice is considerably easier than making a device that operates with the ease and speed of speech.

"There is a real issue of gadget tolerance, and people have finite limits," says Frank DeRuyter, chief of speech pathology at Duke University Medical Center and a leader in the field of augmented communication. "Our smart systems need to be environmentally sensitive or they don't get used." DeRuyter has worked with all kinds of communications devices, from primitive boards-little more than alphabets and pictures used by noncommunicators to slowly construct sentences by pointing-to more sophisticated electronic speech-synthesis devices. All have their own advantages and disadvantages, which are ignored at a designer's peril.

DeRuyter describes how designers can be locked into narrow functionality traps that keep them from seeing the world the way the disabled do. "Talking is a portable communications system that enhances every other activity. We used to put some of our noncommunicators into the pool each day, and we could never figure out why they hated it. Then we realized that by removing electronic communications boards that couldn't tolerate water, their pool time was the equivalent of being gagged. We designed some simple, waterproof alphabet boards and the problem went away. Pool time became fun."

Michael B. Williams is an augmented communications tech-

public speeches in a kind of partial-playback mode, which he has been doing for years now.

Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a young child, Williams struggled with the speech therapy recommended by medical and educational professionals to enable him to control his mouth and use his own voice. His eventual rejection ofthis mode of communication was a simple technology decision; the brain-machine interface called speech is, in his case, seriously flawed. He describes his voice as being "like used oatmeal," and he has instead acquired the tech to live on his own terms, according to his personal specifications. When Williams gives speeches, his advanced VOCA offers the choice of 10 different programmed voices (he prefers the one called Huge Harry for himself). When he quotes someone, he uses a different voice, and it sounds like two people are on stage.

"This bit of electronic tomfoolery seems to wow audiences," he says in an e-mail, his sly showman's confidence coming through. So when you think about Williams, don't think courageous crippled guy giving a speech. Think puppetry, ventriloquism, Stephen Hawking.

Williams says it's impossible to evaluate any technology on function alone. For instance, he says the value of his ability to communicate is directly related to his mobility. "Someone recently asked me, 'If you were given a choice of having a voice or a power wheelchair, which would you choose?' This is a nobrainer for me. I would choose the power wheelchair. What would I do with only a voice-sit at home and talk to the TV? Another thing I wouldn't give up is my computer. With a computer and a modem I can get my thoughts, such as they are, out to the world."

Frank DeRuyter says designers need to think in the broadest possible terms when they apThe CJ CJ proach human-interface technology. "We're just beginning to realize the importance of integratinterface doesn't seem ing movement technology with communications to need the body as much as we tech. We see that a GPS device can powerfully believe it does. We hybrids increase the functionality of a communications board.

When people roll their wheelchairs into are part of a MIffifve:::§£~. :::3C'::;'3.'.2'(rfi~ a grocery store, the GPS will automatically :J'? f~:-":3 :mMIITffiiiliC ci6§~g~ 2Y"2::3,'CfifnccatECD!Lo change the board's stored phrases and icons into ones relevant to shopping. Shifting context as you move-that's what the brain does. Now we can do it, too."

This idea of optimizing a personal brain-machine interface is as much an issue for engineers at Nokia, nology user and a disability rights actiVist from Berkeley, Motorola, and other manufacturers of wireless technology as it California. He relies on three devices to communicate: two is for people designing for the disabled. Companies need peoVOCAs (voice output communication aids, basically chip-controlled text-to-voice synthesizers) and a low-tech waterproof al- ple to actually buy and use their devices, not just gawk at them phabet board. The board, he told me in an e-mail, is there "for in glossy trade magazines. On a street in Manhattan last fall, it when California's power goes out," and for "private thoughts in hit me: four people, one intersection. One man with a cell the shower." Williams' smaller VOCA is a spell-and-speak de- phone and headset was talking calmly and loudly, oblivious to vice that is handy enough for dinner table conversations. His the rest of the world. Another had a cell phone handset pressed largest and most advanced VOCA is "heavy and hard on the to his head and was attempting to get a scrap of paper, oneknees," but has rapid word access that enables Williams to give handed, from his briefcase. A woman was at the pay phone

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looking for a quat1er. The fourth person stood waiting for the opponents, is a direct confrontation to the shared experience of deafness, the language of signing, and all of the hot-dogging imlight to change, looking at his wristwatch. If the four were provisations deaf people have developed over many generations frozen at that intersection, how would future paleontologists to function without hearing. construe their fossilized differences? Four people, four differBrenda Battat is the deputy executive director of Self-Help for ent capabilities, four distinct species. Five, if you count me.

Man with wheelchair...no cell phone.

Hard of Hearing People, a national organization in Bethesda, "There is a calculus in this field that we have come to know Maryland, that counsels people who are considering traditional from decades of experience," says Ron Triolo of the Cleveland hearings aids and cochlear implants. She believes opposition to FES Center. "People don't want to lose anything they already the cochlear implant is moderating. Still, she says, technology rehave, and that includes wasted time, as well as an arm or a leg. quires an investment of time and emotion that engineers and users often aren't aware of. "Whatever technology you use, But if they can increase functionality without losing anything, they want to do that. you're still a person with a hearing loss. When the battery breaks "How we thought people would benefit from FES is different from what actual users have told "It's certainly true that the us," he continues. "For instance, we imagined that FES would be of no value unless it was nearly ingeneral population has glommed onto visible and provided a level of function comparasome principles of assistive tech. ble to the pre-injured state. We discovered we Just roll down the street and observe were talking from an ivory tower. People enjoy the o ability to make even the most rudimentary physithe ifCQlllOCยงwMitn cal motions and don't particularly care if those motions don't lead to jobs or activities associated if[fCQlmm~Itnceii[f ce(ili[fยงo W with their life pre-injury."

Triolo describes novel ways in which disabled people have taken off-the-shelf equipment and used it in sometimes alarming ways, well beyond the designer's down, there is a moment of absolute panic. It's a very scary feelimagination. A man who uses his FES system to stand has improing." That feeling of dependence relates as much to the type A vised a way to clumsily hop up and down stairs. A female FES technoid having seizures over the dead batteries in his user recently sent Triolo a picture of herself standing, a la Titanic, BlackBerry as it does to Johnny Ray adjusting to the imperfecon the bow of a boat under full sail. "If she had gone into the wa- tions of his brain implant. Anyone using an assistive technology ter.. .." He pauses to find words to convey both his fear (of massystem expects it will work every time, under a wide variety of sive product liability, perhaps) and his admiration for the conditions, without degrading any of their existing capabilities. woman's guts. In the end he can only say, "Well, you know."

Perhaps the best example of a technology solution that interIn my case, projecting my independence as a collaboration be- acts directly with the brain is the Ibot wheelchair, now in the final stage of prelaunch testing by Johnson & Johnson and the FDA. tween machine, body, and brain is an imp0l1ant message, if diffiDesigner Dean Kamen wanted to create a transportation device cult to convey. I can coast flat out and slalom effortlessly around pedestrians, and produce equal measures of awe and terror. No that would have the equivalent functionality of walking, climbmatter how skilled I am in my chair, people often wonder why I ing stairs, standing upright, and all-terrain motion. To operate in don't use a motorized one. I love using a machine I never have to upright, two-wheel stand-up mode, the Ibot uses an onboard read a manual to operate. Why can't they see the value of my computer and a system of miniaturized aviation-grade gyros to ragged optimizing strategies? Think Xtreme sports, hot-dogging. assess the center of gravity and deliver a signal to high-speed There are also deep cultural factors that sometimes surprise motors. These turn the wheels accordingly to compensate and and frustrate designers of technology for the disabled. One ofthe keep the user from falling over.

My first impression of the machine was not positive. The Ibot first machine-to-brain devices, the cochlear implant, was heris a cumbersome, complicated thing that makes you dread being alded as a miracle cure for some fOlms of deafness when it was fully introduced in the I990s. The electronic device, mounted in- stuck somewhere without a tool kit. But watch the Ibot balancside the ear, works like FES on muscle tissue. In this case, the ing, making little rocking motions to keep it upright, and you feel electrodes, responding to sound, stimulate different regions of as though you're in the presence of some humanoid intelligence.

When Kamen began testing his chair with disabled users, he the cochlea at a rate equivalent to a 91 K modem. The cochlea, in turn, sends signals to the brain that can be processed as sound. discovered an eerie and unanticipated brain-machine interface.

The device requires training the brain to decipher the implant's "Each person we took up the stairs said, 'Great.' They said great when we took them through the sand and the gravel and up the stimulus and does not replace or completely restore hearing.

Many deaf people view the implant as a form of ethnic cleansing curb and down the curb. But when we stood them up and made and physical mutilation. The cochlear implant, according to them eye level with another person, and they could feel what it

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was like to balance, every single one of them started crying."

Kamen believes that people who use the Ibot in its two-wheel balancing mode are literally feeling the experience of walking, even though the machine is doing the work. "If you could get an MRI picture ofthe balance center ofthe brain of some person in a wheelchair who goes up on the Ibot's two wheels, I bet you'd see some lights go on," he says. "I'm convinced the brain remembers balancing, and that's why people feel so much emotion."

I felt exactly that when I used the Ibot for the first time and stood upright. The chip was making the wheels move, but my brain's own sense of balance seemed to instantly merge with the machine. Its decisions seemed to be mine. No implants. No wires. It was truly extraordinary. Think FDR on a skateboard.

This raises a fairly revolutionary point about brains and the physical world. Bodies are perhaps a somewhat arbitrary evolutionary solution to issues of mobility and communication. By this argument, the brain has no particular preference for any physical configuration as long as functionality can be preserved.

Michael Williams believes that the disabled have helped humanity figure this out in terms of technology. He thinks people are rapidly losing their fear of gadgets. "The greatest thing people with disabilities have done for the general population is to make it safe to look weird. It's certainly true that the general population has glommed onto some principles of assistive tech. Just roll down the street and observe the folks with wires dangling from their ears. Look at the TV commercials featuring guys with computerized eyewear."

The history of assistive technology for the disabled shows that people will sacrifice traditional body image if they can have equivalent capabilities. It's a profound lesson for designers and people who irrationally fear brain implants. It perhaps has even more practical implications for people who are waiting for a cure to restore their functions. The brain-body-machine interface doesn't seem to need the body as much as we believe it does.

Think many different puppets ...same show.

For those open to the possibility, the definition of human includes a whole range of biological-machine hybrids, of which I am only one. The ultimate promise of brain-machine technology is to add functionality-enhanced vision, hearing, strength-to people without disabilities. There is nothing of a technological nature to suggest that this can't happen, and in small but significant ways it has already begun. The organic merging of machine and body is a theme of human adaptation that predates the digital age.

As I think about the quarter century I've spent in a wheelchair, there are almost no traditional concepts to describe the experience. As I weave around the obstructions of the world's lowbandwidth architecture, with its narrow doors and badly placed steps, I find my journey to be less and less some sentimental, stoic "go on with your life, brave boy" kind of thing and more part of a universal redrafting of the human design specification. I am drawn back to Michael Williams and his disarming motto: "The disabled have made it O.K. to look weird." There is such wisdom and promise in that statement.

People with disabilities-who for much of human history died or were left to die-are now, due to medical technology, living full lives. As they do, the definition of humanness has begun to widen. I remember encountering, on a street corner in Kinshasa in the former Zaire, a young man with the very same spinal cord injury as my own, rolling around in a fabulous, canopied hand-pedaled bike/wheelchair/street RV He came up to me with a gleam of admiration for my chair and invited me to appreciate his solution to the brain-body interface problem. We shared no common language, but he immediately recognized how seamlessly my body and chair merged. That machine-body integrity is largely invisible to the people who notice only the medical/tragedy aspect of my experience. I could see how he had melded even more completely with his chair-in fact, it was almost impossible to see where his body left off and his welded-tube contraption began. It was clear he was grateful for my admiration.

As time has passed, I am conscious of how little I miss specific functions of my pre-accident body, how little I even remember them in any concrete way. I used to think this was some psychological salve to keep me from being depressed over what has been a so-far irreversible injury. I have come to believe that what is really going on is a much more interesting phenomenon. My brain has remapped my physical functions onto the physical world by using my remaining nonparalyzed body, a variety of new muscle skills, tools, reconfigured strategies for movement and other functions, and by making the most of unforeseen advantages (good parking spaces, for instance). This is something that has taken me years to learn.

My daughters have never known any other way of looking at me. As they grow older, they will no doubt be introduced by people around them to the more conventional way of thinking about their poor, injured, incapacitated daddy. I suspect they will see the flaws in this old way of thinking far more quickly than their little friends who come though our house warily regarding the man in the purple chair with wheels.

In a straightforward way that needs no psychological jargon to explain, my former body simply doesn't exist anymore. Like Isaac Stern and his violin, I am now part chair, with some capabilities that exceed my original specifications.

There's a very old story about a puppet that worked so hard to live in the real world, it eventually stopped being a puppet. The experience of interacting in the world connected this wooden puppet to the humans around him to the point where he was indistinguishable from them. An unstated corollary of the fable is that the humans were equally indistinguishable from the wooden puppet. I'm not lying.

Think Pinocchio. Think real boy.

D About the Author: John Hockenberry is a New reporter for Dateline NBC. He has worked for the Radio and ABC News and has written for The New New Yorker, J.D., The Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post.

York City-based National Public York Times, The Details and The

Geoff Turner, self-taught prosthetics engineer, in his San Francisco apartment.

Born to Run Microchips promise to make artificial legs as good as new: Fastforward amputees are remaking life and limb on their own.

The race is on.

G

eoff Turner's San Francisco apartment is a personal museum of one man's struggle with technology. A dozen broken artificial legs line his walls, a rogue's gallery of fractured prosthetic knees, cracked plastic feet, and shattered hopes. Each nowuseless medical device comes with its own story: where it broke, how much it hUli, how many calls to manufacturers and insurance companies Turner had to make to get it replaced.

In the 10 years since his right leg was

amputated just above the knee, Turner has seen firsthand the limits of limbreplacement technology. Yet from the day he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, he has stubbornly insisted that the setback wouldn't prevent him from running, bicycling, or whatever the hell else he wants to do. Turner's spirit seems indestructible; it's the plastic and metal components he straps on every day that have failed to keep up.

"This thing," he says, picking up a snapped knee, "lasted six months before

it completely crapped out." Like a curator, he moves to the next exhibit, a battered Flex-Foot, a carbon-fiber prosthesis marketed as "Life Without Limitations."

"The heel broke on this," Turner says. "It made a sound like a shotgun blast. I stepped off the curb, and it just went. A bunch of French tourists behind me hit the deck."

devices," says John Michael, a prosthetist and president of CPO Services, a Minneapolis-based industry consulting firm. "You couldn't make a knee more responsive without making it heavier or more complicated. And that makes it less reliable. Microchips change the rules completely. This is a tremendous window of

First came spring-loaded feet and air-cushioned sockets. Next up: an electronic knee that senses its environment and makes adjustments on the fI): Turner, a 36-year-old supervisor of business development at a law firm, long ago stopped waiting for someone to build a better leg. Instead, he set out to construct his own. He consulted prosthetic experts, studied prosthetic design, and enlisted a local engineering shop to saw, bolt, and weld together components from various artificial-limb manufacturers. He swapped out graphite for sturdier titanium, replaced air-pump pneumatic parts with hydraulics, and fashioned an extralong ankle for additional stability. Turner has worn his homemade leg almost exclusively for five years, longer than he's used any off-the-shelf product.

Artificial legs have advanced significantly over the past several decades, mostly in materials, progressing from wood and metal to plastics, and, now, carbon fiber. But as Turner's collection demonstrates, those improvements haven't gone far enough for the most active amputees. They want replacement limbs that can not only tackle everyday tasks-climbing stairs or treading on uneven ground-but also sports and other physical challenges.

That's where the microprocessor comes in. Embedded chips, paired with sophisticated sensors, are ushering in a new generation of prosthetic components that makers promise will replicate, with increasing fidelity, the complex functions of a healthy limb. "Prior to the microchip era, designers were limited by the mechanical abilities of

opportunity."

Researchers at Duke, Oregon State University, and other institutions have already begun equipping artificial arms and hands with microchips that will help control fine manipulation. But prosthetic legs pose special technological and engineering challenges, since they have to perform complex tasks while withstanding much greater weight loads and maintaining balance. The first rudimentary microprocessor-controlled prosthetic legs are already available. A chip handles only two functions of the limb--how fast it swings and when it locks. One version, called the C-Leg, made by German company Otto Bock, came on the market in 1999. Those who wear it praise its design-after they get past the hefty $40,000 price tag. (The components for a basic above-the-knee prosthetic leg cost about $2,000, but prosthetists' fees can bring the total closer to between $10,000 and $15,000. A top-ofthe-line mechanical prosthesis for an above-the-knee amputee typically costs about $18,000.) "Before the C-Leg, I never had confidence in any artificial leg," says Matt Wise, a 23-year-old above-the-knee amputee. "It's given me that confidence.

It's made me feel that I can do more."

With the microchip barrier broken, things can get really interesting. The immediate challenge is to increase processing power, in order to create an artificialleg that can manage balance, stability, and comfort on its own. The notion of a

truly bionic leg-wired to the brain and able to respond like the original appendage or better-is still the stuff of science fiction. But a new class of digitally controlled "smart" legs that can lend much more freedom and confidence is under development.

MIT's Leg Laboratory, a research facility that's dedicated to studying locomotion and reproducing it robotically, is working on a knee, informed by sensors and guided by a microchip, that will adapt to a patient's individual needs so that a prosthetist won't have to make continual minor adjustments.

Sandia National Laboratories, teamed with a group of Russian nuclear scientists funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), is also developing a microchipembedded knee. German and British companies are working on versions of their own.

Next year, perhaps, an even bolder innovation will be unveiled: a device called the Smart Integrated Lower Limb, which is the brainchild of the Seattle Orthopedic Group Inc., a private prosthetics firm, and Sandia, again working with Russian researchers. This leg, which will cost at least $3 million to develop, will be entirely digitally controlled. Not only the knee, but also the ankle, foot, and leg socket will gather information from sensors and receive instructions from a software-guided chip. Its makers believe the smart integrated leg is the starting point for the development of a replacement limb that's almost good as new.

It all sounds great on paper, but a string of manufacturers' broken promises over the years has made many amputeesGeoff Turner included-skeptical about the idea of the digital age coming to their rescue. Turner points out another item in his collection-a supposedly revolutionary knee constructed of superlight graphite, now split into two pieces. "I'm willing to try new things," he says. "But I'm not going to throwaway what I have just for something with some bells and whistles."

Harvard-MIT researcher Hugh Herr is familiar with the obstacles faced by amputees like Turner. A world-class mountain climber at the age of 17, Herr

and a friend were trapped in a snowstorm while ascending New Hampshire's Mount Washington in 1982. After three days without food or camping gear, the two were rescued, but frostbite cost Herr both legs, which were amputated just below the knee. Herr was fitted with prostheses, but he soon discovered they were developed for walking on flat surfaces, not for taking on advanced functions like climbing or running. With the same determination he once applied to climbing, he set out to create a better prosthetic leg. Like Turner, he worked with an engineering shop to fashion his own prostheses, tinkering with customized sockets and lighter materials.

He even designed artificial feet specially made for climbing rock (built flat and narrow for getting a toehold in cracks) and ice (featuring sharp spikes).

"I experienced a tremendous amount of pain from prosthetic limbs at first," Herr says. "So I decided to go back to school and learn about physics and engineering to try to solve these problems." Herr obtained a master's in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1993 and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard five years later.

Now 37 and a faculty member in both biophysics and computer science at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Sciences, and Technology, Herr holds half a dozen patents for prosthetic leg improvements; among them are springloaded feet that store energy and provide thrust to the leg, and sockets cushioned with air for added comfort. He's spent the past two years as codirector of the MIT Leg Laboratory, tackling his greatest design challenge: an electronic knee that can analyze information about its environment and make adjustments on the fly.

The quest for a better prosthesis stretches back thousands of years. The first known reference to an artificial limb appears in the Rig Veda, a sacred Vedic text dated around 1400 BC. In the account, the warrior Queen Vishpala's lost leg is replaced with an iron substitute, enabling her to return to battle. The Egyptians were among the first to produce artificial limbs on a large scale, and mummies with fake limbs have been found.

But ancient prosthetics were limited by

crude materials, engineering, and surgical techniques. For centuries, the artificial limb's enduring image was the wooden peg leg of pirate lore.

It took modern warfare to advance the technology significantly. The Civil War produced 30,000 amputees in the Union army alone, and touched off the development of prosthetic components that were lighter, stronger, and more balanced, featuring hinged knees and rubber feet. Two world wars produced another wave of amputees, leading to further advances such as knees that flexed with the help of hydraulics.

Currently, there are about 1.3 million amputees in the U.S. An additional 100,000 people undergo lower-limb amputations here each year, according to estimates from the National Limb Loss Information Center. Worldwide, prosthetics and orthotics (the making of braces) have become a $2 billion industry, and the increasingly widespread use of land mines in Third World countries is leading to more amputees.

Today's amputees, however, face many centuries-old problems. The two biggest are that ordinary prosthetic legs produce no power of their own and can't receive sensory information the way living limbs can. An amputee who once called upon the complex interaction of muscles, tendons, and ligaments to provide just the right amount of thrust while maintaining

the brain. The brain in turn sends instructions to the leg on how it should bend and adjust. Without signals traveling in both directions, amputees wearing conventional prostheses will always find it difficult to maintain a normal gait, and constantly risk falls and injury. Chip-controlled legs could help them overcome this difficulty.

The C-Leg, the current state of the art, contains two sets of sensors-one in the knee that measures position and another in the shin that tracks force. Data is zapped to a microprocessor 50 times per second, and it adjusts the resistance of the leg-an action known as damping-for a range of speeds and activities. But like purely mechanical prostheses, the C-Leg must be carefully readjusted by a specialist. These settings can be thrown off if, say, the patient's weight changes or he wears a heavier pair of shoes.

Herr says he and Leg Lab codirector Gill Pratt have a solution: a smart knee that automatically adapts to the amputee.

"It's as if a patient al,ways has a professional there to modulate the knee resistances," Herr says. Their creation-now in clinical trials and expected to be released this summer by Icelandic manufacturer Ossur-features a 6812 Motorola processor and three sensors that measure force, torque, and position. Sensors generate a digital snapshot of the wearer's gait, which is analyzed by onboard software, and the appropriate level of damping is

The first known reference to an artificial limb appears in the Rig Veda, a sacred Vedic text dated around 1400 Be.

balance now has to fling forward what is essentially deadweight. To combat this, energy-storing feet were developed in the 1980s, featuring a spring that captures the power created at the strike of the heel and uses it to propel the leg forward.

A healthy leg is also continually receiving information from nerves about position, terrain, and speed, and sending it to

sent to the knee. The damping is performed by metal plates separated by an iron-rich substance called magnetorheological fluid. The microprocessor switches the magnetic field around the fluid on and off, altering the way plates move past each other, and thus adjusting the resistance in the knee. The magnetic system operates under lower pressure than the

oil-filled hydraulics used by the C-Leg, which should make the MIT knee last longer. As the smart knee was being designed, Herr tested some of the prototypes on a willing subject-himself.

"I could test the knee and immediately tell the team what was wrong," says Herr.

"You can't get that kind of feedback from the average patient."

Currently, the C-Leg is the only prosthetic device that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies as a class II medical device, meaning it interacts directly with the body rather than simply being attached to it. But most insurers won't cover the $40,000 cost; only 300 amputees in the U.S. and 2,000 worldwide are using the C-Leg. "Because the numbers are so small in terms of the patient population, amputees are an easy group for insurance companies to ignore," says Doug McCormack, counsel to the Amputee Coalition of America. "We're talking hundreds of thousands of people, not the tens of millions with cancer or healt disease."

Herr's knee, which is likely to cost considerably less, will be covered by Medicare for any amputee who can walk without crutches or a cane.

After struggling for a decade to come up with a better prosthetic limb, just getting the knee to market will be a personal triumph for Herr-yet another mountain

movement of the whole leg. "If we are really successful in doing this thing, it will be phenomenal," says SOG! president Jim Cairns. "It'll be bigger than anything we've seen in this industry."

From the outside, the company's Poulsbo, Washington, manufacturing headquarters looks like a typical factory.

Once through the door, however, you step into an eerie world: an artificial-leg assembly line. One machine churns out dozens of uncannily human-looking feet, produced under the direction of lab-coatclad workers blasting Aerosmith over a boom box. The artificial feet, which begin as solid blocks of plastic, are first fashioned into thin "keels." A coating machine then adds a lifelike rubbery shell and spits out a still-warm appendage-complete with veins-every minute and 40 seconds. "That's the best-looking foot on the market in the world," Cairns says proudly.

"Everybody tries to do this, but nobody comes close." A bucket of small parts for infants bears a label that reads 3/16 INCH BABY. Across the factory floor, two prosthetic feet sit on a shelf, serving as bookends for technical manuals.

The stocky, gray-haired Cairns gives me a tour of the floor. Like a happy father, he picks up a prosthetic knee axle and points out that the titanium must be shaped within a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch. "Every one of them is for a dif-

Researchers are already taking steps to integrate smart limbs directly into the body.

The endgame is to connect a prosthesis with the brain. conquered.

"It's been a long road," he says. "But I think I'm finally in a position to make a difference." .The engineers at the Seattle Orthopedic Group Inc. (SOG!) say their planned Smart Integrated Lower Limb won't simply improve existing prosthetic technology-it will transform it. They aim to create an artificial limb in which a chip controls not only the knee's resistance, but the

ferent amputee," he shouts over the clamor of machinery. "And we make them all day, every day."

So far, all the prostheses coming off the SOGI assembly line are "dumb," containing only mechanical components. But Cairns predicts that in two to three years, his factory will be turning out chip-controlled smart legs en masse. He is betting big, committing 50 percent of the company's engineering team and $1.5 million to

the smart-limb project.

The basic idea of the smart integrated limb is that an artificial leg, like a healthy one, should function as a unit, not as a collection of isolated components. Digital technology offers the best way to let various prosthetic components communicate with one another, establishing an overall control system that monitors the patient's movements and directs limb motion.

SOGI's next-gen leg will feature multiple sensors such as strain gauges, inclinometers, rate gyros, and accelerometers, placed in the limb socket, knee, ankle, and foot.

These sensors will feed a constant stream of information on pressure, position, and speed back to a central processor. The chip's software analyzes the data and sends instructions back to control the hydraulic joints and piezoelectric motors that power the ankle, knee, and socket. The leg socket also adjusts to the changing diameter of the patient's stump over the coW"se of a day, greatly improving comfort.

Three pressure sensors attached to the bottom of the foot are connected to a system that can deliver a mild buzz to electrodes attached to the residual limb. Using these electrical cues, amputees could train their limb to "feel" their prosthetic foot as it hits the ground. This Hanger Sensory System, as SOG! calls it, will be integrated into the company's products later this year.

The integrated leg will also provide power assistance for pushing off when standing up or climbing. Precision sensors will determine when a boost is needed, and activate tiny motors driven by the chip. Power, says Cairns, is the key to making the integrated limb helpful for the largely older population of amputees.

"We want to make it more comfortable," he says. "But comfort is not just how the residual limb fits in the socket. It's how you get out of a chair, and how you're able to walk on different teITain."

Programming this functionality into a single chip will require software that can keep track of all the components, while controlling adjustments to the motors, hydraulics, and socket. A failure in any area-say, engaging the motors too soon or tightening the socket too much-could make an amputee wish he had never made

the switch to digital.

For the task of programming a single chip to direct all this sensory traffic, Cairns is enlisting the help of Sandia Labs and a posse of scientists from a Russian nuclear facility called Chelyabinsk 70.

The goal was a prosthetic rolling-joint foot-a new type of mechanical energystoring device designed by Mark Pitkin, a Russian-born professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, in conjunction with American prosthetics manufacturer Ohio Willow Wood (OWW).

Pitkin's rolling-joint foot was released in 2000, although none of the Russian work was incorporated into the product.

Still, the project was deemed successful enough to again employ Chelyabinsk technicians. In 1999, Sandia landed DOE funding for a second effort with OWW and the Russians: a chip-controlled knee to take on the C-Leg. That product, which Ohio Willow Wood says will be made of titanium and feature a hydraulic damping control, is now being tested by the Russians.

"It's too early to speak about full success," says Anatoly Ivanov, director of Spektr-Conversion, the Russian agency heading the work in Chelyabinsk. "But first tests were conducted, and they showed that we are going in the right direction. Disabled athletes and those who want to conduct a more active life are waiting for such prostheses."

For SOGI's project, Sandia plans to use a third DOE grant of $1.5 million to hire as many as 120 Chelyabinsk researchers.

Getting the SOG! limb to market will require extensive international coordination, overcoming language and logistical barriers to get a product designed, developed, and tested by engineers thousands of miles apart. "It's going to be a real nightmare when you've got a government agency involved with the Russians," concedes Guy Houser, director of research and development at SOG!. "The Russians are marching to their own drum, Sandia is marching to theirs. So there are three different cultures here that will have to be melded."

The Russian researchers are optimistic the obstacles can be overcome, and they'll own the rights to market any new prosthetic technology they develop in their

own country. "Russian scientists, former weapons designers, understand the importance of the issues they are dealing with," says Ivanov.

Cairns insists that the technology is there; all that's been lacking is the coordination to get the job done. "Obviously, there is some clever programming to be done here," he says. "But for the most part, we're talking about existing technologies that are being packaged in a different way."

of losing more of the residual limb, and even death. But 50 patients have undergone lower-limb osseointegration in Sweden, the U.K., and Australia. Eighty percent, says Branemark, are using their attached limbs successfully.

With osseo integration, smart prostheses like Herr's or SOGI's could one day be permanently attached to the body, combining the best of human and digital controls. "It could initiate new and improved design of prosthetic components," says

The assembly line coats thin "keels" with a lifelike rubbery shell-complete with veins-pumping out a new foot every minute and 40 seconds.

The human leg's functions are too complex, and too poorly understood, for current biomechanics technology to replicate them precisely. But research is already under way to take smart prosthetics to the next level: integrating the limbs directly into the body.

Hugh Herr and colleague Robert Dennis, working in the MIT AI Lab, are using frog muscles to power small robots, a step toward using living tissue to enhance prostheses. Muscles, says Herr, provide "this amazing transduction efficiency between the fuel supply and useful work. We need real muscle in prosthetic limbs, or we need a synthetic version.

Once we have that, prosthetics, orthotics, humanoid robots, everything will change profoundly."

One promising research area involves a surgical method known as osseo integration, in which hardware for a prosthesis is attached permanently to the patient. The procedure, originally developed for dental surgery by Swedish doctor Rickard Branemark, fastens a titanium implant to the bone at the end of the residual limb.

Six months later, an additional piece of titanium attaches the leg to an external prosthesis--eliminating the need for the limb socket entirely. The procedure, which isn't approved in the U.S., carries the risk of severe infection, the possibility

Branemark, "including more advanced systems with feedback from the prosthesis to the human body. The treatment has the potential to improve quality of life for amputees and decrease their limitations.

But it will take another 10 years."

The endgame is to connect a prosthesis with the brain. "With just local mechanical sensing, it's challenging to detect things like the upcoming stairs," says Herr. "But if we could tap into the person, then we could use their eyes. They can tell their knee that the stairs are there, without having to push a button. Now the person's brain is in control."

Geoff Turner, characteristically, isn't waiting for the next generation of prosthetic legs to roll off the assembly line.

He's still busy tweaking his garage designs, looking for ways to improve his own creations. "I think smart limbs are a great idea," he says. "I'd love to try a leg like that. But for now I'm sticking with what I have."

Turner knows, better than most, about constraints-and not just those imposed by technology. "The people who make these legs tell you everything will be great, that you'll be free of limitations.

0 Hello? No one is free of limitations."

About the Author: Evan Ratliff is a contributing editor a/Wired magazine.

HIRING

WORI{ERS WITH

DISABILITIES Just because a person is blind, deaf, confined to a wheelchair or is otherwise disabled does not mean he or she is unemployable. Workers with disabilities are an untapped market of job-seekers.

orporate participation in publicpri vate partnerships to encourage hiring workers with disabilities has blossomed in recent years, as demonstrated by the more-than-tenfold increase in Business Leadership Network sites and their record number of member employers.

There are similar gains in other programs.

Reasons given range from the need for diversity and an increased pool of available talent to "it's the right thing to do."

Here are three examples of companies partnering to strengthen ties to workers and potential workers with disabilities.

C

Monster.com: Making the Company Available A number of companies-notably in the computer and Internet industries-go further and are making strategic business decisions based on accommodation of this segment of the population.

The computer has made it much easier for disabled workers to work in meaningful positions, and IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and others have enhanced the possibilities by producing hardware, accessories, and software designed specifically for people with handicaps of one kind or another.

Internet-based job-search firm Monster.com worked with the Presidential Task Force on Employment of Adults With Disabilities to developand continues to help maintain-the www.disabilitydirect.gov employment Web site. Dodie Perkins, the company's vice president for business development, explains why: "As a young company, we are constantly looking for ways to embed our product in the minds of potential customers; everything we do must add business value. So we search for opportunities in areas that may not be all that visible but that wi 11generate a return.

Working with the Presidential Task Force offered us a chance to help develop something that not only does good things but also returns business value.

"Workers with disabilities are an underserved market of job-seekers who need to be connected with job opportunities," Perkins continues. "Once we understood the breadth and depth of the disabled community, we needed to find ways to reach them, and the task-force initiative helped us do that. What we tried to identifY was the best path-how we could make ourselves available, accessible, and productive as a

provider of a service they wanted and needed.

"In this case, being accessible means changing our structure to reach a specific audience. Our ultimate goal is to meet the highest federal standard for accessibility to persons with disabilities. Entering into this partnership was a business decisionbased on a vast potential number of customers-that is also cause-based. We are on the Web, which offers opportunity for access to information. We want to help people help themselves, and we want to be successful ourselves."

The connection is perhaps more obvious between the computer industry and the disability population than for other kinds of businesses. The Employers' Forum on Disability, a U.K.-based, corporate-led organization that studies the impact of disabilities on business, says that poor presentation of the business case is one reason why companies do not employ people with disabilities, but that, more significantly, the exclusion of disabled people stems from fear and stereotyping.

The group believes there is a sufficiently powerful, long-term business case to be made that challenges "deeply rooted assumptions which currently prevent po-

tential business benefits from being realized. Exclusion from the workplace has a negative impact on individuals, places a financial cost on society and a tax burden on business, and hence affects profitability and competitiveness."

Boeing: Practicing Inclusion ¡Wray D. Calahan, human resource specialist for Boeing Co., says the airplane giant works with Metropolitan Employment and Rehabi Iitation Service (MERS), a group that promotes the hiring of persons with disabilities. As in many other similar partnerships, MERS and Boeing have found that hiring temporary workers-in this case, mostly clerical support-is a good way to determine a worker's capabilities. Calahan says many are hired longterm, and that they are often among the company's most valued employees: "Disabled people often work harderthey want to show they can do the job as

well as someone else. It's a matter of pride." Boeing recruiters also look for applicants with disabilities during their recruiting trips and at job fairs.

"One of the hardest things to do," Calahan says, "is to keep an obvious disability from immediately disqualifying an applicant at the operations level. Most of our people are hired into union positions, and there is no up-front identification.

Supervisors often have no experience with disabilities, and they need to be convinced that the person can do the job. We make it a practice to do so.

One supervisor objected to the hiring of a very experienced, hearing-impaired sheet-metal worker, saying, 'I can't have someone who can't hear working in my sheet-metal department.' After he understood that the man had been working successfully in sheet metal for 10 years, everything was fine, and the employee is still on the job."

Disability experts believe that people with disabilities will be routinely excluded from the workforce unless something is done to increase direct contact between business leaders and this pool of potential employees, an enabling environment for the disability community is created; and the diversity mindset is consciously broadened to include them.

Verizon: Building Technical Skills Recently begun, the Training 2001 partnership between Verizon and Abilities Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Long Island, New York, is designed to help both individuals with disabilities who are preparing for employment and the vocational rehabilitation professionals who work with them. Working side by side with Verizon employees at the company's multimedia training center in Patchogue, New York, job-seekers with disabilities can learn technical and other businessrelated skills to enhance their prospects, and employees of the referral agencies who work with them can build their professional skills as well.

Jeff Sampson, associate director of community affairs at Verizon, says his company hopes Training 2001 will help overcome two major stumbling blocks: • Many people with disabilities have the desire to work but lack the training needed to succeed in today's technology-driven economy . • The professional staffs of nonprofit vocational rehabi litation organizations often do not receive levels of training available to others in the private sector, and this can limit their effectiveness.

To address this, several hundred free computer-based training programs focusing on technical and managerial skills are offered. Each lasts anywhere from several hours to two days. The minimum requirement is that individuals must have a basic knowledge of computers and be able to operate a keyboard and mouse. Most of the programs have been designed to be both aural and visual.

D About the Author: Meredith Armstrong Whiting is a senior research fellow in government affairs at The Conference Board.

It gave us the Internet and the mouse. Today, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency remains a powerful engine driving technological change.

Ingenious

Technologies Nothing quite like it had ever been attempted. Deep in the California desert in March 2000, as a few fatigues-clad u.s. Marines stood nearby, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, fiddled with a 1.S-meter airplane with six walnut-sized bundles of electronics attached to the undersides of its wings. Each bundle, swaddled in pink plastic, held a magnetic-field sensor, short-range radio transmitter, antenna and microprocessor run by a custom low-powered operating system dubbed "Tiny as."

And then the remote-controlled plane, freighted with the early embodiments of a hoped-for advance in miniaturized, networked sensing, buzzed aloft, traveled about two kilometers and dropped its pink payload along a dirt road. Soon, as planned, a few trucks drove past the innocuous electronic spies. The bundles detected the trucks' magnetic fields, shared this information among themselves and beamed a report on the vehicles' location, speed and direction to the remote-controlled plane circling overhead. The aircraft, in turn, relayed the news to the researchers and soldiers waiting on the rugged terrain of the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, California.

The bundles were crude prototypes, and it took days to get even this limited experiment right. But someday thousands of similar devices-only much tinier, perhaps as small as dust motes-might be deployed to collect and process a rich alTaY of information about enemy movements, crop conditions, pollution or anything else requiring monitoring. Realizing such a vision will demand advances in everything from microscale sensors to materials to programming. It's a huge undertaking.

But there's a common benefactor: the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which brokered the desert experiment and is funding ambitious investigations into each of the technologies involved.

Commonly known as DARPA, this is the U.S. Department of Defense's storied outpost of technology research-military systems, yes, but also innovations that sometimes create and transform industries. Formed in 1958, in the technological frenzy sparked by the Soviet Union's launch of its Sputnik satellite, DARPA boasts a four-decade-Iong history of promoting novel technologies-today doling out nearly $2 billion annually to corporate, government and university researchers in support of high-risk, potentially high-impact ideas. Among its many successes, DARPA's gambles proved instrumental in spawning the Internet and the computer mouse, stealth aircraft and the chip that makes your cell

phone work-advances that meant research as out-of-the-box in its time as dust-mote-sized sensors seem today.

DARPA is hardly the only player funding cutting-edge research-think National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health-and certainly not the deepest pocketed. But the agency's swashbuckling style of betting on seemingly far-out research-and bringing together interdisciplinary teams that it pushes toward a practical advance-sets it apart. And while some contend that DARPA has moved back from the cutting edge in recent years, concentrating too much on short-term military issues rather than truly breakthrough ideas, no one denies that the agency remains a powerful engine oftechnological change. "An awful lot of the good stuff we have today is there because DARPA was willing to take a chance on visionary projects," says David Waltz, president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. "They are the visionary agency."

Mundane

Powerhouse

nits physical aspect, DARPA is nothing if not mundane. The critical decisions that agency officials make on exotic technologies are rendered in an unremarkable leased office building in Arlington, Virginia. There are no labs here; DARPA is a funding agency, not a research facility. No sign advertises DARPA's tenancy to passerby. Except for the anti-eavesdropping gadgets glued to its conference-room windows, this edifice of black-hued glass could pass for an insurance company. But once in the lobby, newcomers must submit their social security numbers to "Visitor Contro!." Guards ask, "classified or unclassified?" and make sure guests stay in sight (around here, it's a no-no to wander into a hallway in search of the water cooler, and telephones bear labels warning that conversations are recorded).

The offices are filled with about 240 employees, of whom half are technical staff-program managers whose job is to shape the work DARPA funds and scour the country for promising new ideas. In keeping with DARPA's antibureaucratic

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ethos, these managers are not career government employees but experts on loan from universities, corporations and federal research labs, pulling stints at DARPA of between three and five years.

"DARPA is the [Department of Defense's] center for revolutionary ideas. It is a true bottom-up organization where program managers are the heart and soul," says Anthony J. Tether, the agency's director.

"We hire people who have a dream that they cannot get fulfilled elsewhere ....

DARPA program managers are by nature risk takers; they are passionate about making a difference."

It is in the arena of emerging technologies-funding for research makes up 56 percent of the agency's $2.2 billion 2002 budget-that the greatest triumps have come. And a look at the agency's current lineup shows plenty of potential for future successes. Want microscopically small machines? DARPA was an early funder of efforts to produce miniature mirrors, sensors and gauges-devices used in so-called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-that are now widely employed in industry. Want tiny, low-powered computers?

DARPA is backing work on logic and memory components as small as individual molecules.

Want thousands of sensors (or little robots) to synthesize observations or coordinate actions? DARPA is funding the networking technologies and software they'll need. Want something to quickly detect tiny amounts of viruses and other pathogens? DARPA is working on that, too, and a lot more.

It all adds up to a diverse panoply of projects, but the principle on which they are chosen is the same: "We're about surprise. Prevent surprise, and create surprise," says Jane Alexander, the agency's deputy director. "You need a skunk works, somebody over in the corner who is anticipating what your opponent is doing and what you are going to answer that with, and also is anticipating what your next generation is-what are you going to surprise somebody with. DARPA is that thing."

But the key to the agency's success lies not so much in its mission as in its unique

~ DARPA is working on this organic all;ยง weather targeting air vehicle that will provide direct and indirect weapons system 8 targeting under all operating conditions, including adverse weather.

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administrative model and management philosophy. For starters, before DARPA officials even decide what to fund, "one of the questions senior management asks is, 'Is somebody else able to do this problem?' If they are, let them do it," says Alexander. And ifnot, DARPA primes the pump-providing enough time and money for the technology to take root in the commercial world. "With the right investment at the right time, I can steer industry toward an area that will be useful. I nudge them."

These are multimillion-dollar nudges, of course, so the aim is to choose carefully. After hearing from the military about its near- and long-term needs, DARPA's program. managers design multidisciplinary programs to help meet them. Major initiatives-or "thrusts"usually last four years and incorporate five to 10 research teams; funding typically runs between $10 million and $40 million, and occasionally much more.

Whatever the scale, though, DARPA stresses teamwork among research groups and enforces short-term performance milestones. And then, just as feverishly as DARPA begins a thrust, it often pulls out. Either the teams are unable to meet their goals, or they succeed sufficiently that the commercial sector

or other research-funding sources pick up the ball. Alex Roland, a Duke University professor of military and technology history, says 85 percent of the agency's programs fail. "It's not an aspect of what they do that they want publicly displayed."

Roland says.

However, he adds, "You've got to expect a high rate of fai Iure because the payoffs are fabulous."

So where will the next big successes come from? Technology Review canvassed DARPA directors to identify today's hottest research projects. There's no guarantee any will pan out. But together they provide a representative look at the agency's most cutting-edge initiatives-and the direction technology is heading.

Glassy Metals wo seemingly unrelated events in early-1990s materials research have evolved into one of DARPA's most intriguing new areas of focus. One was the air force's ongoing quest for stronger, lighter materials to build better planes.

The second exploded into view after the Persian Gulf War. During the conflict, United States-led forces used shells made of radioactive uranium-238 to attack Iraqi tanks. Instead of flattening on impact, uranium-238 peels away in layers and actually sharpens, making it more destructive than conventional shells. But some veterans' groups soon claimed the radioactive residue caused health problems.

Plus there was an expensive environmental cleanup required. All this led the army to seek a nonradioactive replacement for its uranium projectiles.

In the mid-1990s, these parallel needs led DARPA to the Caltech lab of William L. Johnson, a pioneer in a field known as "glassy metals." Such materials look like ordinary metals, but they have a key difference: they've been fabricated so their atomic structures aren't orderly, or "crys-

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tal line," but rather random or "amorphous" in nature-like the atomic structure of glass. Scientists have known for at least a decade that a random atomic structure in a metal alloy can confer greater strength and more resistance to fracture and corrosion than are provided by crystalline structures, which contain more defects that make for weakness than amorphous structures. The problem is, glassy metals are extremely difficult and expensive to produce. In most cases, therefore, they have only existed as laboratory curiosities (an exception is Johnson's glassy zirconium-beryllium alloy, now used in high-end golf clubs).

But working under army sponsorship, Johnson's lab in 1997 came up with a glassy tungsten that not only self-sharpened-making it a potential replacement for uranium shells-but pointed the way to techniques for mass-producing glassy metals with broader applications.

Looking to direct more firepower into this potential breakthrough area, DARPA last spring began a four-year, $30 million thrust to fund efforts to model the atomic interactions that take place as metals are mixed and cooled. The hope is that this insight will lead to glassy versions of widely used metals such as aluminum, titanium and iron that can be fabricated by the ton in existing factories. The first glassy metals were discovered "by trial and error, by happenstance, some might even say alchemy," says Leo Christodoulou, DARPA's manager of the new program, called Structural Amorphous Metals.

"What we are trying to do is put [more] science behind this program, try to understand the fundamental physics."

DARPA's effort attacks the problem from several different angles.

For starters, a team led by Johnson that includes seven university labs and three military research groups will do the underlying scientific studies and computational work and create new samples. The prototype materials will then be passed to industrial partners for small-scale fabrication and testing.

Whether any fundamentally new, factory-ready-metals recipes will emerge from this collaboration is an open question. But

the potential payoff is clear: Johnson's et: group, for instance, is working on glassy iยง aluminum and magnesium alloys that ~ would possess twice the strength of their <3 crystalline counterparts. That means less material would be needed to, say, build a fighter jet or a 747, enabling it to save fuel or carry heavier payloads. "If we can successfully do this, then this is the material aircraft will be built out of in 15 years," Johnson says. "It will become a major paradigm shift in the way we use metals."

Bio:lnfo:Micro he fusion of computing with other fields has become a given in recent years. The combination of computers and communications forms the basis of the Internet. The application of computing power to drug development has spurred bioinformatics and other, related areas of genomics and proteomics. In DARPA's view, the next challenge will be linking biology and computing to the science of the very small, through devices that can detect, influence, interpret and communicate what's happening in living cells. And so DARPA last year kicked off an ambitious $35 million, four-year effort called Bio:Info:Micro. As Alexander told a group of researchers in fall 2000, there's a growing sense that merging biology with computing and micro systems "is something really new and revolutionary. In a lot of cases, we can't quite put our finger on it, but all of us, as teclmologists, think that this is a very promising area."

Two basic programs aim to fire early salvos in this predicted revolution. The first attempts to advance brain-machine interfaces-technologies that tap brain signals to control a variety of mechanical and electrical devices and can also send signals into the brain to stimulate neurons.

This program has a solid starting point: already, DARPA-funded groups from Duke University, Caltech and elsewhere have built devices (tested only on animals so far) that can be surgically implanted in the brain to detect neural signals and send those impulses via wires to computers.

The computers decode the signals, then transmit control instructions to devices like robotic arms.

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An illustration of the A 160 vertical take off and landing unmanned air vehicle under development at DARPA. The vehicle is aimed at carrying out airborne surveillance and targeting against ground targets. It will also provide an airborne link between the various ground components, command nodes and satellite terminals.

Linking brains to robotic arms is an awe-inspiring feat. But every component and process in these early systems needs loads of work. And that's where DARPA comes in. "We in the field have demonstrated the feasibility of direct communication with the brain," says Daryl Kipke, an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Michigan who is leading one of three DARPA-funded university teams working on brain-machine interfaces. Now, he says, the challenge is to vastly improve this communication with help from the thrust's three basic disciplines. Kipke's team will work to improve existing MEMS implants, adding a microfluidic device to deliver drugs to the implant site. Biologists will seek to identify which molecules should be used to make neurons grow, stay healthy and not form scar tissue. And finally, computer scientists are improving brain-data proceSSll1g.

If such systems get perfected, they could enable direct nervous-system control of prosthetic limbs, and even the realization of visions like mind-controlled mechanical "exoskeletons" that enable troops to exceed the limits of their normal strength and endurance, says Alan

Rudolph, manager of DARPA programs developing robots based on biological designs. "The ability to have direct brain-tomachine links," he notes, "could in fact augment the ability of a human to deal with [all manner of] complex systems."

The second part of DARPA's Bio:Info:Micro program funds fundamental research aimed at advancing the understanding and control of one of life's most elemental components-the communication network within a cell. A collaboration at MIT, one of three universities where DARPA is funding such studies, includes an engineer aiming to perfect microfluidic devices that can quickly measure thousands of protein interactions, a biologist extracting the cellular proteins needed to detect these interactions-and computer scientists developing algorithms to make sense of the torrent of data that should result. While DARPA isn't the only group supporting these kinds of initiatives, "I'm not aware of other funding agencies ... trying to advance all three of them simultaneously," says Douglas A. Lauffenburger, codirector of MIT's Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health and leader of DARPA's Bio:lnfo:Micro team at MIT.

The work could point the way toward extremely sensitive sensors for detecting disease in the body or chemicals in the environment. It could also lead to new approaches to building complex systemsfrom robots to software-modeled after the extraordinary adaptability and ruggedness of ordinary cells. "Cells are designed to carry out very robust, reliable, simple sets of behaviors under highly variable, unpredictable conditions," says Lauffenburger. But the research is so fundamental, he adds, it's hard to predict what the first payoff might be.

Automa-Teams na major report in 2000, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear their hope that robots would soon handle war's most dangerous tasks. Drone bombers would make early strikes. Robots would clear mines and even fire weapons. Tiny sensor-bots would spy on the enemy and look for evidence of chemical and biological weapons. But to realize this vision, the military needs a way to safely and reliably coordinate and control a robotic fleet that could number in the tens of thousands. It's a mindboggling command and control problem, says Sharon Heise, a program manager in DARPA's Information Technology Office. "But the payoff is enormous if we can get it done."

With that in mind, DARPA recently announced a four-year, $65 million thrust called Mixed Initiative Control of Automa- Teams. The agency says the time is right for such a sweeping effortuniting researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer programming.

Indeed, increasingly sophisticated robots for everything from mine clearing to air warfare have traveled far down the prototype pipeline, including a Boeing-built, DARPA-funded unmanned bomber that took its first flight test last summer. But many robots have been more impressive in their mechanics than in their software and control systems.

The software required to control just one unmanned bomber is complex enough, she notes, integrating sensor data on parameters like wind speed, velocity and pitch, and then making a blaze of cal-

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culations and sending operating instructions to wing flaps, engines and bomb bay doors. "Now imagine expanding that to a number of vehicles. Now network those vehicles together. Now try to determine, how do you control those vehicles to a target? ..the scaling happens so rapidly that it is very difficult to quantify."

DARPA's program doesn't seek to immediately provide all the answers-but rather to develop underlying theories of how to attack the problem. Explains Heise, "Those theories are implemented in fundamental mathematical algorithms, which are implemented in software and then demonstrated through modeling."

DARPA expects this small-scale demonstration by 2005.

In many ways, the Automa-Teams project also gets to the heart of one of the most daunting issues in computing. That is, programming the actions of the thousands, if not millions, of massively distributed and often interconnected sensors and computer systems that will soon permeate everything from cell phones to cars to machinery to appliances. Already DARPA supports about a dozen programs in this "embedded computing" arena, of which Automa- Teams is just the latest. "Embedded computing is perhaps the biggest impact area of computing because it literally changes the physical environment around us," says Janos Sztipanovits, acting deputy director of DARPA's Information Technology Office. "It's a completely new software technology. That is where it gets quite exciting."

Playing Favorites here's no disputing DARPA's past success or current ambition, but the agency is not without its critics.

One complaint is that DARPA seems to disproportionately award its grants to a small universe of major universities, corporations and researchers. "I've heard complaints that DARPA plays favorites both with people that it chooses for projects and the companies it selects as contractors. It's hard to break into the club," says NEC's Waltz. Another gripe, Waltz notes, is that DARPA managers can be

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a bit controlling and unreasonable.

"DARPA, when they give you money, they feel they own your life. They call a meeting and expect you to drop everything and come and be prepared."

Waltz thinks such faults are forgivable in light of DARPA's historical output.

But a more consistent-and fundamental-concern is that the agency has developed a shorter-term focus. "The biggest criticism that can be leveled at DARPA from the mid-1990s on is their telescope receded from distant galaxies to the nearby planets," says Kenneth Flamm, a Clinton-era Department of Defense official overseeing technology policy who now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. During the Clinton administration, Flamm says, DARPA acceded to "pressure to show more military relevance."

Whether the Bush administration, with its emphasis on missile defense, cares to swing the pendulum toward more generic research remains to be seen. The challenge for DARPA, of course, is to promote technology's grandest dreams and show military relevance. Indeed, that's what was happening at the Marine Corps proving grounds, where Berkeley researchers demonstrated their walnutsized electronic spies.

Six months later, the Berkeley group had almost finished building electronic bundles just one cubic millimeter in size-well on their way to creating the envisioned "smart dust" that could both help the military and revolutionize commercial monitoring and sensing. "Given where technology is headed, there is no question" that tiny networked sensors would have been invented someday, says Kris Pister, associate professor of electrical engineering at Berkeley. However, he adds, DARPA accelerates that process by promoting emerging technologies that are blue sky-but requiring them to fly in the deselt sky.

0 About the Author: David Talbot is the founder chairman and editor-in-chief of salon. com, a news Web site, and is based in San Francisco. Before starting salon.com in November 1995, he was the arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

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n the summer of 1987, nearly 15 years before words

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:i like "anthrax" and "bioterror" saturated our vocabu-

: lary, an unassuming biology professor named John . Collier went to hear a graduate student give a talk on Bacillus anthracis. Collier was interested in anthrax because of a peculiar property of the bacteria. Anthrax, Iike a few other microbes, extrudes a deadly toxin that is capable of wreaking havoc on human cells. In fact, anthrax's most frightful symptoms-the coal-colored dimples that erupt into pustules and the volcanic hemorrhages that pour out of the organs-are actually just manifestations of this toxin's actions. And yet, despite decades of intensive military research on anthrax, little was known about how the toxin worked or how humans could be protected from its effects.

Corlier was actually something of an aficionado of bacterial toxins:. In the mid-1960s and 1970s, he and a group of colleagues had deciphered the mechanism for the toxin made by diphtheria. In his laboratory at Harvard, Collier had another set of graduate students tinkering with a toxin produced by a bacterium called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. So while listening tolthat talk in 1987, Collier decided that anthrax would be his next target. "It wasn't even a conscious choice," he recalls.

"As a biologist, youjust had to be intrigued."

Tn the wake of September Il, Collier's reasoning is worth remembering. Since the World Trade Center fell, there have

been numerous exhortations to American scientists to turn their attention to the terrorist threat. The Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services have issued calls to researchers for proposals that pertain to the War on Terrorism.

Nearly $2 billion in funding is now available for anti-terror research. Georgia Senator Max Cleland has even called for a new anti-terror Manhattan Project to be led by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), declaring: "This is a race for the best minds, the best talent, and the best technology we can find in the realm of biological, chemical, and radiological warfare."

But Collier didn't embark on a IS-year investigation into anthrax because he was worried about bioterrorism or germ warfare. In fact, his early scientific papers and grant applications don't even mention the words. Collier spent thousands of hours picking the toxin apart, piece by piece, simply because he was curious about the basic biology and chemistry of the proteins. And in retrospect, there was probably something inherent in that curiosity-in Collier's becoming "intrigued" with anthrax toxin as a quandary of basic biology-that ultimately accounted for his success.

All of which suggests a paradox. In the post-September 11 world, it's tempting to think of curiosity-driven science as an anachronjstic luxury. Wars inevitably make nations pragmatic about spending. And so there is already public pressure to funnel billions of dollars into applied research, into research that di-

, If it weren't for John Collier's fascination with obscure bacteria, which led him to pursue . years of research on small grants at Harvard, government health agencies would have been left high and dry when anthrax was used as a terror weapon after September 11.

rectly intersects with the dramatic changes in the political sphere. But Collier's stOty suggests the pitfalls of such an approach: Ironically, Collier may have cracked the mystery of anthrax toxin precisely because he wasn t out to curb the threat ofbiotelTorism. In other words, even in these pressured times, we may be better off leaving such scientists alone-to follow their curiosities wherever they lead.

This dichotomy-between science driven by curiosity and science driven by applications-began long before the War on TelTorism. In the immediate aftelmath of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt found himself embroiled in a similar national debate.

Back then, the case against funding curiosity-driven research seemed obvious. For much of the American public, the Manhattan Project--eonducted by scientific SWAT teams in military laboratories-had shown that applied science was far more efficient than the arcane musings of academic namby-pambies tucked away in university labs. On August 7, 1945-the morning after the Hiroshima bombing-The New York Times declared, "University professors who are opposed to organizing, planning and directing research after the manner of industrial laboratories ...have something to think about now. A most important piece of research was conducted on behalf of the Almy in precisely the means adopted in industrial laboratories. End result: an invention was given to the world in three years, which it would have taken perhaps half-acentury to develop if we had to rely on prima-donna research scientists who work alone ....A problem was stated, it was solved by teamwork, by planning, by competent direction, and not by the mere desire to satisfy curiosity."

If the trends augured by that editorial had persisted, Collier would have never even started work on anthrax toxin. Anthraxlike the Bomb-was, after all, a military problem. In fact, by the mid-1960s, anthrax research was already in full swing in the U.S. AJll1Ylaboratories at FOtt Detrick, Maryland. Scroll back through the early scientific literature on anthrax, and you'll find scores of scientists from Fort Detrick plugging away on various aspects of the microbe. They produced microscopic studies on how the organism forms spores, and careful disquisitions on the structure of its outer coat. In 1967 ajournal called Federation Proceedings ran a whole seminar series on anthrax, most of which emerged from labs at FOlt Detrick.

Superficially, these studies were flawless. But it's impossible to compare them to the rigorous brilliance of Collier's research-to the carefully dissected experiments, or the complete immersion in the biology of the toxin that characterized Collier's early years at Harvard. Even Collier, who has a reputation for reticence, agrees.

"The military researchers contributed greatly to anthrax research," he says, "but the mechanism of the toxin wouldn't have been so quickly solved had university labs not gotten involved as well."

Indeed, in Collier's hands, the search for an anthrax antidote took a completely different turn. For 10 years, beginning in 1987, Collier and his teanl delved deeper and deeper into the basic biology of anthrax toxin. For Collier, anthrax toxin became a SOltof intricate wind-up toy, whose inner clockwork could be solved only by taking the whole unit apart. The toxin itself, it turned out, was actually a conglomerate of three distinct proteins: Lethal Factor, Edema Factor, and Protective Antigen. Each member of this trio

seemed to playa critical role in the toxin's action. Protective Antigen led the charge: A fragment of the protein bound itself to the surface of cells and formed aggregates on the cell surface.

Lethal Factor and Edema Factor then bound to these aggregates, entered human cells through a "pore" created by the Protective Antigen fragments, and proceeded to poison the cell.

By the late 1990s Collier's work on these details began to yield astonishing payoffs. Once Protective Antigen's critical role had become clear, Collier realized that he might be able to thwart the toxin by blocking Protective Antigen directly. And last year Collier's team published two landmark papers describing not just one but two such anti-toxins directed against Protective Antigen.

Preliminary studies with the new drugs far exceeded Collier's modest expectations. Laboratory animals medicated with either of the molecules became totally immune to lethal doses of anthrax toxin. Ifthe same sort of drugs worked in humans, Collier argued, they could potentially combat even the "late stage" of anthrax, the Sandia National Laboratories researcher Mark Tucker examines two petri dishes, one with an anthrax stimulant, and the other with a decontaminating foam, developed at Sandia, that neutralizes chemical and biological agents in minutes when dispensed at a disaster scene. :ii

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fhghtful crescendo of the illness, when the disease can no longer be curbed by conventional antibiotics or vaccines.

In short, anthrax turned the logic of the Manhattan Project on its head. In the brief span of 50 years, the paradigm of research had dramatically changed, with academic scientists-the tweedy "curiosity-driven" professors once mocked by the Times-playing a critical role in understanding the toxin and the military researchers lagging behind.

What happened? The answer lies in the complete overhaul of science funding that began during Roosevelt's presidency. In 1944 FDR asked the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, an MIT-trained engineer nanled Vannevar Bush, to devise a science plan for postwar America. And, bucking prevailing sentiment, Bush produced a manifesto, entitled Science: The Endless Frontiel; that would transform the compact between science and society. Bush's plan rested on one key assumption: that, in the shOtt telm, people would never grasp the true value of basic science. Ifbasic and applied science were allowed to mix and compete freely, the latter would inevitably drive out the former. The

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g, Wurtman argued that it almost certainly does. His case study was .s AIDS. AIDS, remember, was identified as a clinical entity among ~ gay men in San Francisco and ew York just 17 years ago. In ~ 1993, at the heyday of the epidemic, scientists were uniformly pes~ CL simistic about whether HIV would ever be a curable infection. And ~ ~ yet, a mere eight years later, triple therapy with antiretroviral med() icines-for those who can afford it-has made HIV into a largely treatable disease. That turnaround time of 17 years-between the discovery of AIDS and the discovery of a therapy-is a truly astonishing accomplishment in the history of medicine.

Wurtman contends that this rapid pace of drug discovery was the result of a paradigm shift in HIV research. In the early 1990s, AIDS activists began campaigning ferociously for federal dollars to combat the disease. But instead of picketing the NIH for "more research," they demanded "effective treatrnents"-i.e., they didn't demand greater inquiry; they demanded better results. As WUltffian tells the story, scientists responded to these demands by revising their own ideas about research. Instead of digging in their heels against "mission-oriented," or programmatic, research, they began actively scouting for antiviral therapies--even before much of the basic biology of the virus was fully understood. Prodded along by impatient activists, HIV researchers somehow picked up on what Confocal micrographic image of Bacillus anthracis. Cell walls Wurtman calls an "implicit call for accountability." And that combiappear green, while the spores appear red. nation of public accountability and programmatic focus, Wurtman only way basic science could survive-something Bush wanted to believes, brought about the effective anti-AIDS drugs in record time. ensure-would be to completely insulate it from that competition, But programmatic research has problems that Wurtrnan's paraleaving basic scientists to pursue their work in peace. ble doesn't acknowledge. The first is counterintuitive: It may be The institutions charged with protecting basic science were the more expensive. In 1999 the NIH ran a complex accounting proNational Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science ject in which it attempted to correlate the amount of money spent Foundation (NSF}--near-autonomous scientific foundations that on a particular disease with some measure of the actual years of grew out of the Bush plan in the 1950s. By that decade's end, both life that the disease had claimed from Americans (the so-called institutions had become independent science-funding bodies, run "disease burden"). The goal was to determine whether federal scifor and by scientists. Shielded from political accountability, curiosence money was being spent in a disease-proportional manner. ity-driven scientists were given plush Ivy-league sandboxes and The results were astounding. For most diseases--even money growing public largesse to spend. They could dismantle the struc- guzzlers like cancer and cardiovascular research-federal spendtures of recondite proteins if they so pleased, or sequence the ing was more or less proportional to the disease burden. The big genomes of fruit flies-as long as other scientists deemed their exception was AIDS. In 1996 the NIH spent proportionally more goals scientifically worthwhile. public money on AIDS than on any other disease. Crudely put, Princeton political scientist Donald Stokes, who spent his acadeprogrammatic research had indeed produced remarkable antimic career studying Bush's compact, compared it to a "deal" be- AIDS drugs, but at an enormous price. And it's not hard to undertween society and scientists. Society would invest unflinchingly in stand why the cost was so high. Once you declare "war" on a the basic sciences without insisting on premature technological re- disease, Collier argues, "you would get plainly bad science-a lot wards. Politicians and bureaucrats wouldn't go up to someone like of junk aimed at getting some of that pork-barrel money." After all, Collier and say, "Now wait a second, haven't we funded research you have taken the ultimate funding decisions away from scientists on anthrax toxin for five years? Where's the antidote?" In return, and given them to politicians. scientists would pursue basic research in good faith-being But the problem with programmatic research isn't only that it broadly receptive to the technological innovations that might may be more expensive; it's that it leaves little room for a critical emerge. It was this deal that allowed Collier to sit for 15 years at feature of the discovery process: serendipity. Indeed, the history of Harvard, plumly funded by NTH grants, calmly chipping away at HIV research itself offers eloquent testimony to the role of the structure of a bacterial toxin, before finally producing a new serendipity in science. Anti-HIV therapy was revolutionized in the drug that would block it. mid-1990s with the discovery of a novel class of antiretroviral But how do we know that "programmatic" research-research chemicals: protease inhibitors. These inhibitors block a critical that aims to find cures for applied problems within specified peri- step in the viral life cycle, the point when the virus is just about to ods of time-wouldn't benefit society more? In a provocative artilaunch itself out of an infected cell into another. That process, it cle in Nature Medicine in 1997, the physician and scientist Richard turns out, is mediated by a critical enzyme called HIV protease.

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HIY protease closely resembles another such protease found in an extra year working in a laboratory. It would be 'Just for a year," he told himself-and then he would consider medical school again. the human kidney-renin-which is involved in regulating blood Collier's year in that laboratory wasn't particularly memorable. pressure. In fact, researchers had been scouring for an inhibitor for renin long before HIY arrived on the scene. These kidney scientists There wasn't any single moment of scientific epiphany. But someand blood-vessel biologists-some thing ineffable happened to him-a transformation he struggles to in pharmaceutical companies and some in academic laboratories-had nothing to do with the describe. When application season came around again, he said, much-publicized "War on AIDS." But when the search for promedical school was no longer an option. Maybe it was "merely intease inhibitors intensified in 1990, it was this prior work that HIY ertia," but he had become, as he put it, "somehow drawn in." virologists used to suddenly make the critical connection between Collier told me all this in his office, a sparse, sunny room on the the two completely unrelated fields-jump-starting the search for fourth floor of the "Quad" of buildings that houses Harvard Medical these revolutionary new drugs.

School. The office is stockpiled with scientific journals. And just Examples of such serendipitous breakthroughs abound in the across from his desk. Collier has hung an enormous poster of the folklore of science. Sylvia Wrobel, writing in the scientific magastructure of diphtheria toxin, magnified more than a million times, zine FASEB Journal, relates the story of a mysterious and lethal the way a child might put up a poster of a basketball star. There is an infection that broke out in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and empty space beside it, he explains, where a similar blowup of Utah in 1993. Within days of the outbreak, the CDC deployed a Bacillus anthracis toxin will one day hang. team of top-notch scientists to ferret out the cause of the infecPeople like Collier-people who frame bacterial toxins in tion. Epidemiologists, virologists, and molecular biologists mega-size posters on their walls-may never be "drawn in" by swarmed the desert looking for clues to its source. But the obserprogrammatic research. They can't be recruited for an applied revation that clinched the discovery came from an extraordinarily search project-a "War on Anthrax," for instance. For Collier, unlikely source. Ecologists at the University of ew Mexico had and hundreds of eccentrics like him strewn across academic cambeen tracking the population of deer mice to collect data for a puses throughout the United States, curiosity-driven research completely unrelated project. And looking back at the ecologists' isn't just the best way to do research; it:SOthe only way. data, the CDC scientists noticed that the In retrospect, America's fateful decihuman infections seemed to occur just sion to provide massive funding for Scientific discoveries often happen when when the population of mice in the area basic science is deeply ironic. they are least expected. Disparate nodes in swelled. With that clue in place, it took Yannevar Bush's model was adopted knowledge are inexplicably connected .... just a few weeks to discover a novel -and continues to be accepted-with virus-called hantavirus-from the scarcely any empirical evidence to The more narrowly you define a scientific mice. The hantavirus discovery has long support it. Expert committees weren't goal-hoping to focus and streamline been considered a landmark CDC appointed to approve it; critics werediscovery-the more you potentially achievement. And yet, had the CDC den't called in to drum up statistics to logjam the discovery process. clared a "War on Southwestern Fever," illustrate its shortcomings. The everit's hard to imagine it would have funded lasting paradox of American science is a project on deer-mouse population ecology as part of that effort. that it is based on rules that wouldn't survive even the most rudiThe point is that scientific discoveries often happen when they mentary scientific scrutiny. are least expected. Disparate nodes in knowledge are inexplicably But nonetheless, the history of anthrax research suggests that the connected through secret passages. And the danger is that a post- technology transfer Bush dreamed of has, indeed, come to pass. This September 11 focus on programmatic research might demolish this summer, when Collier and his co-workers found a way to block anLooking-Glass universe. One of the everlasting quirks of curiositythrax toxin with a novel drug, a group of scientists got together to driven science is that it allows kidney biologists to find themselves seed a new pharmaceutical company based on their discovery. That at the forefront of HIY research or mouse ecologists to become company will presumably run clinical trials on the anthrax antihantavirus hunters. And perversely, the more narrowly you define dote-perhaps in coordination with medical researchers-in the a scientific goal-hoping to focus and streamline discovery-the hope that the FDA will eventually approve it for human use. more you potentially logjam the discovery process itself, setting Collier is relieved about this transfer of responsibilities. Drug technology back as a result. development isn't his passion; he wants to return to the laboratory But for John Collier, there's a final argument forcuriosity-dribench, to fU11herexplore the basic structure of anthrax. He has to ven research, and it has little to do with science money or scientific renew his grant from the NIH. He has graduate students and postserendipity. In fact, it lies outside the reach of science itself-in the doctoral researchers to mentor. But as far as finding a potential anfoggy realm of personality. And Collier could only explain it by tidote to anthrax goes, a scientific cycle may be coming to a close. walking me through a critical fork in his own life.

And John Collier-who never imagined himself a poster child for In 1959 Collier, like any other ambitious college graduate curi- curiosity-driven science-seems deeply satisfied with that.

0 ous about science, had to choose between going to medical school About the Author: Siddhartha Mukheljee is a medical resident at the and becoming a basic biologist. He spent an entire year mulling the Massachusetts General Hospital and a clinical instructor at Harvard choice. At the end of his final summer in college, he chose to spend Medical School.

ur tiny dive boat bobs on the crystal blue Flores Sea, about a mile from the primitive Indonesian villages along the shore. I tighten my fins, swig a few test gulps of air through my scuba gear and am about to roll in.

Suddenly, a black beast the size of a minivan explodes out of the water. The enormous splash rocks the boat. "Manta ray," our divemaster says. "They're showing off. Like puppies.

Okay. Now you, jump in."

Underwater, no one can see you sweat. I shrug, roll into the water and descend through schools of neon and Technicolor reef fish into the coral jungle. The weird growths, the psychedelic fOl1l1ations-giant corals, some like moose antlers, some flaming red with spikes, some like brains-make for a surreal scene. It's like swimming into a Dalf painting.

I float over to a couple of big groupers. They're the size of large dogs. As I watch, three or four miniature, delicate "cleaner" shrimp hop fearlessly into the mouth and gills ofthe first fish, who waits politely for his cleaning. It's a little like a car wash. Then there's the boxer crab, whose front claws appear clad in big white boxing gloves-which turn out to be two fluffy white sea anemones. The crab carries these poisonous creatures constantly, jabbing them at prey like an aquatic Muhammad Ali. Even the most seasoned divers are overwhelmed by the parade of bizarre life forms that dwell in the reefs. In the face of such dazzling beauty, it is shattering to realize that the world's coral paradises are perishing at an alarming rate.

Almost 100,000 square kilometers of reefs have died; experts estimate that within a few decades, 60 percent of the reefs will be dead. No doubt, extraordinary species are being extinguished even before they've been discovered. It made me wonder: who's keeping tabs on this?

Many of the animals I saw were easy to find later in the reef guidebooks. But some I couldn't find at all. How would I know if I had found a new species? And what would I do if I had? Is there an institute in Sweden to call to have such a thing verified? Do they need a DNA sample, or a whole specimen or what? Professional bioloSquirreljish and gists would know what to do-but shouldn't a diver off a coral there be some way to tap the energies of reefin the countless amateurs? After all, the search to Caribbean Sea. comprehend the natural order didn't begin or end with Carolus Linnaeus, the] 8th-century Swedish botanist who devised the modern taxonomic system of identifying life forms; weekend naturalists have much to add to communal knowledge.

Naturally, the Internet is where much of this is happening.

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (www.nbii.gov), for example, knits together the biological databases of hundreds of companies, universities and government agencies.

At the grass-roots level, the Tree of Life at the University of Arizona (phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.htrnl) exemplifies the amateur and academic urge to classify. It's a community-authored phylogeny of earth's life fOlms. So if you did find

I

The world teems with life, Scientists are discovering life forms in places they previously thought no life could exist: in volcanic hot springs and sub-zero arctic waters, And amateur enthusiasts can help record these myriad species for posterity,

Almost 100,000 square kilometers of reefs have died, Experts estimate that within a few decades, 60 percent of the reefs will be dead, Extraordinary species are being extinguished before they are discovered" "Who's keeping tabs on this?

a strange fish, you could probably uncover an avenue online for reporting it.

But an even more remarkable effort is just beginning. Amid this taxonomic flurry, something quite fundamental is strikingly missing: the genes. That's where the new All Species Foundation comes in. Founded in 2000, the foundation aims to record all of the earth's genetic information.

Its manifesto (www.allspecies.org) begins, "If we discovered life on another planet, the first thing we'd do is conduct a systematic inventory of those life forms. This is something we have never done on our home planet." The organization's goal: "Within the span of our own gener-

at ion, record and genetically sample every living species on e31ih." In other words, build a comprehensive D A zoo.

Accomplishing this will require massive philanthropic input, new biotech tools and the observational powers of a vast population of weekend naturalists.

I learned of this foundation from board member Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, who has yet again placed himself at the epicenter of a seminal infotech movement. And like many of the loftiest scientific undertakings-sequence the genome, put a man on the moon-this one is so audacious that it seems almost daft to attempt it. Yet there is so much that must be

Clockwise from leji: A swimming Hawksbill Turtle; a coral reef in Tarawa, Kiribati-a group of 33 islands scattered over 5 million square kilometers in the Central Pacific Ocean; Spanish Hogfish swim past plants and the coral reef that provides habitat for thousands of species off the Florida coast; sponge, coral and searod in the Florida reef

learned. Biologists estimate that only about a tenth of earth's species are formally known to science. Maybe it's just a hundredth. At the rate we're going, many species will be extinct before they're even discovered.

The All Species folks aren't just accumulating a massive collection of beetles. It's the DNA they're after: the core record of life on earth. Sequencing the human genome was just a small step for man. University of Texas at Austin biology professor David Hillis quipped that after the All Species work succeeds in 50 years or so, biology can become a predictive science.

Computers may beat nature at "sim-evolution."

While the et has become a natural medium for sorting out nature, what will sort out the Net? That's the mission of an equally audacious project called the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), launched several years ago by Brewster Kahle. Before most others, Kahle realized that the bits people were flinging online could be bottled up and archived.

This isn't as crazy an idea as it might seem. Think of the problem personally. Everything you utter in a year amounts to about four gigabytes of digitized speech. That's half a DVD disc, or four postage-stamp-sized memory chips. In another 50 years, say, a lifetime of spoken output will fit in one of those sugar-

Few things are more precious than the record of experience, whether it's distilled in a journal or encoded into DNA by evolution,

Right: A Seahorse, resident of a coral reef in the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea, off the coast of Jordan.

Opposite page, clockwise from top right: A Queen Angelfish at the Florida reef; a Powder Blue Surgeorifish tours a Pacific reef; Caribbean Sea Whips and Brittle Stars cling to a sea fan; Pillar coral in the Florida reef

cube-sized terabyte stores that surely are coming. This dramatically changes the way we think about the record of our lives, as individuals and societies. The roughly 18 million books in the Library of Congress add up to about 18 terabytes-less than $40,000 worth of disks at today's prices. This means that the Web--which is now the de facto sieve for capturing social output-may be, though evanescent, containable.

When he established the Internet Archive, Kahle acquired a building in an old army barracks in San Francisco; he envisioned the archive as something of a national park for bits. Now, much of the Web is contained in a bay of hard drives in the basement. "It's a Sisyphean task," says Kahle. As they pushed the boulder up the hill, the archivers thought, Since Web pages change over time, why not record with that in mind? So recently, they've built a "Wayback Machine": a browser that lets you set the time. If you want to surf the Web as it was back in, say, 1996, just turn the dial.

Why do these efforts matter? Few things are more precious than the record of experience, whether it's distilled in a journal or encoded into DNA by evolution.

Consider horrific extinctions. When maruading empires want to kill a culture, they cut out its heart. The Romans sacked and burned Alexandria. The Nazis burned books and people. The Khmer Rouge murdered teachers and artists, obliterating the cultural soul of its country. AI Qaida stabbed at the heart of modern capitalism-the World Trade Center. Shortly after the buildings imploded, office papers fluttered into the gutters of Brooklyn,

miles away. Undoubtedly many companies, running close to the bone, couldn't afford to safely clone their archives in more than one place. Those companies are out of the corporate gene pool forever.

Even when people are fortunate enough to survive, the irrevocable loss of institutional memory, as recorded on paper and disks, makes rebooting a business impossible.

Fire insurance is nice to have, but if your house bums down, insurance can't restore memories.

If the surge in computer development has taught us anything, it's that computer memory is so cheap and getting cheaper, so large and getting larger, that it ought to be considered free and infinite. And in a sense, the Internet makes transmission free, too. For the same reason a diffuse network can survive all but the most massively widespread catastrophes, diffuse memories cannot be extinguished. A little like DNA, the bits reside in active vessels and can be transmitted into the future.

Human beings survive as a species because we flock together.

After a tragedy, families and communities draw closer. We reach out and hold onto each other. This is why we touch, and why we love. For the same instinctive reason, we gather our memories and cherish them. Pools of community memory gain depth and power over lifetimes. They allow us to reflect, or project and to carry our understanding beyond the here and the now. If you believe that earth's living memories should live on-both the human record and the natural record-then you have to believe that efforts like the All Species Foundation and the Internet Archive really matter. But it is still a shock to many that such intrepid enterprises have scarcely begun.

D About tbe Author: Michael Hawley is professor of media technology at MIT Media Lab, and co-founded "Things That Think, " a groundbreaking research program that explores the limitless ways digital media will infuse everyday objects.

The Ghat of the Only World Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn

America was poet Agha Shahid Ali's adopted home-a country that affectionately adopted him in returnbut he never forgot his beloved Kashmir

he first time that Agha Shahid Ali spoke to me about his approaching death was on April 25, 2001. The conversation began routinely. I had telephoned to remind him that we had been invited to a friend's house for lunch and that I was going to come by his apartment to pick him up. Although he had been under treatment for cancer for some 14 months, Shahid was still on his feet and perfectly lucid, except for occasional lapses of memory. I heard him thumbing through his engagement book and then suddenly he said: "Oh dear. I can't see a thing." There was a brief pause and then he added: "I hope this doesn't mean that I'm dying ...."

Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the last many weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did not know how to respond: his voice was completely at odds with the content of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled something innocuous: "No Shahid-of course not. You'll be fine." He cut me ShOltoIn a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he said: "When it happens I hope you'll write something about me."

I was shocked into silence and a long moment passed before

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I could bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions: "Shahid you'll be fine; you have to be strong ...."

From the window of my study I could see a corner of the building in which he lived, some eight blocks away. It was just a few months since he moved there: he had been living a few miles away, in Manhattan, when he had a sudden blackout in February 2000. After tests revealed that he had a malignant brain tumor, he decided to move to Brooklyn, to be close to his youngest sister, Sameetah, who teaches at the Pratt Institute-a few blocks away from the street where I live.

Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then that I realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but through the written word. Sbahid knew all too well that for those writers for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an inbuilt resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet; that our friendship was of recent date; that there were many others who knew him much better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge. All this Shahid had guessed and he had decided to shut offthose routes while there was still time.

"You must write about me."

Clear though it was that this imperative would have to be acknowledged, I could think of nothing to say: what are the words in which one promises a friend that one will write about him after his death? Finally, I said: "Shahid, I will; I'll do the best I can."

By the end of the conversation I knew exactly what I had to do. I picked up my pen, noted the date, and wrote down everything I remembered of that conversation. This I continued to do for the next few months: it is this record that has made it possible for me to fulfill the pledge I made that day.

I knew Shahid's work long before I met him. His 1997 collection, The Country Without a Post Office, had made a powerful impression on me. His voice was like none I had ever heard before, at once lyrical and fiercely disciplined, engaged and yet deeply inward. Not for him the mock-casual almost-prose of so much contemporary poetry: his was a voice that was not ashamed to speak in a bardic register. I knew of no one else who would even conceive of publishing a line like: "Mad heart, be brave."

In 1998, I quoted a line from The Country Without a Post Office in an mticle that touched briefly on Kashmir. At the time all I knew about Shahid was that he was from Sri nagar and had studied in Delhi. I had been at Delhi University myself, but although our time there had briefly overlapped, we had never met. We had friends in common however, and one of them put me in touch with Shahid. In 1998 and 1999 we had several conversations on the phone and even met a couple of times. But we were no more than acquaintances until he moved to Brooklyn the next year. Once we were in the same neighborhood, we began to

meet for occasional meals and quickly discovered that we had a great deal in common. By this time of course Shahid's condition was already serious, yet his illness did not impede the progress of our friendship. We found that we had a huge roster of common friends, in India, America, and elsewhere; we discovered a shared love of rogan josh, Roshanara Begum and Kishore Kumar; a mutual indifference to cricket and an equal attachment to old Bombay films. Because of Shahid's condition even the most trivial exchanges had a special charge and urgency: the inescapable poignance of talking about food and half-forgotten figures from the past with a man who knew himself to be dying, was multiplied in this instance, by the knowledge that this man was also a poet who had achieved greatness-perhaps the only such that I shall ever know as a friend.

One afternoon, the writer Suketu Mehta, who also lives in Brooklyn, joined us for lunch. Together we hatched a plan for an adda-by definition, a gathering that has no agenda, other than conviviality. Shahid was enthusiastic and we began to meet regularly. From time to time other writers would join us. On one occasion a crew arrived with a television camera. Shahid was not in the least bit put out: "I'm so shameless; I just love the camera."

Shahid had a sorcerer's ability to transmute the mundane into the magical. Once I accompanied Iqbal, his brother, and Hena, his sister, on a trip to fetch him home from hospital. This was on May 21st by that time he had already been through several unsuccessful operations. Now he was back in hospital to undergo a surgical procedure that was intended to relieve the pressure on his brain. His head was shaved and the shape ofthe tumor was visible upon his bare scalp, its edges outlined by metal sutures.

When it was time to leave the ward a blue-uniformed hospital escort arrived with a wheelchair. Shahid waved him away, declaring that he was strong enough to walk out of the hospital on his own. But he was groggier than he had thought and his knees buckled after no more than a few steps. Iqbal went running off to bring back the wheelchair while the rest of us stood in the corridor, holding him upright. At that moment, leaning against the cheerless hospital wall, a kind of rapture descended on Shahid. When the hospital orderly returned with the wheelchair Shahid gave him a beaming smile and asked where he was from.

Ecuador, the man said, and Shahid clapped his hands gleefully together. "Spanish!" he cried, at the top of his voice. "I always wanted to learn Spanish. Just to read Lorca."

At this the tired, slack-shouldered orderly came suddenly to life. "Lorca? Did you say Lorca?" He quoted a few lines, to Shahid's great delight. "Ah! 'La Cinque de la Tarde,'" Shahid cried, rolling the syllables gleefully around his tongue. "How I love those words. 'La Cinque de la Tarde'!" That was how we made our way through the hospital's crowded lobby: with Shahid and the orderly in the vanguard, one quoting snatches of Spanish poetry and the other breaking in from time to time with exultant cries of, "La Cinque de la Tarde, La Cinque de la Tarde ...."

Shahid's gregariousness had no limit: there was never an evening when there wasn't a party in his living room. "I love it

Many of my favorite things are broken.

-MARIO BUATTA, interior designer known as "The King of Chintz"

in peace. Please come in. How long has it been?

Upstairs-climb slowly-the touch is more certain.

You've been, they say, everywhere. What city's left?

I've brought the world indoors. One wants certainty.

Not in art-well, you've hardly changed-but why, in life. But for small invisible hands, no wall would be lacquered a rain forest's colors. Before, these walls had just mirrors (I tried on-for sizekismet's barest air). Remember? You were led through all the spare rooms I was to die in. But look how each room's been refurbished: This screen in stitches silk-routes a river down Asia, past laughing Buddhas, China a lantern burning burning burning for "God to aggrandise, God to glorify" in (How one passes through such thick walls!).

Candles float past inked-in laborers but for whose hands this story would be empty, rooms where on plots only to die, nothing Dear! but a bare flame for you to come by in. Don't touch that vase! Long ago its waist, abandoned by scrolling foliage, was banded by hands, banded quick with omens: a galloping flood, hooves iron by the river's edge. o beating night, what could have reined the sky in? Come to the window: panes plot the earth apart. In the moon's crush, the cobalt stars shed light-blue-on Russia: the republics porcelain, the Urals mezzotint. Why are you weeping, dear friend? Hush, rare guest. Once a passerby in tears, his footsteps dying, was ...well, I rushed out and he was gone. Out there it's poison.

Out there one longs for all one's ever bought, for shades that lighten a scene: When the last leaves were birds spent wingless on trees, love, the cage to cry in, was glass-stormed by the North. Now that God is news, what's left but prayer, and ...well, if you love something, why argue? What we own betters any tale of God's-no? That framed scroll downstairs and here! this shell drowned men heard God's reply in. Listen, my friend. But for quick hands, my walls would be mirrors. A house? A work in progress, always. But: Could love's season be more than this?

I'll wipe your tears. Turn to me. My world would be mere mirrors cut to multiply, then multiply in. But for small hands. Invisible. Quick... (for Mathew

Stadler)

that so many people are here," he told me once. "I love it that people come and there's always food. 1 love this spirit of festivity; it means that 1 don't have time to be depressed."

His apartment was a spacious and airy split-level, on the seventh floor of a newly-renovated building. There was a cavernous study on the top floor and a wide terrace that provided a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, across the East River. Shahid loved this view of the Brooklyn waterfront slipping, like a ghat, into the East River, under the glittering lights of Manhattan.

The journey from the foyer of Shahid's building to his door was a voyage between continents: on the way up the rich fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour, gray interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices that were always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly musical sound. Suddenly, Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. "Oh, how nice, " he would cry, clapping his hands, "how nice that you've come to see your little Mos-Iem!" Invariably, there'd be some half-dozen or more people gathered inside-poets, students, writers, relatives-and in the kitchen someone would always be cooking or making tea. Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was the center of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food and, of course, poetry.

No matter how many people there were, Shahid was never so distracted as to lose track of the progress of the evening's meal.

From time to time he would interrupt himself to shout directions to whoever was in the kitchen: "yes, now, add the dahi now," Even when his eyesight was failing, he could tell from the smell alone, exactly which stage the rogan josh had reached. And when things went exactly as they should, he would sniff the air and cry out loud: "Ah! Khana ka kya mehek hai!"

Shahid was legendary for his prowess in the kitchen, frequently spending days over the planning and preparation of a dinner party. It was through one such party, given while he was in Arizona, that he met James Merrill, the poet who was to radically alter the direction of his poetry: it was after this encounter that he began to experiment with strict, metrical patterns and verse forms such as the canzone and the sestina. No one had a greater influence on Shahid's poetry than James Merrill: indeed, in the poem in which he most explicitly prefigured his own death, "I Dream 1 Am At the Ghat of the Only World," he awarded the envoy to Merrill: "SHAHID, HUSH. THIS IS ME, JAMES. THE LOVED ONE ALWAYS LEAVES." "How did you meet Merrill?" I asked Shahid once.

"I heard he was coming down for a reading and I told the people in charge that 1 wanted to meet him. They said, 'then why don't you cook for him?' So 1 did." Merrill loved the food and on learning that Shahid was moving to Hamilton College in upstate New York, he gave him his telephone number and asked him to call. On the occasion of Shahid's first reading at the Academy of American Poets, Merrill was present: a signal honor considering that he was one of America's best-known poets. "Afterwards," Shahid liked to recall, "everybody rushed up and said, 'Did you

know that Jim Merrill was here?' My stock in New York went up a thousandfold that evening."

Shahid placed great store on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from traditional methods and recipes: for those who took short cuts, he had only pity.

He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: "Kashmiri food in the Pandit style." I asked him once why this was so important to him and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.

At a certain point I lost track of you.

You needed me. You needed to perfect me: In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.

Your memory gets in the way of my memory ...

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

I hid my pain even from myself'; I revealed my pain only to myself.

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what would not have been possible in the world?

Once, in conversation, he told me that he also loved Bengali food. I protested: "But Shahid, you've never even been to Calcutta."

"No," he said. "But we had friends who used to bring us that food. When you ate it you could see that there were so many things that you didn't know about, everywhere in the country ...."

This was at a time when his illness had forced him into spending long periods in bed. He was lying prone on his back, shielding his eyes with his fingers. Suddenly he broke off and reached for my hand. "I wish all this had not happened," he said. "This dividing of the country, the divisions between people-Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu-you can't imagine, how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is: why can't you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?" He paused and added softly, "At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things."

Of the many "good things" in which he took pleasure, none was more dear to him than the music of Begum Akhtar. He had met the great ghazal singer when he was in his teens, through a friend, and she had become an abiding presence and influence in his life. In his apartment there were several shrine-like niches that were filled with pictures of the people he worshipped: Begum Akhtar was one of these, along with his father, his mother and James Merrill. "I loved Begum Akhtar," he told me once.

"In other circumstances you could have said that it was a sexual kind of love-but [ don't know what it was. I loved to listen to her, I loved to be with her, I couldn't bear to be away from her.

You can imagine what it was like. Here I was in my midteens-just 16-and I couldn't bear to be away from her."

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It may well have been his relationship with Begum Akhtar that engendered his passion for the ghazal as a verse form. Yet, ardent advocate though he was of the form, he had little time for the gushing ardor of some of its contemporary American fans: "Imagine me at a writer's conference where a woman kept saying to me, 'Oh, T just love guh-zaals, I'm gonna write a lot of g'zaaals,' and I said to her, in utter ~ pain, 'OH, PLEASE DON'T!'" Always the disciplinarian in such matters, he believed that the ghazal would never flourish if its structure were not given due respect: "Some rules of the ghazal are clear and classically stringent. The opening couplet (called matla) sets up a scheme (of rhyme--ealled qajia, and refrain--ealled radif) by having it occur in both lines-the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain-and then this scheme occurs only in the second line of each succeeding couplet. That is, once a poet establishes the scheme-with total freedom, T might add-she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master." Over a period of several years he took it on himself to solicit ghazals fi-oma number of poets writing in English. The resulting collection, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, was published in 2000. In establishing a benchmark for the form it has already begun to exert a powerful influence: the fonnalization of the ghazal may well prove to be Shahid's most impoliant scholarly contribution to the canon of English poetry. His own summation of the project was this: "If one writes in free verse-and one should-to subvert Western civilization, surely one should write in forms to save oneself from Western civilization?"

For Shahid, Begum Akhtar was the embodiment of one such form, not just in her music, but in many other aspects of her being. An aspect of the ghazal which he greatly prized was the latitude it provided for wordplay, wit and nakhra: Begum Akhtar was a consummate master of all of these. Shahid had a fund of stories about her sharpness in repartee. On one occasion he had accompanied her to the studios of All India Radio for a recording session. On the way in they met a famous singer, a man who was reputed to be having an affair with his dhobin. Begum Akhtar greeted the Ustad with a deep salaam, as befitted by his standing in the world of music. But then, in passing, she tossed off the line: "Arrey Khan-sahib, what a very clean kurta you're wearing today." Later, once out of the maestro's sight, they fell over laughing.

Shahid was himself no mean practitioner of repartee. On one

famous occasion, at Barcelona airport, he was stopped by a security guard just as he was about to board a plane. The guard, a woman, asked: "What do you do?"

"I'm a poet," Shahid answered.

"What were you doing in Spain?"

"Writing poetry." o matter what the question, Shahid worked poetry into his answer. Finally, the exasperated woman asked: "Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?"At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried: "Only my heart."

This was one of his great Wildean moments, and it was to occasion the poem "Barcelona Airport." He treasured these moments: "I long for people to give me an opportunity to answer questions," he told me once. On May 7 I had the good fortune to be with him when one such opportunity presented itself. Shahid was teaching at Manhattan's Baruch College in the Spring semester of 2000 and this was to be his last classindeed the last he was ever to teach. The class was to be a short one for he had an appointment at the hospital immediately afterwards. I had heard a great deal about the bri IIiance of Shahid's teaching, but this was the first and only time that I was to see him perform in a classroom. It was evident from the moment we walked in that the students adored him: they had printed a magazine and dedicated the issue to him. Shahid for his part, was not in the least subdued by the sadness of the occasion. From beginning to end, he was a sparkling diva,

Akhtar incarnate, brimming with laughter and nakhra. When an Indian student walked in late he greeted her with the cry: "Ah my little subcontinental has arrived." Clasping his hands, he feigned a swoon. "It stirs such a tide of patriotism in me to behold another South Asian!"

Towards the end of the class, a student asked a complicated question about the difference between plausibility and inevitability in a poem. Shahid's eyebrows arched higher and higher as he listened. At last, unable to contain himself, he broke in. "Oh you're such a naughty boy," he cried, tapping the table with his fingertips. "You always turn everything into an abstraction."

But Begum Akhtar was not all wit and nakhra: indeed the strongest bond between Shahid and her was, I suspect, the idea that sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner.

Shahid often told a story about Begum Akhtar's marriage: although her family's origins were dubious, her fame as a beauty was such that she received a proposal from the scion of a prominent Muslim family of Lucknow. The proposal came with the condition that the talented young singer would give up singing: the man's family was deeply conservative and could not conceive of one of its members performing on stage. Begum Akhtar-or Akhtaribai Faizabadi, as she was then-accepted, but soon afterwards her mother died. Heartbroken, Akhtaribai spent her days weeping on her grave. Her condition became such that a doctor had to be brought in to examine her. He said that if she were not allowed to sing she would lose her mind: it was only then that her husband's family relented and allowed her to sing again.

Shahid was haunted by this image of Begum Akhtar, as a bereaved and inconsolable daughter, weeping on her mother's grave; it is in this grief-stricken aspect that she is evoked again and again in his poems. The poem that was his farewell to the world, "I Dream I Am At the Ghat of the Only World," opens with an evocation of Begum Akhtar: A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger.

It was Shahid's mother who had introduced him to the music of Begum Akhtar: "With her I'd heard-on 78 rpm-Peer Gynt .. ./ and Ghalib's grief in the voice of Begum Akhtar." In Shahid's later poems, Begum Akhtar was to become an image for the embodiment of his own sorrow after his mother's death.

Shahid's mother, a woman of striking beauty, happened to have a close, indeed startling, resemblance to Begum Akhtar: Shahid's walls were hung with many pictures of both and I would frequently mistake the one for the other. What then of Shahid's belief that he resembled Begum Akhtar? There is a mystery here that I am content to leave untouched.

Shahid was born in New Delhi in 1949. Later, in one of the temporal inversions that marked his poetry, he was to relive his conception in his poem "A Lost Memory of Delhi:"

I am not born it is 1948 and the bus turns onto a road without name There on his bicycle my father He is younger than I At Okhla where I get off I pass my parents strolling by the Jamuna River Shahid's father's family was from Srinagar in Kashmir. They were Shia, who are a minority amongst the Muslims of Kashmir.

Shahid liked to tell a story about the origins of his family: the line was founded, he used to say, by two brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained as hakims, specializing in Yunani medicine, and they aITived in Kashmir with nothing but their knowledge of medical lore: they were so poor that they had to share a single cloak between them.

But it so happened that the then Maharaja of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, "some kind of colic." Learning that all the kingdom's doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler, the two brothers decided to try their hand. They gave the Maharaja a concoction that went through the royal intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief. Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his court physicians: thus began the family's prosperity.

"So you see," Shahid would comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion. "My family's fortunes were founded on a fart."

By Shahid's account, his great-grandfather was the first Kashmiri Muslim to matriculate. The story went that to sit for the examination, he had had to travel all the way from Srinagar to Rawalpindi in a tonga. Later, he too became an official at the court of the Maharaja of Kashmir. He had special charge of education, and took the initiative to educate his daughter. Shahid's grandmother was thus one of the first educated women in Kashmir. She passed the matriculation examination, took several other degrees, and in time became the Inspector of Women's Schools. She could quote poetry in four languages: English, Urdu, Farsi and Kashmiri. Shahid's father, Agha Ashraf Ali, continued the family tradition of public service in education. He taught at lamia Millia University in New Delhi and went on to become the principal of the Teacher's College in Srinagar. In 1961, he enrolled at Ball State Teacher's College, in Muncie, Indiana, to do a PhD in comparative education. Shahid was 12 when the family moved to the U.S. and for the next three years he attended school in Muncie. Later the family moved back to Sri nagar and that was where Shahid completed his schooling.

But it was because of his early experience, I suspect, that Shahid was able to take America so completely in his stride when he aITived in Pennsylvania as a graduate student. The idea of a cultural divide or conflict had no purchase in his mind: America and India were the two poles of his life and he was at home in both in a way that was utterly easeful and unproblematic.

Shahid took his undergraduate degree at the University of

Kashmir in Srinagar. Although he excelled there, graduating with the highest marks in his class, he did not recall the experience with any fondness. "I learned nothing there," he told me once. "It was just a question of ratto-maroing." In 1968 he joined Hindu College in Delhi University to study for an M.A. in English literature. Once again he performed with distinction and went on to become a lecturer at the same college. It was in this period that he published his first collection of poems, with P. Lal of the Writer's Workshop in Calcutta.

Shahid's memories of Delhi University were deeply conflicted: he became something of a campus celebrity but also endured rebuffs and disappointments that may well have come his way only because he was a Muslim and a Kashmiri. Although he developed many close and lasting friendships he also suffered many betrayals and much unhappiness. In any event, he was, I think, deeply relieved when Penn State University in College Park, Pennsylvania, offered him a scholarship for a PhD. His time at Penn State he remembered with unmitigated pleasure: "I grew as a reader, I grew as a poet, I grew as a lover." He fell in with a vibrant group of graduate students, many of whom were Indian. This was, he often said, the happiest time of his life.

Later Shahid moved to Arizona to take a degree in creative writing. This in turn was followed by a series of jobs in colleges and universities: Hamilton College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and finally, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he was appointed professor in 1999. He was on leave from Utah, doing a briefstint at ew York University, when he had his first blackout in February 2000.

After 1975, when he moved to Pennsylvania, Shahid lived mainly in America. His brother was already there and they were later joined by their two sisters. But Shahid's parents continued to live in Srinagar and it was his custom to spend the summer months with them there every year: "I always move in my heali between sad countries." Traveling between the United States and India he was thus an intermittent but first hand witness (shahid) to the mounting violence that seized the region from the late 1980s onwards: It was '89, the stones were not far, signs of change everywhere (Kashmir would soon be in literal flames) ....

The steady deterioration of the political Kashmir-the violence and counter-violence-had

situation in a powerful

effect on him. In time it became one ofthe central subjects of his work: indeed, it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a political poet. I heard him say once: "If you are from a difficult place and that's all you have to write about then you should stop writing. You have to respect your art, your form-that is just as important as what you write about."

Another time, I was present at Shahid's apat1ment when his long-time friend, Patricia 0' eill, showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were political, trenchant in their criticism of the British Government for its failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at them and tossed them off-handedly aside: "These are terrible poems." Patricia asked why, and he said: "Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of the Armenians.

Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. r might as well just read a news repOli." Anguished as he was about Kashmir's destiny, Shahid resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his. Had he not done so, he could no doubt have easily become a fixture on talk shows, news programs and op-ed pages. But Shahid never had any doubt about his calling: he was a poet, schooled in the fierce and unforgiving arts of language.

Such as they were, Shahid's political views were inherited largely from his father, whose beliefs were akin to those of most secular, left-leaning Muslim intellectuals of the Nehruvian era.

Although respectful of religion, he remains a firm believer in the

separation of politics and religious practice.

Once, when Shahid was at dinner with my family, I asked him bluntly: "What do you think is the solution for Kashmir?" His answer was: "I think ideally the best solution would be absolute autonomy within the Indian Union in the broadest sense." But this led almost immediately to the enumeration of a long list of caveats and reservations: quite possibly, he said, such a solution was no longer possible, given the actions of the Indian state in Kashmir; the extremist groups would never accept the "autonomy" solution in any case and so many other complications had entered the situation that it was almost impossible to think of a solution.

The truth is that Shahid's gaze was not political in the sense of being framed in terms of policy and solutions. In the broadest sense, his vision tended always towards the inclusive and ecumenical, an outlook that he credited to his upbringing. He spoke often of a time in his childhood when he had been seized by the desire to create a small Hindu temple in his room in Srinagar. He was initially hesitant to tell his parents, but when he did they responded with an enthusiasm equal to his own. His mother bought him murtis and other accoutrements and for a while he was assiduous in conducting pujas at this shrine. This was a favorite story. "Whenever people talk to me about Muslim fanaticism," he said to me once, "I tell them how my mother helped me make a temple in my room. 'What do you make of that?' I ask them." There is a touching evocation of this in his poem, "Lenox Hill": and 1, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir/ listening to my flute.

I once remarked to Shahid that he was the closest that Kashmir had to a national poet. He shot back: "A national poet, maybe.

But not a nationalist poet; please note that." If anything, Kashmir's current plight represented for him the failure of the emancipatory promise of nationhood and the extinction of the pluralistic ideal that had been so dear to intellectuals of his father's generation. In the title poem of The Country Without a Post Office, a poet returns to Kashmir to find the keeper of a fallen minaret: "Nothing will remain, everything's finished," I see his voice again: "This is a shrine of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished envelopes." ...

This is an archive. I've found the remains of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.

Shahid with his mother Sufia in the late 1960s. They were close, and her death moved him to write some of his most affecting poems: "Lenox Hill, " and the cycle of poems "From Amherst to Kashmil; " that appear in his last published collection Rooms Are Never Finished. "Kashmir, she ~ dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst, " he wrote.

The pessimism engendered by the loss of these ideals-that map of longings with no limit-resulted in a vision in which, increasingly, Kashmir became a vortex of images circling around a single point of stillness: the idea of death. In this figuring of his homeland, he himself became one of the images that were spinning around the dark point of stillness-both Shahid and ShahTd witness and martyr-his destiny inextricably rinked with Kashmir's, each prefigured by the other.

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir, and the shadowed routine of each vein will almost be news, the blood censored, for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain ....

Among my notes is a record of a telephone conversation on May 5. The day before he had gone to the hospital for an important test: a scan that was expected to reveal whether or not the course of chemotherapy that he was then undergoing had had the desired effect. All other alternative therapies and courses oftreatment had been put off unti I this repOli. The scan was scheduled for 2.30 in the afternoon. I called his number several times in the late afternoon and early eveningthere was no response. I called again the next morning and this time he answered. There were no preambles. He said: "Listen Amitav, the news is not good at all. Basically they are going to stop all my medicines now-the chemotherapy and so on. They give me a year or less. They'd suspected that I was not responding well because of the way I look. They will give me some radiation a Iittle later. But they said there was not much hope."

Dazed, staring blankly at my desk, I said: "What will you do now Shahid?"

"I would like to go back to Kashmir to die." His voice was quiet and untroubled." ow I have to get my passpoti, settle my will and all that. I don't want to leave a mess for my siblings. But after that I would like to go to Kashmir. It's still such a feudal system there and there will be so much suppOli-and my father is there too. Anyway, I don't want my siblings to have to make the journey afterwards, like we had to with my mother."

Later, because of logistical and other reasons, he changed his mind about returning to Kashmir: he was content to be laid to rest in NOtihampton, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to the memory of his beloved Emily Dickinson. But I do not think it was an accident that his mind turned to Kashmir in speaking of death. Already, in his poetic imagery, death, Kashmir, and Shahid/ShahTd had become so closely overlaid as to be inseparable, like old photographs that have melted together in the rain.

Yes, I remember it, the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson, so long ago of that sky, its spread air, its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went on the day I'll die, post the guards, and he, keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me on an island the size of a grave. On two yards he rowed me into the sunset, past all pain. On everyone's lips was news of my death but only that beloved couplet, broken, on his: "If there is a paradise on earth It is this, it is this, it is this."

Shahid's mother, Sufia Nomani, was from Rudauli in Uttar Pradesh. She was descended from a family that was wellknown for its Sufi heritage.

Shahid believed that this connection influenced her life in many intangible ways; "she had the grandeur of a Sufi," he liked to say.

Although Shahid's parents lived in Srinagar, they usually spent the winter months in their flat in New Delhi. It was there that his mother had her first seizure in December 1995. The attack was initially misdiagnosed and it was not till the family brought her to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, in January 1996, that it was confirmed that she had a malignant brain tumor.

Her condition was so serious that she was operated on two days after her arrival. The operation did not have the desired effect and resulted instead in a partial paralysis. At the time Shahid and his younger brother Iqbal were both teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His sister, Hena, was working on a PhD at the same institution. The siblings decided to move their mother to Amherst and it was there that she died on April 24, 1997. In keeping with her wishes, the family took her body back to Kashmir for burial. This long and traumatic journey forms the subject of a cycle of poems, "From Amherst to Kashmir," that was later included in Shahid's 2001 collection, Rooms Are Never Finished.

During the last phase of his mother's illness and for several months afterwards, Shahid was unable to write. The dry spell was broken in 1998, with "Lenox Hill," possibly his greatest poem. The poem was a canzone, a form of unusual rigor and difficulty (the poet Anthony Hecht once remarked that Shahid deserved to be in the Guinness Book of records for having written three canzones-more than any other poet). In "Lenox Hill," the architectonics of the form creates a soaring superstructure, an immense domed enclosure, Iike that of the great mosque of Isfahan or the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab in Cairo: a space that seems all the more vast because of the austerity of its proportions. The rhymes and half-rhymes are the honeycombed arches that thrust the dome towards the heavens, and the meter is the mosaic that holds the whole in place.

Within the immensity of this bounded space, every line throws open a window that beams a shaft of light across continents, from Amherst to Kashmir, from the hospital of Lenox Hill to the Pir Panjal Pass. Entombed at the center of this soaring edifice Iies his mother:

... Mother, they asked me, So how's the writing? I answered My mother is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir and the cries that reached you from the cliffsof Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir, she's dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst.

The poem is packed with the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions, imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at once disingenous and wrenchingly direct.

For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir, and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe when I remember you-beyond all accounting-O my mother?

For Shahid, the passage of time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he re-lived it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in mid-conversation: "I can't believe she's gone; I still can't believe it." The week before his death on waking one morning, he asked his family where his mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event.

In the penultimate stanza of "Lenox Hill, " in a breathtaking, heart-shopping inversion, Shahid figures himself as his mother's mother: "As you sit here by me, you're just like my mother," she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she's watching at the Regal, her first film with Father.

If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I'd save you-now my daughter-from God. The universe opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God's mother!

I remember clearly the evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember it because I could not keep myself fi'om wondering whether it was possible that Shahid's identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of his mother's death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. Yet there are traditions in which poetry is a world of causality entire unto itself, where metaphor extends beyond the mere linking of words, into the conjugation of a distinctive real-

ity. In Shahid's last months I thought often of the depth of Babar, who was not just the first of the Mughal Emperors, but also a poet and writer of extraordinary distinction.

Shahid thought of his work as being placed squarely within a modern Western tradition. Yet the mechanics of his imagination-dreams, visions, an overpowering sense of identity with those he loved-as well as his life, and perhaps even his death, were fashioned by a will that owed more perhaps to the Sufis and the Bhakti poets than to the modernists. In his determination to be not just a writer of poetry but an embodiment of his poetic vision, he was, I think, more the heir of Rumi and Kabir than Eliot and Merrill.

The last time I saw Shahid was on the 27th of October, at his brother's house in Amherst. He was intermittently able to converse and there were moments when we talked just as we had in the past. He was aware, as he had long been, of his approaching end and he had made his peace with it. I saw no trace of anguish or conflict: surrounded by the love of his family and friends, he was calm, contented, at peace. He had said to me once, "I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the after-life, ifthere is an afterlife." I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2 a.m. on December 8.

Now, in his absence, I am amazed that so brief a friendship has resulted in so vast a void. Often, when I walk into my living room, I remember his presence there, particularly on the night when he read us his farewell to the world: "I Dream I Am At the Ghat of the Only World." I remember how he created a vision of an evening of ghazals, drawing to its end; of the bediamonded singer vanishing through a mirror; I remember him evoking the voices he loved-of Begum Akhtar, Eqbal Ahmed and James Merrill-urging him on as he journeys towards his mother: "love doesn't help anyone finally survive."

Shahid knew exactly how it would end and he was meticulous in saying his farewells, careful in crafting the envoy to the last verses of his own life.

D About the Author: Amitav Ghosh is a Brooklyn-based writer of Indian origin and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. His novels include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome.

The article is from Amitav Ghosh's recent collection, The imam and the Indian, published by Ravi Dayal Publishers and Permanent Black, New Delhi. It originally appeared in The Nation.

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_8dd "Honesty sounds like a great policy, but l'djirst like to explore our other options. " © 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

"1 know there:S something bothering you, Herschel.

It:S written all over your chart. " Copyright © 2001 by Scott Arthur Maesear. All rights reserved. Originally appeared in The Bulle/in 0/ Atomic Scientists, September/October 200 I.

Fumaroles provide more evidence of hellish conditions deep underground.

awake at night, staring at his bedroom ceiling. What worries Hill is that for nearly two decades, the caldera has been showing every sign that it could erupt, producing as much magma as did Mount St. Helens.

An eruption would be a disaster, because not only are there people living in and around the caldera, but a major ski resort is there, attracting thousands of skiers and other vacationers. The building of second homes has become big business.

The Long Valley caldera butts up against the steep eastern face of the Sierra Nevada.

A volcanic explosion thousands of years ago created this particular 16-by-32-kilometer oval depression, and scientists like Hill are wondering if things here are starting to heat up again. Geologists know that earthquake swarms can serve as an early warning of volcanic unrest, indicating that magmahot, molten rock from deep undergroundmay be squirming its way toward the surface. Such swarms were one of the signs at Mount St. Helens just before the side of the mountain disappeared in 1980, at the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991 and at the Soufriere Hills eruption on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1995.

Worse, in Long Valley the swarms have been accompanied by other signs that can be precursors of an eruption: an ominous bulge in the center of the caldera continues to grow, presumably pumped up by fresh injections of magma; since 1994, large stands of 300-year-old trees on the edge of the caldera have been dying, killed by carbon dioxide upwelling into the soil, once again coming from magma.

The signs rise and fall, each time ratcheting up the nerves of the scientists. They have covered the caldera with instruments that measure the strength and location of the earthquakes, the incremental increases in ground deformation and the chemical composition of gases vented from fumaroles. Yet, so far, each time the signs build and build in intensity, they are followed by ... nada. Nothing. No Mount St. Helenslike explosions, no sudden, destructive flow oflava (what magma is called once it reaches the surface), no plume of ash rising miles into the sky. It will happen, but no one is able to predict when.

David Hill and I are walking down a narrow road, about 50 kilometers south of Long Valley and 16 kilometers north of Bishop. It is a hot day, the air still, the road dusty. About 35 meters ahead of us is a group of 25 dusty people being led by

Roy Bailey, a colleague of Hill's and an emeritus scientist with the USGS. The group is mostly composed of earth scientists, who are all independently conducting research on Long Valley caldera. To compare notes, the group returned to the High Sierra, and part of the get-together was a daylong tour to see some ofthe geologic sights in and around Long Valley.

The rocky road we're walking on is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which controls nearly all the water rights here in the Owens Valley.

This land was lush and green until the department got hold of it. Now it's desert, a place of chaparral, volcanic rocks and sand. Lots of sand. Before getting out to walk, we had bounced along the road in Hill's truck. Paralleling the road was a silver pipe, taller and wider than the truck, which is part of the Los Angeles aqueduct that carries water south to the city.

Now, though, we've left the pipe and truck behind and continue on foot; Hill is talking about earthquakes. "With all the activity in the caldera," he says, referring to the many small quakes, "there's no reason to think there couldn't just as easily be a magnitude 6.5 or even a 7.0. That could do some damage." As he says this, I'm eyeballing a six-meter wall of crumbling rock looming overhead to our left. It's not a comforting sight, as Dave Hill has warned that aftershocks can produce rock~fctlls.

California, of course, has a history rich with earthquakes. The state sits on top of the boundaries of two tectonic plates, the North American and the Pacific. As a result, the state is laced with faults-fractures in rock caused by the shifting of the earth's crust. For the past three million years a fault system running the 640-kilometer length of the Sierra Nevada has been shoving the mountain range up (peaks of 3,048 to 4,270 meters are routine) and ti lting it to the west, and at the same time pushing the Owens Valley, which runs along the Sierra's east side, down. Over time, the topography has been sculpted by glaciation and weathering.

While the Sierra fault zone is not as well known as the San Andreas, it has had its share of severe earthquakes. In 1986, not far from where we now walk, a mag-

nitude 6.4 earthquake struck in the area known as Chalfant Valley. One struck in 1872 at Lone Pine, 160 kilometers south of the caldera, destroying the town and killing 27 people. Although the quake occurred before the invention of seismographs, modern geologists estimate its magnitude at 7.6-8,0.

Other researchers had explored and mapped the area, but Bailey and a colleague were the first to identify the Long Valley caldera in 1968 as a "resurgent" caldera, a collapsed volcano containing a growing, magma-fed bulge. Since then, Bailey has spent years, and worn out who knows how many pairs of hiking boots, laboriously studying the caldera's rocks, ancient lava flows, pyroclastic deposits and other volcanic debris. Learning a volcano's history is impoltant in anticipating future eruptions, and over the years.

Bailey identified many of the types and magnitudes of old eruptions.

It may be difficult for the layperson to understand Bailey's jargon as he talks to the group of visiting scientists, but it's possible to get the drift when considering the visual aid behind him, because 1.5 meters beyond Bailey is an awesome Scientist Roy Bailey studies aerial photographs of cliffs formed from volcanic ash turned to rock.

sight. There, the ground ends, plunging straight down some 120 meters to a river.

The cliff we are looking at across this gorge is made of Bishop tuff, "tuff" being a type of rock composed of compacted volcanic ash.

It is powerful evidence of the cataclysm that formed the caldera. Way back when, a single, huge chamber of magma, about 6.5 kilometers deep, underlay the terrain where the present-day caldera now sits.

Then, about 760,000 years ago, a volcanic explosion blew out 625 cubic kilometers of magma; a fast-moving and turbulent flow of lethally hot gas and debris quickly buried a 90,650-hectare area. Known as a pyroclastic flow, it leveled everything in its path and laid down a carpet of ash 150 meters thick; the flow and airborne ash created this rock formation, subsequently cut by the river. At intervals along the cliff are columns of curving rock; Bailey calls them "rosettes," remnants of ancient fumaroles, vents where steam blasted its way out. Ash was blown as far east as present-day Nebraska and as far south as today's Los Angeles. The explosion caused the roof of the magma chamber to collapse, dropping the overlying ground more than a mile and forming the caldera.

Within the caldera itself, the Bishop tuff is not exposed on the surface, although the ash that would eventually harden to form

California, which has a history rich with earthquakes, sits on top of the boundaries of two tectonic plates. the tufffell back into the caldera during the explosion. It's subsequently been buried by what Bailey calls "post-caldera" activity, meaning more ash being ejected from other, nearby volcanoes, along with the glaciation that came along later, covering the caldera with other kinds of rock and soil. Indeed, some 10,000 years ago the caldera was entirely filled with water; icebergs from the glaciers would have been floating about, says Bailey.

As the group clambers back into the trucks, Hill gives me a lesson in the volatile geology of Long Valley. The force of any eruption is strongly influenced by the chemical makeup of its magma, he explains. Bishop tuff-rhyolite-is about 73 percent silica. In magma, the greater the silica content, the greater the viscosity, or resistance to flow. Or, in other words, the greater the viscosity, the slower the lava will flow.

So why the explosion? Why didn't the lava simply ooze out, like toothpaste?

"Because the more viscous magma is, the more gases it can hold in," says Hill.

"Since the magma has a high content of silica, the viscosity-the thickness-also holds in these gases, stuff like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide." Presumably, says Hill, when the magma eventually worried its way through fissures in the rock to finally reach the surface, it was almost instantaneously released from the intense pressure caused by the ealth and rock that pressed against it; that sharp pressure drop allowed the gases trapped in the magma to explosively expand.

But complicating the picture is another "explosive chemical" that lurks everywhere beneath the real estate of the

caldera: water. The pools of magma that underlie Long Valley also heat and pressurize pools of underground water. The water feeds hot springs that locals and tourists like to soak in, and it produces natural steam vents. The hot water even drives three geothermal power plants, which together produce enough electricity to power a small town. All this water makes the area ripe for a phreatic explosion: when magma penetrates a body of underground water, the water flashes to steam.

Most Californians who are familiar with this pali of the state don't call it the

Long Valley caldera. Instead, they call it Mammoth Mountain, Mammoth Lakes or simply Mammoth. Mammoth Mountain is a 3,370-meter dormant volcano that's perched in the southwest end of the caldera. It's also a major ski resort, the West's second largest after Vail, Colorado.

Obviously, a ski resort's survival depends on the skiers who come each winter. The town of Mammoth Lakes, with its restaurants, shops and active real estate market in second homes, is dependent on yearround tourism.

The area received a nasty wake-up call

Carbon dioxide jimn magma killed these trees.

Seismologist David Hill (inset) has worked here for 25 years.

on Memorial Day 1980, when four magnitude-6.0 ealihquakes hit in a 48-hour period. Hundreds of smaller quakes followed. Together, the temblors caused avalanches and rockslides, buckled the ground, and cracked walls and chimneys.

Research in 1981 through 1982 found that the resurgent dome had bulged another 25 centimeters since it was last measured in 1978. At the time, the evidence indicated that the ealihquakes were becoming more shallow, suggesting the possibility that it was not tectonic faulting that was causing the quakes but magma moving closer to the surface.

"You have to remember, too, that this was not long after Mount St. Helens," says Hill, "and we were observing a pattern that was very similar to the events that preceded that eruption." That was a scary thought because in Washington State, despite careful monitoring of the volcano, people still died.

When the swarms persisted, the USGS finally issued the lowest level volcanic

alert, notifying residents and the media of a "potential volcanic hazard." The swarm of earthquakes was occurring under the intersection of highways 395 and 203, the latter the lone access into Mammoth Lakes. State and local officials, fearing an eruption would cut off the town, demanded that a secondary escape road be built that would provide vacationers and residents another way of fleeing any eruption or lava flow.

All of this was very bad news for the locals who, until the infamous Memorial Day weekend, had not even known they were living in a volcanically active area.

Earthquakes, they could understand. This was, after all, California. But volcanoes?

Still, all they could do was watch as tourists fled, real estate prices plunged and their own incomes headed south.

Then, says Hill, in the typical manner in which the geology in Long Valley can be, as he puts it, "perverse," nothing happened. o eruption occurred. "No more temblors," Hill smiles ruefully. "Everything quieted down." The locals were outraged, deriding the USGS as the "United States Guessing Society." A new sign was quickly erected by the new escape route, naming it the Mammoth Scenic Loop.

Still, the agency's concern was not unreasonable.

The possible scenarios were frightening. A 1987 multi agency report stated that even in a moderate eruption, flows of hot ash and gas could bury buildings and forests or set them on fire. If it happened in winter, the hot ash could melt snow, creating floods and mudflows that could be devastating.

"1 think it's fair to say there was grinding of gears between the local businessmen, the people in the town and the USGS," says Wally Hofmann, publisher of the local newspaper, the Mammoth Times.

"The USGS wasn't great about communicating information to us back then."

The situation also wasn't helped by the outside media, says Hofmann. He cites as one example the Los Angeles TV station that did a report on the volcanic activity in the area. As a background, they used an exploding Mount St. Helens. That caused many people to think it was Mammoth Mountain itself that had erupted, exacer-

The USGS's Adam Heffernan monitors a station from which lasers measure ground movement.

bating the situation.

Hill winces when reminded of the media. "We didn't help ourselves any, either," he says, "because a reporter from the Los Angeles Times somehow got wind that we were issuing the alert, and published it before we had a chance to alert local officials."

The agency, says Hill, was embarrassed-but also frustrated. After all, what was it supposed to have done? Say nothing? Then what, should an "event" actually have occurred? "At that time, most of the residents had no idea they were even in a volcanic area or living within a caldera," recalls Hill. The animosity was such, says Hill, that "years later I stayed at the same motel when I went to Mammoth because it was the only place that would take me."

Hill remains the man in the hot seat.

Each time the caldera starts to show life, it's up to him to read the geologic signs and decide whether he should implement the USGS's "Response Plan for Volcanic Hazards." The plan refers to what the agency will do in the event of any volcanic activity in the caldera. The advisories range from green (for weak unrest, the normal, day-to-day standard for the

area), through yellow (intense unrest), orange (eruption likely), and finally, red (she's blowing!). In late November 1997, Hill came close to calling a yellow alert.

Besides a severe swarm of earthquakes, the resurgent dome, which normally expands at a rate of about 2.5 centimeters a year, grew almost 10 centimeters between May and December of 1997, when things were shaking.

These days, relations have improved between the town and the USGS. People are more knowledgeable, and Hill has gone to great lengths to make his agency more communicative. Nonetheless, when the swanns come, everybody's a bit uneasy. "It does get stressful when the caldera gets restless, and you're uncertain what's going to happen for weeks or months at a time.

When I went into science I had no idea I was going to be in this kind of a position," he says. "There was nothing in my textbooks about public relations."

One bit of good news for the town is that few if any scientists believe that if an eruption were to take place it would be anything like the cataclysmic event that formed the caldera. No single, large pool of magma underlies the caldera anymore.

Instead, says Hill, there are several smaller, separate pools, "like a breakfast pastry that's sprinkled with raisins." Besides the one under the dome, there's at least one

Inside the caldera, this crater was created 550 to 600 years ago when hot magma flashed groundwater into steam.

smaller pool under Mammoth Mountain, another in the northwestern part of the caldera, and possibly yet another under the intersection of the two highways, where the activity in the early 1980s occurred.

While the rate of growth may vary during times of unrest, the dome still grows every year. Since 1979, the dome has risen 79 centimeters, presumably fed by repeated, fresh injections of magma into an existing pool. Logically, then, this is the place where an eruption is likely to happen.

Ironically, though, it's not, says Hill. "Certainly the magma's coming in at depth from somewhere, but it's not necessarily moving closer to the surface." He sees my blank look. "Think if you had a big chunk of foam rubber and had some way of sticking a balloon under it and blowing it up. You'd see a domeshaped uplift on the surface. The whole thing would go up and stretch.

That's what we're seeing here. So you can get uplift and extension of the dome without moving the balloon any closer to the surface."

I get it. Still, though, isn't nearly a meter of uplift in 20 years significant? "It is, but you have to keep it in perspective," says Hill. "The uplift at the Rabaul volcano in Papua New Guinea, for example, rose 4.8 meters in 27 hours just before the eruption in 1994," says Hill.

That evening I drive up Lake Mary Road, at the backside of Mammoth Mountain, to see the area of dead trees that have been killed by carbon dioxide escaping from under the ground. It is near a place called Horseshoe Lake and the campground that wraps around it. In 1989, after a series of small earthquakes under the mountain, USGS monitoring instruments showed that a small dike, an intrusion of magma, was rising closer to the surface.

Soon after, trees in the area began dying. At first no one linked the tree kills to volcanic activity: "We assumed it was some kind of bug infestation, or possibly a manifestation of a drought that was taking place at the time," says Mike Sorey, a USGS hydrologist. Scientists took a fresh look after a U.S. Forest Service ranger,

"The uplift at the Rabaul volcano in Papua New Guinea, for example, rose 4.8 meters in 27 hours just before the eruption in 1994." seeking shelter from a winter storm, was almost asphyxiated when he entered a cabin that was nearly buried in snow near the tree kill. The culprit was carbon dioxide (C02), odorless and colorless. Because it is also heavier than air, CO2, will accumulate at the bottom of tents, snowbanks, small depressions in the earthand cabins nearly buried in snow. It displaces the normal air and its life-supporting oxygen.

Normally, soil gases have a CO2 content of about one percent. In Horseshoe Lake, though, researchers determined that by 1994, the CO2 content was as high as 80 percent. Plants, of course, require CO2, taking it into their leaves and releasing the oxygen. But a tree's root system needs to take up oxygen, water and other nutrients directly. Because there was so much CO2 seeping through the ground, the roots couldn't get what they needed. The trees suffocated.

To determine if the CO2 had a magmatic source, the USGS looked at the ratios of various carbon and helium isotopes in the gas; magma produces a specific ratio.

Samples were taken from cold streams ("some of the springs contain so much CO2 it tastes like soda water," says Sorey), soil and fumaroles on Mammoth Mountain. In every case, the isotopic evidence pointed to magma as the source.

Other instrumentation determined that the volume of gas that's been escaping is too much to be coming from small gas pockets.

At one point, the researchers calculated the amount upwelling through the soil at more than 500 tons of CO2 every day.

Bathers congregate in Hot Creek where warm water from geothermal vents mixes with cold stream wate!:

Before leaving, I make a visit to Mammoth Mountain itself, hiking to a fumarole at the 3,048-meter level on the mountain's side. The vent gives off a steady blast of steam and stink. (I take a childlike delight in holding my hand over the vent's outpouring, nearly scalding myself in the process.) The mountain, still bare of snow, is bustling with activity as new and faster lifts are installed. Intrawest, a major resort development corporation, recently bought 60 percent of Mammoth Mountain and has already completed work on a condominium and lodge. Times are good, and business is building. Clearly, the threat of a volcano isn't a deterrent, and the ski mountain developers, as well as citizens, are counting on the long, long stretch between geologic events.

"As a community we were slow to come around to accepting the geology that we have here," says Pam Murphy, Mammoth Mountain's general manager, who has been a resident in the area since the 1950s. "The earthquakes back in 1980 really caught us off guard. It took us until the 1990s before it finally became apparent that we needed

to acknowledge that this area was formed by geologic activity."

And what of other local people who have planted roots in the community? 1 had dinner one night with five residents, all of whom had lived in Mammoth for at least 10 years. One opinion was voiced by Brian Knowles, a newlywed who recently purchased his first home here.

"Right after we bought the house, there were several earthquakes in a row," says the 31-year-old, "and it was a bit unnerving. We were thinking, 'Oh Lord, what did we do?' But this is California, and this is a beautiful place to live. Earthquakes come with the territory. As for volcanoes," he laughs, "like most people here, we're just banking on the geologic timescale."

The next morning as I depart, I decide to make one last stop. At the southern boundary of the caldera, Mammoth Creek flows from west to east to the confluence where it empties into the Owens River.

Before it gets to that river, though, the last stretch is called Hot Creek. Gazing down from a bluff, I can easily see why. Steam rises from vents and from several pools of boiling, sky-blue water; directly below, a small geyser of water, a few inches high, is popping and sizzling. In one large pool,

several people are immersed to their chins in the hot water, ignoring the posted warning signs.

The signs are there because things can change here, and quickly. After a magnitude-6.2 earthquake in 1980, a 9-meterhigh geyser boiled for several hours in this creek before dying out. Mike Sorey, the USGS hydrologist, told me that in 1997, one earthquake caused a 30-centimeter-high geyser that would have cooked anybody sitting in the water.

Making my way down a narrow path to the water's edge, I feel an eerie sensation.

The water snaps and bubbles, belching and frothing. Gingerly, I touch it. It's very hot. I reread a nearby sign: "Danger. Scalding water. Unstable ground. Keep out."

While intellectually I accept the long odds of the geologic calendar, I can't help but recall Sorey's comment.

It takes faith to believe in scientists' interpretation of the geologic record. As I beat my retreat to high ground, I'm glad I don't have to fill the hiking shoes of a David Hill, the point man for the roiling real estate of the Long Valley caldera. 0 About the Author: Mark Wheeler is a science writer with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

aI's has been born afresh in the human mind with each exploratory thrust. ow it was happening again under the astonished gaze of Ken Edgett as he sat at his computer, tucked away in a leafy industrial park in the Pacific coast hills outside San Diego. One of Edgett's tasks, unique on Earth at the moment, was to inspect virtually every one of the thousands of images raining in at the rate of 5,000 pixels per second from the only operational spacecraft in the vicinity of the red planet-the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS).

For a little while each day, in some sense, the young geologist had this hatchling Mars all to himself.

The world unfolding in front of him was not, as he put it, "your mother's Mars." It was not the Mars of the Viking missions ofthe 1970s or even of the last successful landing mission a few years ago. And although he had spent many of his 34 years honing his own sense of the place, he confessed this Mars shocked even him. "The biggest thing to come out of the MGS images is bafflement," Edgett said the first morning of my visit. "Much of it doesn't add up. It's spine-chilling. It's ...mind-boggling!"

In ovember 1996 when Surveyor was launched, there had been no completely successful mission to Mars in 20 years. Its goal was to assemble a global portrait of the planet over a full Martian year (about two Earth years). A boxy, one-ton craft, it carries a camera and a suite of remote-sensing instruments that bounce laser beams off the surface to measure topography, scan for heat emissions to study atmosphere and mineral composition, and probe the planet's interior through its gravity and magnetism.

Surveyor never attracted the concentrated burst of global acclaim bestowed in 1997 on its charismatic (but scientifically much less ambitious) sister mission, NASA's Mars Pathfinder with its lander and rock-sniffing sidekick, the rover Sojourner.

Slowly and steadily, however, Surveyor fomented its own quiet revolution in scientific understanding of the seemingly most Eat1hlike planet known.

By late 2000 the workhorse camera had churned out some 80,000 images, on average 50 times as detailed as any previously taken from orbit. Other onboard instruments had mapped the topography and gravity of the entire globe, provided a new understanding of the planet's overall shape, and discovered a puzzling pattern of magnetic strips in the planet's surface-apparent

I

Mars, as seen from Viking, showing the great canyon, Valles Marineris.

Illustration of Mars Global Surveyor thatjinished mapping the planet on Januwy 31 last yew; after gathering thousands of images of the Red Planet.

remnants of an ancient global magnetic field. The craft had operated a continuous Martian weather service, recording huge dust storms, the shadows of tornado-like dust devils, and wildly rapid swings from dusty and warm to cold and clear. (At the summit of Olympus Mons, for instance, the typical daily high is 4 degrees Celsius, and the low is minus 109 degrees Celsius.)

Some of the images were, aside fi路om any scientific revelations, simply dazzling displays of nature's art: Byzantine dune-field sculptlU"es,black scrawls etched by Mat1ian dust devils. "When I first gazed at some of the images fi路om Surveyor's camera," said Jim Garvin, NASA's chief scientist for Mars exploration, "I was moved to tears."

The quest to understand the history of water on Mars has been an overarching theme in the study of the planet. Right now that quest was perhaps nowhere more concentrated than here at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS), where the Surveyor camera was designed, constructed, and tested under the guidance of Edgett's boss and mentor, geomorphologist Michael Malin.

On this pat1icular spring morning Edgett was escorting me on a virtual flying tour over Mars's surface. Exhibit A was a disheveledlooking region known as Gorgonum Chaos. Here, captured in the MGS images, we saw pati of a rugged crater wall that had collapsed into a gully with a number of deep, sinuous channels fanning out, ending abruptly in an apron of deposited material.

In shape the features resembled gully washes in the American West. The flows appeared to come to a sudden halt, suggesting the material was thick-perhaps liquid filled with dirt and debris.

Mud on Mars? But what really brought up the goose bumps was the panoramic repetition of the statiling features. As the flight continued along a strip of the planet's surface, the flow patterns showed up on the cliff walls and escarpments of other craters, mesas, and troughs, always erupting near their tops, always apparently from the same geologic layer 100 to 500 meters down.

The evidence disturbed the scientists in more than one respect. First, conditions on Mars are such that any water reaching the surface supposedly would not remain liquid for very long but would boil, freeze, or poof into vapor.

Second, from the absence of craters, sand dunes, or anything else on top of the gullies, they appeared to have formed very recently, possibly as recently as yesterday.

By this time the signature of weeping or seeping liquid had shown up in some 200 Surveyor images. Most of the evidence was found, strikingly, in some of the coldest places on the surface-on shadowed slopes facing the poles, in clusters scattered around latitudes higher than 30 degrees-rather than at the warmer equatorial latitudes. This suggested that the flows contained frozen volatiles, substances that

would vaporize if exposed to the warmth of sunlight.

Malin and Edgett had been puzzling over these images for more than a year, trying to come up with an explanation that would point to something other than liquid water before publishing their discovery. "We were dragged kicking and screaming to this conclusion," Edgett said. But they could find no plausible "dry" explanation. And proposals for other substances that might behave as liquids on the Martian surface raised so many other questions that they failed to solve the problem.

As if this mystery weren't enough, Malin and Edgett were pondering other images that told a separate and possibly more fundamental tale of ancient water on Mars. Soon after Surveyor's alTival there, the researchers noticed images of Valles Marineris (a great canyon system that would span the continental United States) that show the planet's upper crust is dramatically layered: light, dark, light, dark. Something like what you see in Arizona and Utah at Zion, Bryce, or the Grand Canyon.

Bruce Murray of Caltech, an old friend and adviser of Malin who stopped by MSSS around Christmas 1997, happened to see the first images ofthe layering. "T can't believe it!" he said.

"Everything we knew from Mariner 9 and Viking led us to expect that the uppermost subsurface of Mars would resemble that of the moon," Malin said. "To see hundreds of individual layers defied the common wisdom."

As Surveyor's orbiting camera zoomed in, there were more surprises in the details. The presence of the layers and the way they are interbedded with ancient craters suggest that here is a priceless record of a Martian history previously unknown. The layers speak of the Mars that existed for hundreds of years.

"The surface of today represents the preserved end of a time," Malin said. The layering "certainly preserves a story about Mars few had ever thought of before."

Actually Malin, 50, had been fretting about this issue for decades and even predicted elements of the hypothesis in his thesis written in 1975, based on Mariner 9 data, with its thousand times poorer resolution. "Nobody bought my story," he said, "so I stopped harping on it."

Until now. "If I had to bet, I probably would say these layers represent lakes that occurred on Mars very, very early in its history. r probably would say that Mars had lakes all over its surface at one time, and materials were being transported into these lakes." Just as with the eerie signs of seepage elsewhere, the layering evidence introduces more riddles to be solved. But, says Malin, "it all points to a Mars that was substantially more dynamic in terms of its environment, weathering, erosion, and transport than anything we see on the surface today."

Perhaps the layers in the Surveyor images represent the only record ofthe erosion of landscapes long gone because the processes that created them no longer operate on Mars. "Craters the size of Washington, D.C., were completely filled and then exhumed," says Edgett. "Unbelievable amounts of material were moved around in ways that just don't add up."

The human perspective on Mars has flickered over the centuries, but in some sense it has always centered on water. Percival Lowell's

famous notebooks-drawn from telescope observations enhanced by a hopeful imagination-proposed in the late 1800s that vast, engineered canals, or irrigation ditches, carried water from the Martian poles to a mighty civilization concentrated nearer the equator, where the Maliian climate was no less comfortable than, say, "the South of England."

A more skeptical assessment by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1907 described a much colder, perpetually frozen place as dead and forbidding as Earth's moon. Still, life-giving waters flowed compellingly through the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, while H.G. Wells conjured a Martian race of "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic."

Our first space-age close-up-a glimpse for Mariner 4 as it swept over a slice of ancient cratered terrain-revealed a staggeringly inhospitable world. The view brightened again with Mariner 9, the first Mars orbiter. Though it could see no features smaller than a few football fields, its images suggested a more interesting, changeable world: one where water had indeed once flowed, where the polar caps had ice in them and expanded and retreated as the seasons changed, where there was water in clouds that drifted through Martian skies.

With the ambitious Viking missions of the 1970s, scientists were emboldened to ask the big question: Is there life? Were there organics in the surface soil? At least for that place and time, the answer came back No. Meanwhile, scientists studying life on their home planet were gaining a new perspective on the topic.

Evidence was turning up all over the globe that microbial life thrived under extremes of pressure, temperature, and other conditions previously considered lethal. Certain organisms could use chemical energy in place of sunlight.

In 1996 the startling claim that signs of possible microbial life had been discovered in a Martian meteorite helped complete the link between the Ealih microbes known as extremophiles (lovers of extremes) and the hunt for life on other worlds.

Although most of the scientific community rejected the more dramatic interpretations by the NASA-Stanford team, some features of the rock remain mysterious, and there is little dispute that its evidence confirms the presence of certain kinds of organic molecules on or within Mars. At the same time the intriguing complexity found within the Martian meteorite has made scientists painfully aware that they might not be able to recognize extraterrestrial life, or agree about it, if they found it.

The quest to understand the history of water on Mars not only guides scientists but also serves as an organizing principle for NASA's long-range Mars exploration plan. Liquid water is essential for all known biology, and scientists note that everywhere

life is found on Earth, it exists in combination with organic material, an energy source, and liquid water. If the Malin-Edgett seepages do represent water, says Edward Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science, "It could have profound implications for the ultimate question: Are we alone?"

But biology takes time. For three decades planetary scientists have debated a fundamental question about Mars: Did it rain? The answer is crucial, many believe, to the ease with which life could arise there, at least at the surface. Rain implies a warmer climate, where water could flow or pool for long periods, a water cycle persistent enough for life to have developed. The geologic record has suggested that Mars was warmer, wetter, and more Earth-like billions of years ago-possibly back to the very time that life was emerging on Earth. There is abundant evidence that water in huge quantities once flowed there, but then something changed on Mars, leaving its surface barren, cold, dry, and desolate.

For some 30 years the primary evidence for a wetter, warmer early Mars has been the many branching channels, known as valley networks, that some believe were carved by cascading rainwater. Because they occur on heavily cratered terrain, the assumption was that they are very ancient and the valleys carved among them are very ancient.

Other Surveyor data have been consistent with a "no rain" scenario, suggesting negative implications for life on the surface.

What if the streambeds and channels seen on Mars were created

in brief, spasmodic events-such as molten volcanic flows or explosive asteroid and comet impacts-that cooked the surface and melted the ice? If so, some argue, it is unlikely that there was a climate temperate enough for rain to fall and unlikely that water was present on the surface long enough for life to have begun there. Also, Surveyor images show branching channels ending abruptly in box canyons, which indicate flooding rather than rain.

"The evidence against rainfall is much greater than it was," says Arden Albee, Surveyor project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, which manages the Mars program for NASA. One ofthe consistently puzzling aspects of the data so far is in the evidence of huge basins within the structure of the Martian crust. Findings from Surveyor's laser altimeter and gravity sensors, published in early 2000, revealed signs of buried channels that could have been carved by floods of water flowing from the southern highlands into the northern lowlands billions of years ago. Once on the surface but since buried in sediment, these channels are as much as 200 kilometers wide and more than 1,600 kilometers long. They hint at the existence of oceans. A depression near the north polar cap looks the way the site of an ancient ocean could look on Earth.

But intensive searches for confirming details, such as a shoreline, have turned up nothing conclusive. (Although geomorphologist Tim Parker of JPL has argued persistently that such details are there.) And scientists can't tell yet whether the basin's flat bottom represents sediment that settled out, which would also be a key indicator of oceans. One of the more intriguing ideas under debate is the possibility that the water flows were ice covered.

Dan McCleese, chief scientist of the Mars program at JPL, notes that the Mars features are sometimes way off scale, much larger than their best counterparts on Earth. "The absence of an Earth analogue for these at the right scale," he adds, "has been a problem."

But for now, it seems, the conviction that there was a wet, warm Mars a long time ago has been shaken. Where there is evidence that water once flowed, scientists don't understand what processes drove it.

Veterans of Mars exploration have felt their enthusiasm increasingly tempered of late by a renewed sense of respect, even humility, regarding the planet. There is of course the pain and shock of losing an orbiter, a lander, and two microprobes in rapid succession in late 1999 and the awareness that of the 30 Mars missions launched by the United States or the former Soviet Union to date, 21 have failed completely or partly. And of 12 attempts at landings, only four have made it. Even more daunting is the Surveyor data showing how poorly the planet is

understood and how ill-equipped scientists and engineers are to confront it. All these factors informed NASA's drastic alternation last year in its strategic approach to Mars. After a period oflively debate, NASA last October announced the outlines of a long-term strategy designed to be less vulnerable to failures and better able to respond to new discoveries and evolving scientific understanding of the planet. "You have to assume Mars will continue to surprise us," Edward Weiler said.

One spacecraft equipped to pursue signs of water on and below the Martian surface was launched on April 7 last year-the U.S. 2001 Mars Odyssey. The European Mars Express is on track for launch in 2003. Weiler has decided to send two robotic rovers to the planet's surface in 2003. Missions later in the decade will depend on what the 200 I and 2003 explorations reveal about a Martian climate and geology and how the technologies advance.

Tentative plans call for the 2005 launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a craft that could photograph surface details as small as beach balls and follow up on the mystifYing hints of water seen in the Surveyor images.

Bringing home samples of Martian rocks and soil is still a goal, Weiler emphasized, but not until at least 20 II. To make sure such a costly mission (an estimated one to two billion dollars) goes to the right place on Mars, the exploration leading up to it will focus on determining whether the ingredients required for life-liquid water, complex organic molecules, and a source of energyever existed together anywhere on Mars and if so, where.

The space agency has already begun developing better technologies for the eventual return of samples: improved methods for preserving them on the trip home, for detecting life, for preventing contamination of Earth's biosphere should there be any captured microbes in the trove, and for analyzing the rocks once they are in hand.

Planetary exploration is inherently risky, but the avoidable 1999 failures convinced managers that, among other problems, the philosophy known as "faster, cheaper, better" had been pushed too far toward faster and cheaper. With little additional money in their exploration budget, program leaders plan to reduce the chance of failure in part by stretching the mission schedule over longer periods.

Through their camera, the Malin team will tell you, they live the Surveyor mission with a dailiness hard to explain to the outside world. They experience the Martian seasons, watch the polar caps shrink and expand.

They take their vacations every two years when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from the Earth. And they have learned that when you have the only camera on Mars, the pressure can get intense. Malin and his beleaguered staff of ten struggle constantly to cope with the sheer volume of incoming data. When I visited MSSS, machines from the entetiainment industry used to mass-

produce CDs were cranking out discs like pancakes, leaving them stacked up everywhere in the lab. It took 44 CDs to contain just the first six months of Surveyor data, and scientists around the world had been clamoring impatiently for copies.

At peak data-transmission rates, the camera takes 300 pictures a day, and a mere 60 during slower periods when Mars is farthest from Earth. At full throttle, when the two planets are closest together, Edgett can spend 12 hours planning 24 hours of observations.

This is an obscure field of expertise with just the one leading practitioner, who has much of the "mission memory" stored in his brain. Despite long lists of previously identified targets, Edgett notes that many of what have turned out to be the most surprising and informative sites-such as those showing seepage-were products of serendipity. "You don't have a roomful of engineers and scientists making decisions," said Edgett.

"The target list is due in six hours, and I've got to get it done.

The ability to learn as we go, to select what we shoot, that's what makes for a powerful mission."

But as Malin and Edgett pondered those elusive landscapes, they admitted to a certain melancholy. "We are constantly aggravated by the fact that all the questions we have about Mars could now be answered by Ken and me if we could just walk around on the planet for a few days," Malin said.

Edgett agreed: "It's unusual to hear people like us argue for manned space exploration. But for about two years now Malin and I have been absolutely convinced that we're going to have to send people there."

Short of digging with his own trowel into the Martian sand, Malin has his heart set on dispatching a sophisticated Mars airplane, built by a consortium of Earth's best high-altitude aircraft experts. He can almost see it-soaring on its 1O-meter wingspan on a three-hour tour over the eastern region ofYalles Marineris to study the layering or to Gorgonum Chaos and one other seepage site. Its camera and remote-sensing instruments would probe the planet's interior, and "if there's liquid water there now, it will glint like gangbusters at radio frequencies.

"I would give them a Mars they'd never dreamed of."

0 About the Author: Kathy Sawyer is the Washington Post staff writer on space science and technology .

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