SPAN: November/December 2002

Jimmy Carter

2002 Nobel Peace Laureate ormer

u.s.

President Jimmy Carter was winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize on October 11, a prize many feel he earned several times over. His crowning achievement, historically, came while he was President (19771981). He negotiated the Camp David Accords, the 1978 peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. In the years since his presidency he has waged an indefatigable campaign for peace and against poverty, with many significant successes.

Often sent as a peace ambassador to countries locked in intractable conflicts, his mediation has helped avert escalation more than once. He played a role resolving conflicts in North Korea, Haiti, Liberia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, among other places.

Jimmy Carter has long been dedicated to developing a positive relationship between the United States and Cuba. Documents from his presidency declassified in May revealed him to be the only known President to make normalization of U.S.Cuba relations part of American foreign policy.

Recently Carter urged caution in embarking on military action against Iraq, favoring cooperation with the UN. The Nobel citatiDn said, in part, "In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development."

Carter and his wife Rosalynn, in 1982, founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, a think tank committed to human rights advocacy and the alleviation of human suffering around the world. On its Web site the former President posted his response to the award: "My concept of human rights has grown to include not only the right to Jive in peace, but also to adequate health care, shelter, food and to economic opportunity. I hope this award reflects a universal acceptance and even embrace ofthis broadbased concept of human rights."

Jimmy Carter is an active participant in Habitat for Humanity International, which sponsors cooperative housing projects for the homeless poor. He is the third American President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson received it for fostering the League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations, and Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906 for negotiating a number of peace treaties. The last American to be awarded the Peace Prize was Jody Williams, in 1997, for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

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SPAN American Hindus

By Diana L. Eck

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

A Kaleidoscope of Religions An Interview with Diana L. Eck

Editor-in-Chief David Kennedy

Digital Cinema

Editor Lea Terhune Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

By Michael A. Hiltzik

Light, Sound, Animation

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

By A. Ven.kata Narayan.a

Editorial Assistant K. Muthill.Llll1ar

By Lea Terhune

Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar

On the Lighter Side

Deputy Art Director Sharad Sovani Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Magic Is Alive in India

Flights of Fancy

By Andrew D. Blechman

Kaboota rbazee Photographs by Santosh Verma

Research Services

Brave New World

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

By James Trefil

Body of Evidence

By Dana Hawkins Front cover: The lion and the rabbit, chief antagonist and protagonist in Moving Picture Company's new 3D animated cartoon series Jungle Tales (Jungal Mongol in Hindi), are featured in this frame from the first episode. The series was created to have universal appeal, and while the original is in Hindi, it may be subtitled or dubbed in any language. Art courtesy Moving Picture Company.

Note: SPA does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query 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 o/this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price 0/ magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

Visit SPAN on the Web at usembassy.state.gov/delhi.html/wwwh19.html U.S. Embassy Homepage usembassy.state.gov/delhi.html

Biotech's Big Bazaar

By Janet Rae-Dupree, Paul J. Lim, Pamela Sherrid and Nell Boyce

The Biotech Debate

By Dipesh Satapathy

My Mingus

By Sue Graham Mingus

Lionel Hampton: King of the Vibes

By Soli J. Sorabjee

Spotlight: Ramesh Hariharan

By K. Muthukumar

Cleaning Up Old King Coal

By Paul Beck

A LETTER

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here's an old American saying, "You can't go home again." Well, you can. I'm "back home" in India for the second time, and enjoying the country's rich diversity and vibrancy.

My first visit to India was as a young tourist way back in 1971. That was an unforgettable trip, and I experienced many of the sights, sounds and tastes of India which fascinate so many Americans. I returned in 1987 to serve for three years as the US. Embassy's spokesman and information officer (and an avid SPAN reader). Now, in this exciting, postCold War period of increasing interdependency and cooperation, I'm pleased to be back and to see all the breathtaking changes that have taken place recently.

This time I'm the Embassy's Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs and, in that capacity, I have the pleasure of serving as SPAN's publisher.

Remarkable strides have taken place in this great democracy and rising economy Particularly noticeable, of course, are the striking improvements in the Indo-American relationship. Bilateral relations have been transformed across a whole range of government-to-government and people-topeople contacts. Prime Minister Vajpayee's recent trip to the United States. and meeting with President Bush and the many high-level US. visitors to New Delhi are but two indicators of the qualitatively different relationship developing between the two countries.

One thing that has not changed is SPAN, which has been publishing for 42 years. This unique magazine continues to serve as an effective bridge between America and India. It continues to reprint pieces from the top US. magazines and to attract some of India's best writers commenting on the latest trends in Indo-US. relations, business, science and technology, education and culture and the arts.

Our final issue of 2002 highlights some exciting possibilities in our still-new century-things that already enhance all of our lives. Take the movies, for instance. Our cover feature looks at the strides in digital imaging in Hollywood, and the digital animation industry in India, which is poised to burst into the world market. In "Digital Cinema," Michael A. Hiltzik tells how computfilm making. erized post-production is transforming A. Venkata Narayana, in "Light, Sound, Animation,"

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surveys the digital animation scene in India.

Outsourcing for big foreign film companies is the unique selling point for a number of hot Indian studios. Ramesh Sharma, director of one of those studios, talks about why his Moving Picture Company plunged into 3D digital animation in "Magic Is Alive in India,"

by Lea Terhune.

A potentially life-changing frontier is biotechnology.

Scientists have mapped DNA, cloned animals and altered plants. The goal is to benefit humanity with new vaccines, cure diseases and grow crops that are resistant to destructive pests. "Brave New World," by James Trefil, gives the rundown on stem cells and genetic engineering.

In "Biotech's Big Bazaar," a range of companies developing new means of prevention and cure are profiled by several authors. And biotech advocate C.S. Prakash airs his views to Dipesh Satapathy in "The Biotech Debate."

Recently, the well-known South Asia scholar Diana L. Eck was in India to speak about pluralism in society Pluralism is the subject of her book Religious Diversity in America and her work for a decade as head of Harvard's Pluralism Project. "American Hindus" offers excerpts from her book. Eck's observations about religious diversity in America follow in a SPAN interview, ''A Kaleidoscope of Religions."

Recreation comes in many forms. Some people delight in digital extravaganzas on TV or in the cinema hall. Others enjoy keeping pigeons. "Flights of Fancy,"

by Andrew D. Blechman, takes us to the races with avid pigeon enthusiasts in New York, where pigeon-keeping has long been a popular pastime. Photographer Santosh Verma, meanwhile, went to Lucknow to see how pigeon keepers in India are doing. The results may be seen in his photo essay, "Kabootarbazee."

Eminent jurist Soli J. Sorabjee prefers jazz, and his tribute, "Lionel Hampton: King of the Vibes," accompanies "My Mingus," Sue Mingus' memoir of her husband Charles.

Yes, it's good to be "back home" in India and to reconnect with SPAN and its many loyal readers who not only want a good read but also more dialogue with Americans.

American

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iana L. Eck explores various religions that have taken root in American soil in her book A New Religious America:

How A "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. The chapter entitled "American Hindus: The Ganges and the Mississippi," discusses the ways wisdom from India entered America and ultimately produced today's integration of modern Indian Hindus into American society, temples and all. The history of Hindu influence in America goes back to the 19th century Transcendental ists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Swami Vivekananda breathed life into

dUB America's intellectual interest in Hinduism when he visited Boston and later gave a memorable address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He stayed for three years, teaching groups of seekers.

His work led to the founding of America's first Hindu organization, the Vedanta Society.

It still exists, and offers a universalist approach to spirituality.

A few decades after Vivekananda's death, Paramahansa Yogananda came to the U.S. for a conference and stayed for more than 30 years, during which he founded the still-flourishing SelfRealization Fellowship in California. Yogananda died in 1952 with a well-established teaching program in place.

The 1960s and '70s saw more Hindu teachers gain a following in the United States: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi with Transcendental Meditation; Swami Muktananda and Siddha Yoga Dham; A.C. Bhaktivedanta and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), among others. The late 1960s were also watershed years when Indians began to immigrate to America in larger numbers. Before, Hinduism in America came via visiting exotic teachers, or from Americans, like Baba Ram Dass, who went to India, studied with Indian teachers and returned to publicize their message in bestsellers. With an ever-increasing infusion of regular, practicing Hindus in America, more and more Hindus-along with Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists-became next door neighbors to Christians and Jews.

Perhaps fittingly, the home of Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts, is less than 16 kilometers away from the Sri Lakshmi temple, New England's first Hindu temple. The following excerpts from A New Religious America describe the evolution of American Hinduism in recent decades.

Gurus and The New Religious America hen the 1965 immigration act opened the door to immigration from Asia, among the beneficiaries ofthe new policy were not only the engineers, computer scientists, physicians, and nurses who came to the U.S. in great numbers, but also religious teachers or gurus, like the Maharishi. The term guru entered into the American vocabulary with the steady stream of teachers who brought their philosophies, meditation practices, spiritual leadership, and eccentricities to America. In the Hindu tradition, becoming a teacher has traditionally meant receiving the blessing and authority to teach from one's own teacher.

It is not a matter of academic degrees but of recognizing that the student has learned deeply the wisdom ofthe tradition and can

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Maharishi AÂŁa1J.eshYogi teach it with authenticity. Hindus in India know, however, that there are all kinds of gurus, some more fully in possession of the insights of the tradition than others.

And in India it is taken for granted that some alleged gurus are downright bogus.

In America, however, who was to say? All had a chance to attract a following. In the past 35 years, gurus have come and stayed, and come and gone.

Of the many Hindu gurus who came, From the book A New Religious America by Diana L. Eck, which is published by HarperSanFrancisco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [nc., and available wherever books are sold. Copyright Š 2001 by Diana L. Eck. All rights reserved.

exploded like the fireworks on the Fourth of ~ July, and eventually disappeared, 1will mention only two of the most memorable. In " 1971 we saw the meteoric rise of the young boy-guru ofthe Divine Light Mission called Guru Maharaj Ji. By 1973 he was said to have initiated 50,000 people who had "received knowledge" through him. He rented the Houston Astrodome for what was billed "the most significant event in human history." It was unclear what was supposed to have happened, but the event was not well attended, leaving his organization in debt half a million dollars and on the road back to India. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh also had a brief life in America. In the 1970s his ashram in Pune, India, had attracted young Americans and Europeans to a cathartic form of Hindu tantric meditation practice. In 1981 he established an ashram community in the small town of Antelope, Oregon, and the movement became widely known in the U.S., partially because of the controversies that ensued. Suddenly the small town had acre Integral Yoga Institute in the green hills more than 3,000 residents and a legendary of rural Virginia continues to attract yoga fleet of Rolls Royces for the guru. The city practitioners even today. Here you will find council refused the group new building per- what is perhaps the most astonishing piece of spiritual architecture in the whole counmits, but soon the Rajneesh followers elected themselves to the council and try: the Light of Truth Universal Shrine, or LOTUS. It is a domed, lotus-shaped temple changed the name Antelope to Rajneeshpuram, the "City of Rajneesh." In 1985 the of pink glass sitting like a huge glass flower ashram disintegrated amidst a flurry of in the green countryside. Entering this temlegal controversies and interual dissent. ple, you will find at the center an open shaft Eventually, Rajneesh returned to India. oflight, reaching upward toward the infinity Of the long-lasting new gurus of of the sky. Around it on the lotus petals of the periphery are twelve chapels, each dedicated America, the senior statesman is Swami Satchidananda. He came in time for Wood- to the Divine as seen in one of the world's stock in 1969, where he spoke a word of religious traditions. Hindu eclecticism spirituality and attracted some of the assem- has found a home here, with these lotus 5altars embracing all the bled hippies of the day to the practice of yoga, ~religious traditions of '8 America. and he stayed right on through the seventies and At the Siddha Yoga ~Dham Ashram in South eighties. In 1993 he was ~Fallsburg, New York, at the Parliament of the World's Religions in ~this eclecticism takes a slightly different form, Chicago, and in Septas the followers of the ember of 2000 he was there with orange robes stylish Gurumayi oband long, now white, hair serve pujas not only for the Hindu festivals of at the Millennium World Diwali and Shiva Ratri, Peace Summit at the but also for Christmas, United Nations. Swami Passover, and Easter.

Satchidananda's 750-

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Here in the Catskills, once famous as a spa country of America's urban Jewish culture, Gurumayi's own teacher, Swami Muktananda, established a retreat center in the late 1970s. A disciple of a long line of revered Hindu gurus, Muktananda taught a path of inner awakening called siddha yoga, aimed at awakening the transformative spiritual power that is deep within each of us. The touch of the guru's shakti, or energy, can enable us to experience the divine consciousness within and to recognize that divine consciousness in others.

When Muktananda died in 1982, there was a brief period of instability, intrigue, and turmoil while the two young gurus he had appointed his successors found their spiritual feet. Eventually, the young woman he had named Swami Chidvilasananda took over the movement.

Known to her followers as Gurumayi, she had created a vibrant, somewhat upscale, following.

She teaches and bestows shakti pat in her primary ashrams at South Fallsburg in New York and Ganeshpuri in India and also conveys instruction through a network of smaller ashrams in places like Oakland, California, and Atlanta, Georgia. The Web site iconography of Siddha Yoga leaves behind distinctively Hindu motifs for a more universal iconography of autumn leaves, nautilus shells, and abstract images from the world of nature. For the time being, it seems that Gurumayi has made a critical transition in creating an American context for teachings and meditation practices that had traveled for centuries in Indian spiritual lineages.

The guru Ammachi creates a very different scene in the United States, with a soaring popularity that is astonishing for a woman from Kerala who communicates primarily in Malayalam. But her real language of communication is unconditional love, dispensed liberally to thousands who wait in line for hours to receive her blessing in the form of a hug. Her full name is

Mata Amritanandamayi. She was born in a fisherman's family on the coast of Kerala and even as a child is said to have displayed an uncommon devotion to the Divine, first as Krishna and then as the Goddess. Her inborn nature, she says, was always to pour fOl1h an unbroken stream of love toward all beings. Her ashram communities in India make clear that social service goes hand in hand with devotion. She runs two hospitals, an orphanage for about 400 children, and a school committed to serving the poor through education. Ammachi first came to the United States in 1987 and since then has made regular tours through major American cities each summer attracting both Indian immigrants and Euro-American seekers.

For those who follow her or come to see her, this unselfconscious woman seems to become the "universal embodiment of Mother Love," and apparently there is a yearning and thirsting for this maternal love. WheiB ~ ther in the outskirts of u :%' Boston or midtown E ~ Manhattan, whenever _~her gatherings are an~ nounced many hunj dreds of seekers line up, sitting for hours on <3 end, anticipating the moment she will embrace each one on her shoulder with the hug that is her special blessing.

America seems to have begun to leam the ropes of the gurus. It has kept some, let others go. There are frequent debunkings.

But the power and importance of the guru-the presence, the word, the touch, and the image of the guru-were not concocted by the wild imaginings of the anticult movement of the 1970s, which saw untold dangers in such spiritual authority.

The spiritual authority of the guru is central to the Hindu tradition, in which religious knowledge is transmitted personally to the disciple from one who knows, not merely intellectually, but experientially.

As Swami Muktananda put it in an aJ1icle entitled "What Is a True Guru?"

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The Guru is not a human being. The Guru is the grace-bestowing power of God. He transmits the power, the Shakti of God into you and awakens your own inner power.

It would be fitting to round out our brief view of the new gurus of America with one who would have to be called an antiguru, so averse was he to precisely the guru described by Muktananda. That was J. Krishnamurti, who first visited the United States in 1911 and whose final years were lived out in the Ojai Valley of Califomia until his death in 1986. As a young man, Krishnamurti had been hailed by the Theosophical Society's Order of the Star of the East as the long-expected world teacher for our age. In 1929, however, he called his followers together and dissolved the order, maintaining that the very impulse to follow a teacher and cling to his teachings is what keeps us from realizing our own true nature.

"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect." While Krishnamurti taught for decades, moving back and forth from India to Europe to America, and while he filled lecture halls in California and London, in Banaras and New York, he did not wish the label or the following of a guru, much less a Hindu guru.

When I first heard Krishnamurti in Banaras in 1965, I found that his teaching style relentlessly challenged our habitual propensity to label, compare, judge, and classify everything we hear, everything

we experience. "Choiceless awareness" was the quality of mind that he tried to elicit in those he encountered: experiencing for ourselves the ground of our consciousness, before we build upon it the superstructures of our interpretations and the organized systems of our religions.

Meditation can help cultivate this choiceless awareness, but even meditation can become too rigid. As he put it, "I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘. desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies." It was, of course, one of the ironies of Krishnamurti's life that people followed him, listened to his lectures, and recorded his teachings as if to map that trackless land.

After Krishnamurti died, the ranch home he kept in Ojai, California, has continued to flourish as a teaching center, and the Krishnamurti Foundation of America there promotes the teachings of this antiguru of the age through an extensive library and a school aimed at cultivating in young people the freedom of mind that was his.

Ganesha at the Gates t the time ofthe 1970 census, 6,000 Indian immigrants had settled in New York City. By 1990 the number had grown to 94,000 and the 2000 census will expand this number considerably.

In Flushing, Queens, stands the first temple Hindus built in the u.s. from the ground up, the great Hindu temple formally called the Sri Maha Vallabha Ganapati Devasthanam. The temple is dedicated to Lord Ganesha, also known as Ganapati, the portly, elephant-headed god who sits above the doorway of homes and temples as the remover of obstacles and the lord of new beginnings. As the temple brochure puts it, "Everything in Hinduism begins with the worship of Ganesha." So it is fitting that

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Agastya told Alaga~ ppan that Lord ~ Ganesha would take ~up residence in the ~ city of New York. The U temple of Ganesha would become a bridge between India and America, bringing scholars, priests, artists, and musicians to the U.S. and initiating a movement of temple building on American continent.

There was one final, intriguing point to the vision: Agastya told him that one day in the distant future, when the waters rise up to Ganesha's waist, Ganesha would save New York City from a great disaster. This, of course, remains to be seen.

With this commission, Dr. Alagappan organized and formally established the Hindu Temple Society of NOlih America on January 26, 1970, India's Republic Day. More than seven years of hard work later, America's first Ganesha Temple was dedicated on July 4, 1977, America's Independence Day. A bridge in time was created between the two great independent democracies, and every year the Ganesha temple community celebrates its founding day on the Fourth of July. It is fitting that the image of Ganesha was one of the first to be duly consecrated in the U.S. and to be placed at the eastern gateway of America in New York City.

The Ganesha Temple has now become an important hub for the Hindu communities of the Northeast. The annual Ganesha Chaturthi-the celebration of Ganesha's birthday in late August or early September-is now tradition in Flushing.

During the nine-day festival more than ten thousand people come to the temple. Their rituals eloquently express their love for Ganesha. They donate 108 conch shells, they recite 100,000 mantras of Ganesha, and they decorate the great granite image of Ganesha in the central sanctum of the temple with flowers, sandal paste, and pearls. For the children, there is a chilg

this temple is dedicated to him.

It would be safe to say that all Hindus love Ganesha. They make a place for him in their home shrines and at the doorways of their temples, where he guards the threshold into sacred space. They worship Ganesha at the beginning of every ritual, at the outset of every wedding, at the launching of a business deal, at the outset of a journey, or on the first day of the school year. Why does he have an elephant head? According to one version of the story in Hindu mythology, Ganesha was created by the goddess Parvati from her own body and set to guard her doorway as she bathed. When Lord Shiva, her divine husband, came home and demanded entry, Ganesha obediently and bravely refused. A terrific battle ensued, and Ganesha lost his head. When Parvati saw what had happened, she was distraught, and Shiva, chagrined. He set off to replace the boy's head with another.

The first candidate he found for this emergency surgery was an elephant, and so it is that Ganesha has the head of an elephant.

Like every temple in India, the Queens temple has a founding story. One ofthe men responsible for the project, Dr. Alagappa Alagappan, reports that he had a vision. The astral form of an ancient Indian sage named

dren's puja in which the temple's youngsters sit in the sanctuary with plates of offerings before them. They learn how to proffer the flowers, lights, water and incense to Lord Ganesha.

The highlight of the festival is the Ratha Yatra, when the processional image of Ganesha, a pOliable duplicate of the great granite image in the temple, is taken out of the temple for a chariot pilgrimage through the streets. The people place Ganesha on the chariot, decorated to be a portable temple, and pull the chariot through the streets of Flushing. Musicians take the lead, playing the reedy instrument called the nadaswaram. Devotees by the hundreds lend a hand to pull the Lord's chariot by its long ropes. There is dancing and chanting, the singing of devotional bhajans, all along the parade route. "It's difficult to believe we're not in India!" exclaim patiicipants. Yet for the children who skip along with the procession in excitement, this festival has no association with India but is squarely a part of the America they know.

On this same festival day across the continent on San Francisco Bay is another famous Ganesha procession.

Many new American Hindus who have come from Gujarat and Maharashtra in western India used to celebrate Ganesha Chaturthi back home by honoring temporary, finely made clay images of Ganesha in their homes and neighborhoods. At the end of this time, the clay images are returned to a body of water-the sea or the river-which is the proper way to dispose of an image that has once been the temporary focus of worship. Back home in India at the conclusion of Ganesha Chaturthi, there are great processions in which worshippers bring hundreds of images of Ganesha from neighborhood and temple shrines to the seacoast for the rite of immersion, called visarjana. In 1991 Hindus from all over the San Francisco Bay area launched this tradition in America.

Gathering at the Baker Beach parking lot,

they formed a parade with their painted clay images of Ganesha, carrying them to an artillery site in the old Presidio that they had converted into a temple for the occasion. They broke coconuts at the feet of Ganesha and then immersed the imagesall biodegradable-in San Francisco Bay. For the first time in history, the mayor of San Francisco issued a proclamation declaring the date, September 22, 1991, Golden Gate Ganesha Visarjana Day. The repOlier from India Abroad wrote, "It is believed to be the first time that a mayor of a city in the United States has honored the Hindu deity."

Ganesha is found in almost every American Hindu temple, and in some temples he is the central deity. When the diverse Hindu community of Nashville set out to build a temple in the western suburbs of the city, it took a vote as to which deity should occupy the central sanctum. It was a truly American solution to the inevitably difficult problem of

Being responsible for the removal of obstacles, both in a practical sense and in a spiritual sense. On the spiritual path, our obstacles might be our weaknesses or our ego. When we pray to Ganesha, we ask him to help remove those obstacles within the self." She told the story of Shiva and Parvati and the elephant's head but then went on, "But for me, I think that when Hindus long ago imagined the divine form who would remove obstacles from the path, it is natural that they saw the mighty elephant as such a form." She has clearly developed a symbolic, spiritualized explanation of the gods and myths of India, which makes an effort to bridge the gap of culture and tradition separating the temple life of Hindu immigrants from the suburban life of their American neighbors.

The immense interpretive task that falls to Hindus in America cannot be underestimated. The introduction of Hindu temple culture in late 20th-century ,>. ~ .. -+-::::'L =""-=: America is comparable in 7-,. 0 . . I importance to the introduc.~ .A-~ tion of Hindu ideas by Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th century-but very different. A century ago the seeds of Vedanta and Yoga, which have always claimed a universal applicability, were transplanted and grew to have a wide appeal in the American context. But today we are seeing the transplanting of a more particular idiom of Hindu worship, liturgy, art, and symbol, hitherto rooted primarily in the cultural soil of India and the negotiating so many Hindu differences in the creation of a single house of worplaces of the Hindu diaspora-in East ship. Ganesha won by a landslide, and Africa, Trinidad, Malaysia, and Fiji. The today he presides in the elegant marble first fruits of this transplanting are America's new Hindu temples-with sanctuary of the temple, balancing a row of Shai va shrines on one side of the hall their finely proportioned architecture, and Vaishnava shrines on the other. their intricate ornamentation, their When I first visited the temple in 1995, a exquisitely rendered images of the gods, and the elaborate ritual culture of warm and articulate woman from the temple community accompanied me and Hinduism. Americans now encounter, explained to me what she no doubt says not just the ideas of Hindu philosophy, to the temple's countless visitors, from but the many gods of the Hindu kaleidoschoolchildren to elder-hostel tourists: scope and the prolific ritual and artistic "Ganesha is the aspect of the Supreme expression of Hindu life.

ulling off Highway 101, which winds through the Poconos into Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, I found a Sunday flea market set up in a large field. Booths had been set up selling blue bottles, canoe paddles, lamps, quilts, used books, and Confederate flags. But across the road, in a grove of tall pines, was the place I was looking for, Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, "Wisdom of the Sages School," roughly translated, where a week-long Hindu family camp was getting under way. The flea-market folks were going about their business unaware of what was happening on the margins of their Sunday encampment, just as most Americans are unaware of the new life on the margins of a familiar culture. What was happening across the road is typical of the new life that is changing America forever.

Just a hundred feet from the road under the pines was a cluster of summer cabins and an open meadow where Americanborn Hindu teenagers were throwing a football. A beautiful new Hindu temple was secluded in the pines, with attached kitchen and dining hall to accommodate campers. Here the negotiation of old and

Statue of Swami Vivekananda at the Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago. Vivekananda was the first Hindu religious leader to bring the practice of yoga to America more than a century ago.

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new, Indian and American, first- and secand-generation, was in full swing.

I arrived just in time for the opening session. A Hindu swami in traditional orange robes was speaking to a group of summer campers on the subject of viveka, "discrimination," in Hindu philosophy.

The temple room where we were all seated was a peaceful space, the high arched ceiling supported with wooden windows trusses, with floor-to-ceiling along the walls. The whole room was covered with soft blue carpeting and spread with floor cushions and backrests for the small congregation of 40 or so who had gathered. They were middle-aged men and women, with pullover sweaters and reading glasses. For many of the professionals among them, this week of Vedanta in the Poconos was their summer vacation. They opened their loose-leaf texts, containing the text of the Tattva Viveka in Sanskrit and English. They begin with a prayer for understanding:

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g Om. May He indeed protect both of us.

May He nourish both of us. May we together acquire the capacity to study and to understand. May our study be brilliant. May we not disagree with each other. am, peace, peace, peace.

I found that Arsha Vidya holds frequent family camps-at Thanksgiving, at Christmas and over the Fourth of July weekend, creating a Hindu context for the great days of the American calendar.

Youth camps for high school and college students take place in summer, and for adults there are Vedanta camps to study a particular text and stress-management camps for busy professionals. This camp is but one knot in a web of new sites where American Hindu life is now being created all across the country, and per-

haps it is a good place to conclude our own journey.

More than one hundred years after Swami Vivekananda planted the seeds of Vedanta in American cities, the Hindu tradition has truly taken root in America-and in ways Vivekananda could not have imagined. Were he to return to the U.S. today, Vivekananda would be pleased to find these Indian professionals studying Vedanta under the pines in Pennsylvania, and he would recognize the forms of their study and practice. But traveling across America today, he would be astonished at the array of Hindu life he would find here. He would find Bengalis from his own part of India gathering for summer picnics in Boston and Telugu speakers from the South gathering for summer conventions. He would find practitioners of Indian Ayurvedic medicine in Seattle and yoga classes in hundreds of health clubs. He would find a temple youth choir learning Sanskrit chants and Hindi devotional songs in suburban Maryland and a group of zealous devotees singing the Hindi Ramayana straight through in Chicago. He would see the procession of Lord Ganesha through the streets of New York and the celebration of Krishna's birthday in a huge convention center in Houston. Were he to return to Harvard, where he lectured in the 1890s, he would find students crowding into a gaily pecorated dorm room for the celebration of the Diwali Festival of Lights, he would hear the chanting of the Rig Veda at the baccalaureate of the senior class, and he would wonder, as we do, how these young people, destined for American life in public service, medicine and science, wi II carry their tradition with them in the years ahead. A new and somehow American Hinduism is coming into being.

0 About the Author: Diana L. Eck is head of the Pluralism Project, a Harvard research initiative on religious diversity started in J 99 J.

A of

Religions

Scholar Diana L. Eck has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with India. It began when she was a student of20, enrolled in a course in Advaita Vedanta philosophy at Banaras Hindu University. She explored the teeming galis of that city in her free time. "It was in Banaras that I experienced the first real challenge to my faith ....!t came in the form of people-Hindus whose lives were a powerful witness to their faith," she writes in her autobiographical Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras. An elderly acquaintance was one of these people: "Uncle was fascinated to discover I was a Christian ....He asked me to tell him about my ishta devata, my 'chosen god,' Jesus Christ." He then asked, "as if verifYing an outlandish rumor," if it is true "Christians believe Jesus to be the only avatara?" Her experiences in India led her to a masters degree in South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

She took her Ph.D. in the Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard. Eck compiled her definitive work Banaras: City of Light (1982) and continued her researches into Hinduism, and other world religions.

Her other books include Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India and Speaking of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change,

which she compiled with Devika Jain. More recently she has explored the impact of diverse immigrant religions in the United States in A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. This book was inspired largely by her work with the Pluralism Project, a Harvard research team Eck has headed since 1991. The Pluralism Project's interactive CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, has won major awards in the United States. Diana Eck was appointed to a State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad and in 1998 received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities on American religious pluralism. She spoke with SPAN Editor Lea Terhune during her recent trip to India.

SPAN: You have said that there is a new religious landscape in the United States. Is this something that is true from coast to coast?

DJA TA ECK: It really is true all over the country that there is a new religious landscape. The biggest expressions of it you see in the big urban areas, like New York and Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. It is spread across the country so that there are Hindu communities in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, and North Carolina, South Carolina-Buddhist communities as well.

It is fair to say that in some places you don't see the diversity as much as others. In my home state of Montana, in the Rocky Mountain west, it's a very sparsely populated state, and there are some Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist communities, but it still looks much more homogenous than the rest of the country.

You have also referred to Los Angeles as "the most complex Buddhist city in the entire world. " Would you elaborate on that?

There are Tibetans, Burmese, there are Thai wats in Los Angeles; there are Sri Lankan viharas, there are Vietnamese and Cambodian communities that came with sort of the backwash from the war in Vietnam. There are Taiwanese and old Chinese communities, and Japanese and Korean. The spectrum of Buddhists that you would really need a few months in Asia to see, you can see in a few weekends in Los Angeles, if you work at it. And of course, there are all the Euro American Buddhists, the folks who have become what we sometimes refer to as "new Buddhists," Tibetan or Vajrayana traditions which themselves are multiple in the United States. And there are teachers from the Thai forest tradition who teach mindfulness meditation in a variety of different styles, and there are old and new zen traditions, all of which now have literally passed the mantle of leadership across the Pacific to a new generation of American teachers. Los Angeles has a Sangha Counci I, which consists of monks, teachers and religious leaders, men and women, from all of these traditions. It is rather an unusual venture, kind of an ecumenical Buddhist association in Los Angeles.

What about the post-September 11 backlash against ethnic minorities? Alongside attacks on Asians, there are also reports of communities defending their Asian neighbors from attacks.

What is the climate now? What is on the balance sheet?

The balance sheet in my view is overwhelmingly in favor of the backlash to the backlash, the communal outreach rather than the violence. The Pluralism Project has actually done a fairly good job of gathering incidents from across the spectrum, not just Muslims gathering Muslim incidents and the Sikh Media Action Resources Task Force gathering incidents. We have tried to list as many as we have been able to. And it is an ugly story to begin with. The immediate flare-up of violence was a disgrace, in many ways, but it came out of a kind of fear

and ignorance, an immediate sense of anger, also. So you could document the numbers of mosques that were attacked or fired upon or had a canister of a firebomb thrown into it. But at the same time there were the prodigious efforts of multi-faith groups and neighborhood groups to protect them (minorities).

In the case of Toledo, Ohio, when the big mosque in the cornfield outside the city had rifle fire through the dome on the night of September 11, two days later a Christian radio station called out on the airwaves for people to come and protect the mosque and gather in prayer. There were 2,000 people who showed up to hold hands around the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo. The head of that Islamic center is a woman, Sharifi Khadri, and she was astounded. People drove an hour and a half, some of them two hours, to participate in this.

I think that is prognostic of the fact that indiscriminate violence against innocent people, who just so happened to be associated with this religion or that, is something that Americans won't stand for. I was just in Seattle, and there was a piece in the Seattle newspaper about the Idris mosque, which is the first big mosque in Seattle. Immediately after September II someone had fired at a couple of worshippers who were approaching the mosque, and put a gas canister to one of the cars.

These people were apprehended, but in the days and weeks after that there was a kind of neighborhood watch, and people came together taking turns doing round the clock vigils to protect the mosque. These were not people who knew anything about Islam or had any particular portfolio to carry about Islam, but were simply neighbors who insisted this would not happen in their neighborhood. The piece in the Seattle paper was about a barbecue that the mosque held to thank all these neighbors who had been so supportive through these months.

Is awareness ofreligious and ethnic diversity trickling down to a broader segment of American society?

I think the trickle down effect was pretty rapid after September II. People who had been relatively unaware of all the Muslims and mosques in their neighborhoods now became aware of them, wondered whether they were the very mosques where the terrorist hijackers had prayed and mingled in the community. But the interesting thing is that in those days right after September 11, mosques all over America had open houses. There was a call out to open the doors of the mosque and invite neighbors to come in. It happened in my neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And on a Sunday afternoon they had something like 700 people show up. And similarly, 1 was reading a story from the Austin AmericanStatesman in Texas. A woman at that mosque-someone who had never been to a mosque before-was interviewed by the paper and said "The time of not getting to know each other is over." Now I think that is a really profound statement that we can carry around as a slogan for the times. We can't afford the level of ignorance that most of us have. And in part the out-

reach of the Islamic community even in these tough times has been important in initiating levels of dialogue and beginnings of understanding.

The same thing, I think is true of the Sikhs ... the outreach of the Sikh community was immediate. They put out education packets.

You have drawn comparisons between the significance of the American motto "E Pluribus Unum" and the essence of the Hindu tradition. Can you expand upon this idea?

There is a way in which Hinduism is kind of a theology for American religious pluralism. Our commitment to freedom of religion implies the diversity of religions and the unwillingness of the framers of our Constitution to even think about the establishing of any religion, even a generalized form of Christianity, sort of implies the ongoing development of religious freedom and therefore religious diversity.

Now E Pluribus Unum was a motto that meant out of many colonies, out of 13 colonies, one nation. Eventually it took on ethnic and European national meaning, out of many peoples one people. It certainly doesn't mean out of many religions.

That's sort of where the melting pot breaks down, but there is a commitment, a common commitment to the covenants of citizenship out of which many people become co-citizens of one country. ow there is a way in which I think Hinduism has a theology for religious plural ism because it really recognizes the manyness of human constructions of the divine and understandings of god. This verse that everyone intones from the Vedas, Ek urn sat vipraha bahuda vadanti, "truth is one, but even the wise speak of it in many, many ways", that is an understanding that has given strength to the fabric of India's diversity. India's a place in which unity out of diversity has been a strong theme, and not always lived up to. But unity certainly does not mean unanimity or uniformity. It means ability to hang together out of all the diversity. So Hindus are kind of born to the American project in some ways.

It is certainly true that among the things their (Hindus') new American neighbors find hardest to understand is the multiplicity of gods and forms of god and names of god and images of god. So you can see the language of polytheism, the bowing down to graven images and idols just sort of streaming through the consciousness of some of the less well-informed Christian and Jewish and even secular American citizens. They simply don't understand Hinduism. So it's a challenge. It's obviously something that India today is really struggling with, also. There is a way in which India ought to be at the forefront in real leadership in the international community as a country that has had a long experience of living together through all the tensions and difficulties, into a fabric of very rich and vibrant diversity. And that should be, at this point in time, the mature leadership ofIndia for the rest of the world.

Please tell us a little about the Pluralism Project at Harvard which you have been directing for the past decade. What is its . ? aim.

We really started asking three overarching questions. One, the question of who's here: because the United States doesn't do a religious census, we don't count by religion. We actually don't know who we are religiously. But we do know that cities like Denver, Colorado, have begun to change. There are five or six Buddhist temples, quite a few mosques or Hindu temples, so basically we document some of the institutional ways in which American cities and towns have begun to change. And we have a directory, a database, profiles of and stories about literally hundreds of religious communities in the United States.

The second question is how are these religious traditions changing in the American context, because immigration means change in some way, it always has. And as Hindu communities put down roots in Boston, Massachusetts, they are bound to find new forms of community life and religious life and new demands on their time that they just never had to encounter before. They need new vehicles to pass on their religious tradition to the next generation who simply won't get it by osmosis in the family or in the community. So there is a greater intentionality needed in religious communities in the United States.

And the third question is how is America changing in the light of this new multi-religious reality? What are the new kinds of questions that come before the COutts in the terms of church-state? Does a Hindu temple have to look more Spanish to conform to the zoning codes of Norwalk, California? What about building an Islamic school in an area where people are not so sure what it means to have an Islamic school? What are the kinds of challenges that Sikhs might bring when they petition to wear a turban instead of a helmet on a hardhat job?

Or as schoolchildren who are Khalsa Sikhs try to bring their kirpans to school? All of these pose new sets of questions. And these questions are literally on the agenda of every public institution.

So it's this kind of documentation that we are doing. So far the project has been carried largely by research students from Harvard University, but in the last couple of years we've started de-centering this from Harvard and having a group of affiliates from across the country from Anchorage, Alaska, to Orlando, Florida. These are professors and students from colleges and universities who want to take on a kind of pluralism project of their own in their own area. If there is a new Hindu temple being consecrated with the rites of Kumbh Abhisheka in Cleveland, Ohio, it makes so much sense for the universities in Cleveland to begin studying this. They can take advantage of this remarkable opportunity to learn about a new phase in the life of their town and a new phase in the life of the Hindu community there.

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ollywood being a star-making machine above all else, it was not surprising that the buzz on 2000's release of Cast Away was all about the weight Tom Hanks gained and then dropped to give life to his character's years of privation. The real magic behind the

film wasn't revealed until much laterthat the island peak over which the hero clambered was a mud pile overlooking a Californja parking lot, and that much of the tropical environment seen on screen, from breakers to mountaintop, had been fashioned inside a computer.

Reliving the production, George

10blove breaks into a delighted grin. "Any shot that had ocean or sky in it," says the senior vice president for technology at Sony Pictures lmageworks, which created the visuals, "was pretty much a special effect." The film's software-generated scenes not only featured action and compositions that would have been impracti-

cal and expensive to shoot on location, but also contained elements such as windstorms and enormous waves that are virtually impossible to create in the real world.

That a tropical island could be manufactured so seamlessly out of pixels and algorithms testifies to the ascendancy of digital technology in Hollywood, where it has all but superseded the optical and photochemical man ipulations that were state of the art as recently as 10 years ago. It's no secret that 3D digital processing is responsible for some of the grandest effects of modern blockbusters, beginning with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and leading up to the careening space runabouts of Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones. But what's more remarkable is how thoroughly digital technology has taken over film editing, color adjustment and other components of the so-called postproduction process-including the subtle alterations, such as the erasure of television antennas from period backgrounds and support cables from acrobatic stuntmen, that lend verisimilitude to everything from drawing-

puter science graduates write algorithms that will eventually simulate the wash of waves on a beach or the separation of a Saturn V rocket from its Cape Canaveral gantry-artists working in code rather than pen and ink.

And today there is scarcely a film lab in Hollywood that does not offer digital services-up to and including the restoration of archival films-to its industry clientele along with traditional developing, color timing and print services. One ofthe fastestgrowing business lines at Technicolor, which pioneered the first two-color photochemical process in 1916, is the digital scanning offilm prints in order to insert visual effects. Kodak, which sells some 80 percent of all the film stock used in U.S. movies, has hedged its bets by opening Cinesite, a Los Angeles- and London-based subsidiary that has become one of the most important and innovative purveyors of digital services-such as digital editing, special effects, and the creation of digital master copies of negatives and prints-to moviemakers.

Digital projection is still not common in theaters, in part because it does not create as unmistakable an improvement in the viewing experience as, say, the talkies did over silent films. Upgrades are expensive. room pieces to psychological dramas.

"We call them 'invisible effects,'" says Joblove, speaking from an office that overlooks the six-hectare Sony Pictures Entertainment studio complex in Culver City, California. "Most are things you shouldn't notice and shouldn't know about, things that shouldn't draw attention to themselves."

Indeed, without most moviegoers' noticing, digital technologies have been slowly supplanting film-based processes that have been used since the 1920s. Imageworks' vice president of marketing and communication Donald Levy estimates that the movie industry now spends roughly half a billion dollars per year on visual effectsalmost all ofthem digital. At many postproduction houses chemistry labs have given way to programming carrels in which com-

But while large-scale digital modification of images is already rife in Hollywood, it has its limits. Clean digital files and hidden microchips haven't quite replaced reeking photochemical emulsions and temperamental celluloid stock, and the unalloyed enthusiasm many filmmakers felt for the new technology just a couple of years ago has evolved into a mature assessment of it as one tool among many, both novel and traditional. Directors and cinematographers who have worked in the new medium have generally found that its flexibility, while valuable, also comes at a steep cost.

Take Roger Deakins, an award-winning cinematographer who used digital technology to great effect in creating the distinctive look of the Joel and Ethan Coen Depression-era film 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? Deakins and the Coen brothers were

determined to evoke the Dust Bowl by giving the whole film the faded look of an oldtime picture postcard. This involved, among other effects, transforming the lush greens of vegetation into a sere tobaccoyellow in the film's exterior shots. While the judicious deployment of lighting and lens filters would have had the same effect, it would also have given other colors, especially skin tones, an unnatural tint. Instead, Deakins shot the entire film conventionally and had his negative digitized at Cinesite, where technicians then helped him tint out the greens without affecting the rest of the palette by adjusting the digital values ofthe pixels in each image-much the way audio engineers can boost the bass of a recording without changing the treble or midrange.

Although the process sounds straightforward; it was much more demanding than conventional photography. Among other things, Deakins realized that he should invest his negatives with the most highly saturated colors possible, to give the technicians the maximum amount of infOlmation to work with during the color correction process. At Cinesite, he supervised the alterations like a mother hen watching over her chicks.

"I was there every day for more than 10 weeks, from testing with camera negatives until the first print was out of the lab," Deakins says. This was necessary in part because the entire project was novel, even for Cinesite. But Deakins feels that because of its very power, digital color cOITection demands particular watchfulness. "There's so much that can be done with the technology that if you as a DP [director of photography] aren't there, your work easily could be ruined."

In the end, he concluded that such socalled digital mastering (the conversion of a sequence or an entire film to digital form) is useful only in special circumstances-as when striving for an effect that can't be reached through conventional means. "It depends on what's right for the project, because I don't think the quality is as good as film. If you're not going outside straight RGB [red, green and blue] timing, I don't see much point in going the digital route."

"There's a tremendous amount of hype around the word 'digital,'" agrees Steven

Poster, president of the American Society of* Cinematographers. As director of photogra- 8 phy on Sony's summer release Stuart Little ~ 2, Poster also used a digital master in post- ~ production, since almost every frame includes the film's title character-a mouse created entirely in digital form-or one of his digital pals. "There are certain skills necessary to accomplish the shooting, making and coming out on the other end with a motion picture," Poster says. "One is cinematography. We say, if you know how to light it doesn't matter what medium you're shooting on. Likewise, if you don't know how to light it doesn't matter which medium you're shooting in." Today's filmmakers, in other words, must master not one technology but two-and then be willing to spend long hours bridging their incompatibilities.

Film's Firm Foothold he best way to grasp the degree to which digital technology has infiltrated moviemaking is to partition the life cycle of a feature into three phases: image acquisition (known in simpler days as "photography"), postproduction and exhibition.

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Electronic technologies have made remarkable progress on some of these fronts-but overall, cinema hasn't changed as much as you might expect from all ofthis summer's buzz about digital movies. Most principal photography is still done on film, despite George Lucas' decision to shoot Star Wars: Episode II entirely using digital cameras. Cinematographers agree that digital hardware is getting vastly better, aided by the emergence of the so-called 24p process, which allows high-definition digital video to be shot at film's 24 frames per second, rather than the roughly 30 of conventional video (thus eliminating the need for complicated adjustments of frame rates). But even the best digital imagery still doesn't approach film's resolution and dynamic range in terms of color and contrast.

"There's still room in film to carry information beyond the capability of the eye to see it," says Brad Reinke, manager of digital restoration services at Cinesite.

"Digital's not nearly there."

At the other end of the production process-your neighborhood movie the-

ater-digital technology has barely made any headway. As of this summer only 100 or so of the country's 35,000 screens were equipped for digital movies-whether downloaded via satellite or spooled off high-density digital discs resembling DVDs. Those that were used a Texas Instruments system based on an'ays ofmicrochips, each with about a million microscopic mirrors that pivot toward or away from the screen thousands of times per second. Digital projection is jiggle free, and unlike film projection, it doesn't degrade the print with every showing. But in part because digital projection does not create as unmistakable an improvement in the viewing experience as, say, the talkies did over silent films, theater chains are unwilling to foot the bill for the new projectors, which cost at least $100,000 per screen and might have to be upgraded every few years. Conventional film pro-

Digital magic can remove blemishes, nicks and scratches to restorejilms to pristine condition, as was done with this print of To Kill a Mockingbird.

jectors, which last 20 years on average, cost $30,000.

"Digital cinema could never drive enough extra traffic through our box offices and to our concession stands to make up the difference," John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, told a Washington, D.C., technical conference last year.

Still, almost everyone in Hollywood agrees that in postproduction, digital is well on its way to becoming the state of the art.

Film editing today is done almost entirely through virtual cutting and pasting on video screens, which replaces the tiresome manual method of slicing up celluloid film strips and splicing them back together with tape.

Complex FX pecial effects--evelything from plane crashes to acrobatic stunts to alien life forms-are now customarily computer generated, thanks to software tools like Pixar's RenderMan, or like Maya, perhaps the most widely used application for 3D imaging. The product of Silicon Graphics subsidiary AliaslWavefront and a direct descendant of the program that produced the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park in 1993, Maya is esteemed by digital-effects teams not only for its comprehensive scope and power, but for its compatibility with the special-purpose "plug-ins" (mini-programs that interact with and enhance the main software) that special-effects departments often devise to meet particular needs on feature projects. It's not unusual to hear visual-effects artists comparing the merits of, say, the ocean effects plug-in Imageworks devised to generate the breakers and swells in Cast Away and the one developed by Warner Brothers for The Perfect Storm.

Even more remarkable is the extent to which digital artists are using their tools to give life to animated characters. Every year brings improvements in the rendering of movement and organic textures like skin and hair. "We do almost all our modeling and character animation with Maya," Sony's George 10blove is explaining one afternoon as he escorts me past the darkened warrens of Imageworks' animation floor, where the finishing touches are being made on Stuart Little 2 weeks before its scheduled release. He pulls aside a curtain to reveal a glimpse of a Maya artist working on a scene a few seconds long in which a complacent Stuart Little is suddenly snatched out of the frame by a set of talons.

The scene plays over and over again as the artist refines the details.

"We have more than two dozen software engineers," 10blove continues as we tour this particular nexus ofthe Hollywood Hills and Silicon Valley. At any given time, he notes, some might be deployed to work on the effects for a single film, others on software that the firm will use on dozens of projects. Some of these, such as code writers and database specialists, can be found in any higWy computerized organization; others, the more artistic, have expertise that can

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Hollywood and Vine, that the virtues of digital postproduction are most vividly on display-along with the difficulties.

The compromises begin in Cinesite's scarming room, where technicians convert film images to streams of digital bits by playing a laser beam over the original frames. Because digital video images have an inherent "edginess," film converted to video at the standard resolution (2,048 pixels wide by 1,556 deep, known as "2K") tends to look somewhat soft focused. That failing can be overcome by scanning at 4K-rougWy 4,100 pixels across by 3,000 only be found in a facility like Imageworks. deep-but thjs generates a data file so big I ask which is more important, artistic that a stand3l路d feature film would take 12 talent or coding skills. full days to scan. The larger digital files also "We span the whole spectrum-people who are just engineers and couldn't draw a ,impose a huge cost in storage requirements and processing time. Since the difference in stick figure, and others who are talented image quality is almost imperceptible in a al1ists and never used a computer before they came here. And in the middle," says movie theater, 4K is only used for the most 10blove, "are a few people working on shots exacting projects, such as the conversion of who have a strong and deep understanding Fantasia and Apollo 13 for Imax presentaof the science and the software and the 311." tions, where the giant screen would render even a minute loss of detail spectacularly Thjs precious breed is actually becoming more and more common in Hollywood, fu- visible.

After they leave the Cinesite scanning eling a range of digital-movie companies from Efilm, which has developed its own room, digital files continue along any of laser recording technology for transfelTing three production routes: to the insertion of vidigital images back to film, to Rhythm and sual special effects; to digital mastering, Hues, where one specialty is animating un- which allows color correction and conversion to DVD or video formats; or to the comusual characters such as Harry Potter's pany's restoration service. The specialSorting Hat-a mouthy piece of millinely that, in the judgment of the New York Times, effects artists, who must c3l路efully integrate had "more personality than anything else in the computer-generated objects in a frame the movie." But it may be at Cinesite's with the real ones, get much of the glory once hangar-sized facility, a few miles north of a film's publicity is under way. But the color Imageworks and not far from the corner of timers and other professionals who oversee

Tron was a 1982 Disney production that featured innovative sequences of action generated completely by computa The story line concerns a man who is absorbed by a video game, literally.

While the techniques have been surpassed in the 20 years since Tron was made, at the time it was a landmark in the evolution of visual effects. It was the first motion picture to make such extensive use of computer imagery, placing its characters in entirely virtual landscapes.

digital mastering probably contribute more to a film's overall look. During mastering, Cinesite's technicians use Kodak's Cineon system to adjust color values to avoid distracting video phenomena such as banding, in which slight gradations of brightness create contour lines, and clipping, in which the detail within bright images bleaches out. By adjusting the brightness of digitized images to a logarithmic curve-compressing the amount of infOtmation at the dark end of the scale and expanding it at the bright end-the system "matches the eye's perception," explains Steve Wright, Cinesite's technical director for 2D.

Restored to Life ut it may be Cinesite's digital restorationists who work the biggest technological miracles from day to day, making old, unviewable films look as new as they did the day they were printed.

Restoration, in fact, is the one area where digital technology is close to an unadulterated blessing, for it gives technicians an unprecedented ability to remove defects caused by production mistakes or the ravages of time.

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In a room rimmed with computer workstations, Corinne Pooler is painstakingly restoring a sequence from the classic 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, which Universal Studios is planning to rerelease in a pristine theatrical print. Because Mockingbird's original negative had been damaged beyond usability, the restorers are working from two fine-grain prints unearthed in Europe and the United States and

subsequently digitized by the company's scanners. Each print has its own myriad imperfections, however, which presents Pooler with the challenge of assembling one clean print from the undamaged portions of the two others.

The secret weapon is another program called Moviepaint, which Kodak specifically designed for Cinesite. On her monitor, Pooler displays a frame showing a clapboard house on the left, the branches of a spreading oak on the right, and along the frame edge the large, ugly blotch that is her quarry. Pooler carefully aligns the digital image of the previous frame over the stained image. Then she launches a function that allows her to import the pixels from the clean frame into the stained image, in effect erasing the blotch.

"It can be tedious," she says of a process that will have to be repeated, with minute variations, on thousands of scratches, stretches, dust globs and breaks. (A Cinesite program called Bitzer automates much of that process, but only manual work using Moviepaint can correct every flaw.) Pooler, nevertheless, is well aware that she holds a job that would not exist at all but for digital technology. Seven years ago, she explains, she was a housewife with ajob with her local school board. As it happened, her husband, Jerry Pooler, creative director for digital restoration services at Cinesite, was beginning work on the restoration of Sleeping Beauty.

"I was off for the summer, and Jerry needed people to help paint out dirt hits," Corinne recalls. "He told me, 'If you can paint 150 frames a day we'll keep you. If not, I'll have to fire you.'" Pooler had no training in art or computer science, but she did have an eye instinctively capable of distinguishing between the minuscule details on a frame that are actually pali of the image and the imperfections that call for obliteration.

In this craft an innocent misjudgment can wreck hours or days of work. Pooler recalls the time her team was called upon to paint out the vestiges of stunt gear from a 3,000-frame paratrooping sequence from a big-budget adventure movie.

"Six of us divided the work. The first person saw a line of tiny black spots in the

image and painted them out of the frame.

The next person took a look and said, 'You erased all the parachutes!'"

Mixed Media he inadvertent erasure of real-world objects is only one of the occupational hazal'ds awaiting moviemakers as digital technology continues to spread.

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"Increasing technology always yields increasing complexity," says Daniel Rosen, Cinesite's chief technology officer. "If you're in a film theater and there's no image, your eyeballs will tell you what's wrong-a lamp burned out, or the film broke. If you're in a digital theater, what happened? Was the satellite down? Or the server? Or is there an encryption problem?"

A former TRW engineer, Rosen is Cinesite's resident technical visionary and voice of realism-equally alive to the virtues of digital technology and to its shOlicomings. On the plus side, he says, is the incredible flexibility producers will gain from having digital negatives of their films, which they can feed into a multitude of formats, be they theater prints, DVDs or TV broadcasts.

On the other hand, Rosen doubts that atiists or audiences will soon want to give up the unique sensory qualities of film. "If we look decades ahead, people will come to realize that digital [photography] is another way of doing things, but film will give you a different organic look," he says.

"It's like oil paint and acrylic. Digital has a different texture."

And just as acrylics, watercolors and other media haven't replaced oils, digital movies may never fully replace film. More likely, the two media will coexist, with digital's practical advantages and differing qualities widening directors' and cinematographers' artistic and logistical options as the technology advances. Think of it this way: if Sony Pictures ever develops a Cast Away 2, and the producers discover that a digital Tom Hanks can shed 25 kilograms instantly, rather than dieting for a year, then the island may not be the only thing that's virtual.

0 About the Author: Michael A. Hiltzik is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

moce th'n 95 ye''', the animated cartoon has entertained people in cinema houses and on television sets, with a cavalcade of cartoon characters that have captured the hearts and imaginations of fans in every corner of the globe. Animated features have become cult films and the drawings, or "cells," used to create them valuable works of pop art. This legion of animated heroes marches on in a vast array of cartoon productions, and whether they are reruns of old favorites or the debut of new characters, cartoons still stimulate laughter. The king of animation was Walt Disney, who gave us Mickey Mouse. He also created the first full-length cartoon feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). His classic films that followed, Pinnochio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, all made before 1950, have enchanted, warmed hearts and brought tears to the eyes of generations of children and adults.

Technology evolved, and so did the animated feature fi 1m. In 1968 the Yellow Submarine challenged the Disney model. It was an odyssey featuring The Beatlescartoon John, Paul George and Ringo--and audiences were receptive. It proved there was room for animated films that were less Disneyesque. Disney continued to make popular animated feature films. After Walt Disney's death in 1966, Disney studios successfully carried on, leading the field with blockbusters. Then, in 1977, George Lucas stunned the world with Star Wars and Steven Spielberg with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The films created a new de~oc

n' L..:

r

Digital animation has become essential from Hollywood to Bollywood.

Will India become a new outsourcing hub? finition for special effects. Lucas proceeded to develop this new digital art in the studio he founded, Industrial Light and Magic.

Five years later, Disney released Tron (1982), a film replete with striking computer-generated visual effects. Digital animation was evolving fast. There were more Star Wars episodes, and there were new concepts like Chicken Run and Shrek.

Animation may be synonymous with cartoon films, but its applications are varied and ever increasing. The 2D and 3D animation productions are used not only for cartoon films but also in TV news, entertainment, advertising and for public service announcements. Remember the movie Twister, where the cow flew across the screen? Or Independence Day where the alien spaceship threatened the existence of planet Earth? What was common between Indian movies Lagaan, Aks, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Raju Chacha and Hindustani, and Hollywood films Titanic, True Lies and Deep Impact?

Apart from being big budget movies, the common thread running across these was the use of special effects and animation in varying degrees, a phenomenon hitherto confined only to Spielbergs and Lucases.

Although 3D animation is a recent

phenomenon in India, it became a rage in America in the early 1950s. Several studios began turning out 3D feature films and short subjects, to the delight of moviegoing audience. The technique was used in cartoon as well. In 1953 Paramount's Famous Studios created two 3D cartoons, Popeye: The Ace of Space and Boo Man. The following year Warner Brothers added its own 3D favorite, Lumber Jack Rabbit. But for full impact, the viewer had to wear special glasses.

India is coming of age in the animation field, and it is emerging as a new destination for the international animation and special effects industry. Although digital animation in India may still be in its infancy, it has been used here in filmmaking for three decades. Renouned animator Ram Mohan provided footage for Mrinal Sen's film Bhuvan Shome as early as 1969. It was the first Indian feature fi 1m which had animated footage as an integral part of the story. In 1977, Mohan also did animation for some scenes in Shafran;' ke Khiladi, a much-acclaimed film by Satyajit Ray. With American, Canadian and European companies beginning to outsource their work to Indian animation companies, the business mood now in this IT-enabled service sector is upbeat.

According to an independent trade survey conducted recently, the Indian animation industry, which is now pegged at $550 million, is expected to grow at 30 percent annually in the next couple of years and reach a level of$15 billion by 20 I O. To meet both the domestic and export demand, some 40-odd Indian companies are making strides into 2D and 3D anima-

tion market. More than half-a-dozen Indian entrepreneurs have set up state-of-the-art special effects studios in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Thiruvananthapuram to compete with players from Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, who gamer a major chunk of global animation business. Some of the leading Indian animation companies are Pentamedia Graphics, based in Chennai, Jadoo Works in Bangalore, CD India in Chandigarh, UTV Toons in Mumbai, Moving Picture Company in Film City, Noida, Heart Entertainment Ltd. and Color Chips India in Hyderabad, and Toonz Animation India in Thiruvananthapuram.

These companies produce animated films, and co-produce features for American and Canadian clients.

This is no surprise to filmmakers. "We have traditionally been a creative country.

Stories have been told in various formsart, dance, painting, and temple sculpture.

Animation is just a modern form of story telling," says Rajiv Marwah, CEO of Jadoo Works in Bangalore. With the animation industry set to grow exponentially, Jadoo is focusing on training 2D and 3D animators. According to him there is a dearth of professional institutions in India which provide technical training in quality animation, resulting in a shortage of animators with the requisite skills. The awareness of animation as a career needs to grow. It isjust beginning to develop as a lucra,tive career option.

Pentamedia, subsidiary of a computer software company Pentafour, both based in Chennai, has unveiled Sindbad: Beyond the Veils of the Mists, the first full-length Indian animated 3D film using the technique of "motion capture." Motion capture uses several infrared cameras and computers to simultaneously film one subject. When computers gather together all the digital data from the shoot, the product is a three dimensional, animated figure-a stunning image at a fraction of the cost of traditional animation technique. The film was completed in a record time of 18 months instead of the usual two years and more, and the total cost of the film was about $14 million. The average cost of such productions anywhere else in

the world is around $40 million. This was possible because it was made in India.

"What we have done for the first time in India is capture the motion of real human beings and apply them to digitally-created 3D models. The technology to make this possible was developed in-house by us," says V. Chandrasekaran, CMD of Pentafour Software and Exports Ltd. Indian animation has touched new heights of achievement with Sindbad. The most important aspect of the film is the quality of movement of character designs and background layouts. It involves wiring actors with reflector balls and capturing the actors' movements with a camera. The movements are then applied to computer-generated animated characters to make them lifelike. Such sophistication shows something that Indian companies have to offer to Hollywood production houses. It remains to be seen if Hollywood takes the bait and starts looking seriously at India to outsource its special effects and animation requirements. Pentamedia has joined hands with an American company, 3DMax, to create high-end digital enter-

A still from Walt Disney S Snow White and the Seven Drawfs, the first fulllength cartoon feature made in j 937.

tainment content using cutting-edge tools for Internet, cinema and television. The joint venture company has proposed a project, to bring two of the greatest movie stars of India, M.G. Ramachandran and Raj Kapoor, alive through digital animation and photo-realistic 3D graphics. The movie will have Tamil and Hindi versions.

UTV Toons, a premier animation studio founded five years ago in Mumbai, ranks among the country's top outsourcing destinations for both flash and traditional animation. It won the runner-up award this year for its production, Meena in the City, at the Asian Technical and Creative Awards.

Firdaus Kharas, co-founder ofUTV Toons, opines that India has the maximum potential in 2D animation. "India should pitch for this segment ifit wanted to be noticed in the international animation scenario," said Kharas at an animators conference held last year in New Delhi.

Another Indian company taking a shot (Continued on page 22)

Magic IsAlive IN INDIA

A smooth glide from Delhi on the Noida Expressway, a turn into a peaceful road flanked by trees, and you are in Film City. Buzz isn't obvious, but signs pointing the way to the Zee TV studios hint that you're in the right neighborhood for it. A pleasant edifice rises at the end of the block, all brick, steel and glass. It is the headquarters of Moving Picture Company.

Inside abundant light, splashes of primary colors, and emphatic vertical space create a serene atmosphere that belies the intensity within. Computers in edit suites and open stations hum under the fingers of artist-technicians who are the stars at this high-tech dreamworks of filmmaker Ramesh Sharma and his wife Uma Gajapati Raju. Moving Picture Company spins films from ideas into cine-reality: ads, documentaries, short subjects and, most recently, 3D animated cmioons. It is on the front lines of an emerging trend, a product of the union of talent and technology. India, like the surfer girl heroine of the Disney cartoon feature Lilo and Stitch, is on the crest of a wave of digital outsourcing, and people like Ramesh Shalma are ready to ride.

Sharma has been in the film business for nearly 25 years. His first film, Monastery Wreathed in a Thousand Rainbows (1979), was a documentary about the 16th Karmapa and Rumtek monastery in Sikkim. A few years later Shatma achieved notoriety with his exceptional feature fiLm staning Om Puri and Shashi Kapoor, The New Delhi Times (1985). Irked by the anti-colTuption message-the story line dramatized the nexus between politicians and criminals-the

George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic sets the benchmark for special effects worldwide, as it has ever since Star Wars changed filmmaking three decades ago. Now Indian production companies are expanding capacity to meet international demands for digital animation.

Ramesh Sharma thinks the benefits will be bigtime.

government banned the award-winning film for a time. Since then Sharma has maintained a respectable profile in film production in partnership with his wife Uma, also a well-known media professional. Moving Picture Company has steadily grown, always with an eye toward the future. And, according to Shm'ma, digital animation is the future. "I've been very keen that we should get into animation, primarily because we are a creatively driven company and we can bring a whole lot of value to this business," he says. Success in information technology, and the increase in diverse business product outsourcing to India, leads him to one conclusion, "India is a dominant force." India's "incredible taskforce" and the incredible volume of potential work from customers abroad, particularly the United States, Canada and Japan, plus demands of the domestic market spell oppOttunity for savvy film studios. Digital animation is now essential for motion picture visual effects, video games-"close to a $37 billion industry," Sharma points out-workaday ads, network IDs, or bread-and-butter documentaries.

"Animation is going to be one of the biggest growth markets," declares Sharma.

He is ebullient because a special project has just been completed: the pilot for a new catioon series based on the Panchatantrain 3D. Investment in 3D animation technology, currently available at only a few Indian studios, was a carefully considered decision. Already involved in many co-productions for documentaries and with feature films on the stOty board, the next step for

Moving Picture Company was an upgrade to 3D to complement its 20 facilities. "We are doing ad films completely in 3D, for a company called NOW, an Intemet service provider." Now he hopes to market his winsome cast of Panchatantra-inspired animal cartoon characters in Jungle Tales (Jungal Mangal in Hindi) to a global audience. "We started looking for stories we felt would have crossover appeal, a story that would have appeal for children all over the world. So we selected the Panchatantra tales because they are based on animals, and animals have no culturespecific rules," he says.

Global outreach is an important part of the vision of Moving Picture Company. "In fact," Sham1a says, "we are looking at possibilities of setting up idea cells and developmental cells in the U.S. and in the U.K. where we will have writers, creative people, develop it according to the market there, but the intellectual property rights are co-owned by us. So we don't become just a service industry, but we become partners in creativity ...a kind of global partnership, so that we make a product that can be then sold worldwide." A recently completed documentary, Afghanistan: Beyond the Taliban Years, co-produced with U.S.based TeleProductions International (TPI), is one such film which uses all the bells and whistles of digital filmmaking and is targeted at a multinational audience.

Tweaking a film to satisfY differing country-to-country requirements is easy in the digital world.

There are two roads to travel, Ramesh Sharma explains. One is outsourcing, "basically doing the backend work, which

means the designs are all made in America. The entire development of the story idea is done in America. The narrative soundtrack comes from America, and we execute it here." The other is creative co-production, for which state-of-theart studios are well equipped. Moving Picture Company has 30 engineers, including 18 core people who are both technical and creative whizzes. Everything is done in-house. Nothing is outsourced. With two studio floors, eight edit bays, camera people, writers, editors and the new 3DS Max/Discreet technology, "it's one stop shopping," Sharma says.

Co-production with well-endowed foreign partners makes sense economically.

The Jungle Tales series consists of 26 episodes, 23 minutes each. It is an expensive proposition. In regular 20, the minimum cost for a 23-minute cartoon is $150,000. "3D, $200,000 minimum, maybe even more. It can't be less," according to Sharma. Chief animator, National Institute of Design-trained Anupama Chatterjee, adds, ''It's a gargantuan task ...you have to create the actors and make them act." Regardless of the exhausting attention to detail required, she finds the work "very exhilarating."

Blossoming enthusiasm in the industry led to the founding of the Animation Producers Association of India (APAI) in October, which counts UTV Toons, Pentamedia, Padmalaya, Tata Elxi, Crest and Maya Entertainment among its members. So far the outsourcing market has been dominated by providers in the Far East, so to get a piece of that action APAI will represent members at important inter-

national festivals, create a Web site, and generally put out the good word that magic is alive in India, too. "Long format animation, advertising films, visual effects for movies, all of that is a part of the world of animation. Lagaan-look at the clouds coming in. You can't get those kinds of clouds otherwise," Sharma observes, a gleam in his eyes. "That is computer graphics. It can be done today.

That's the magic of cinema. And that's what makes cinema so much more exciting today, because you can really let your imagination go wild."

0 Above: Filmmaker and managing director of Moving Picture Company Ramesh Sharma.

Left and far left: Animators and artists at work at Moving Picture Company studio in Noida, near Delhi.

Opposite page: Cartoon characters Fom Jungle Tales.

trend has changed. It can do what live action cannot. It is more educative and entertaining. Even the most serious subject can be put across in a humorous and simplified manner. With so many TV channels, the scope for animation in this country will be upbeat."

Animation in commercials will take the lead. Akkineni thinks 3D animation will be the leader as far as commercials and movies are concerned and 2D will take first place in Web and TV cartooning.

Indian films are using the 3D technology Academy, can currently deliver 20-25 because 2D is not viable cost wise. "And episodes a year of20 minutes duration each.

It has a state-of-the-art 2D studio; Warner we do not deal with this, as we are not a 3D studio. This has been a deliberate Brothers' Histeria, Tommy Nelson's Crippled Lamb and Little Dogs on the move because the best way to go about Prairie are some animation features in its 3D animation is to acquire 20 experience. portfolio. It has done a pilot project for Walt And we will shortly plunge into 3D," Akkineni says. In order to meet the Disney, and is also working for Canada's Amberwood Productions. production requirements of Heart EnterHeart Entertainment deals in 20 animatainment, the Heati Animation Academy tion. "It is a labor-intensive profession. The trains students in the techniques of filmHercules, an 86-minute cartoon feature by making. The Academy trains the country's largest pool of artistic talent to meet the Walt Disney, required 907 atiists, 699 days growing needs of the animation industry. and around 1,23,840 drawings," says U.S.-based production Venkat Akkineni, managing director of companies Heart Entertainment, India's first fullwhich earlier outsourced most of their animation works to other Asian countries fledged animation studio to commence prohave now started considering India as a duction and training facilities concurrently. greener pasture. It remains to be seen how "2D animation, especially for cartoons, Indian animators, elated now with the being expensive, will not be the costeffective business for TV channels," Oiays business potential in the field, deliver in Akkineni. "But in the recent years the the long run.

D Left. Venkat Akkineni, managing director of Heart Animation Academy (HAA) in Hyderabad; Far left: Rackroom for HAA s archives.

at the animation market is Toonz Animation India. It was set up in 1998 by Bill Dennis, who worked with Disney Feature Animation studio for more than two decades. Toonz won several assignments to produce commercials for Cartoon Network. It will also be producing original programming based on Indian folk tales. Toonz created a name for itself within two years of its launch. It bagged the first prize at the World Animation Festival 2000 at Los Angeles for the short film Stone Crusher, which was made for UNICEF. Toonz is now trying to build a reputation for animation films based on Indian mythology. Dennis claims that Toonz can offer better quality animation at rates that are 25-40 percent lower than those of other Asian studios.

The scenario in Hyderabad, too, is velY promising. Hemi Entertainment Limited, parent company of the Heart Animation

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and discarded school chairs, and a soft-drink machine that dispenses cans of beer. Trophies capped with regal-looking golden pigeon figUl'ines sit on a shelf beneath a water-stained drop ceiling. A few dozen men, ranging from their early twenties to their late seventies, mill around a feather-encrusted kerosene heater. Martinez, with his boyish chmm and easy smile, stands out from the crowd. In his sneakers and jeans, he works the room as if running for office, slapping backs, throwing fake punches and showing off his shiny, custom-embroidered jacket depicting a gray pigeon with red feet and displaying the words "OJ Loft"-for Orlando and his brother, Jose's, racing team.

During the meeting, the racers discuss the high cost of shipping their birds. The night before each race, pigeons are dropped off at i

noVO days before the main event, the Bronx Homing Pigeon Club is already abuzz as Nick Cisco (in baseball cap) takes early bets.

the club, then trucked overnight to a destination, say, 480 kilometers away, to be released the following moming. For Martinez, preparing for shipping is an all-day affair. He spends the moming monitoring winds and other weather data so he can judge his birds' nutritional needs. "For tough race days, I load them up like marathoners on fats, proteins and carbs," he says. "]'11 feed them peanuts and safilower seeds. Sometimes I'll give them B-12 amino acids and brewer's yeast. If it's a short race, I'll give them plenty of com and peas. Picture a boxing trainer. That's what I am." Two hours before shipping, he sets out clay nesting bowls and removes a partition in his rooftop coop separating cocks from hens. After an hour of motivational intimacy, the birds are separated again.

"Coming home to food is a big motivator, but sex is even bigger," MaIiinez explains.

Today, the club's large and occasionally cranky president, John Ferraro, is trying to persuade club members to buy electronic clocks, to automate the process of determining race winners. Under existing rules, when a bird arrives home from a race, its owner takes a numbered elastic band off its ankle and puts it in a capsule that goes into a tamper-proof clock for time-coding. The system makes

cheating all but impossible-a major concem given the fanaticism of the racers and the high stakes of big races. The new clocks would be even better, says Ferraro. "You put a chip on the bird, and the clock scans it as soon as the bird comes in. It even has a built-in master timer that automatically updates itself using satellites. It's clear. No mistakes, no cheating."

The clocks would also eliminate many of the tedious tasks perfonned after the races. Because lofts are located at varying distances from a race's starting point, the first bird home isn't necessm'ily the winner. An aerial survey is perfOlmed on each loft, and its distance from the start is calculated. The winner is the bird with the best average speed.

A week later, 50 pigeon racers, gathered for an auction at the Triboro Club in Queens, are inspecting row upon row of caged pigeon. The crowd is a cross-section of New York: Puerto Ricans, blacks, Poles, Italians and others, all standing around, trading breeding tips and pigeon gossip. An auctioneer stands on a folding table and stalis the bidding on a healthy-looking pair of blue-and-white homers.

"This pair comes from Johnny Russo," he announces. "Need [ say more? He flies a dynamic bird. Do I hear $50? O.K., $55? $60? $70? $80?

Sold for $80!"

Mmiinez reaches into a cage, picks up a bird and spreads one of its wings. "You always got to look at the tips of the feathers," he says. "They're like the rings in a tree. You can tell if a bird missed a day of feeding or if it didn't get enough water." He holds the bird in one hand, first inspecting its beak then its breastbone, or keel. "]'m more interested in how a bird feels in my hand and how it handles itself," he says. "He should be as curious about me as I am about him." According to MaIiinez, the best predictor of racing success is a bird's telTitoriality.

A territorial bird, he says, will "overlook pain, hunger, muscle cramps-anything-to get home to its perch." Moments later, a bird in the next cage catches his eyes. "I like that bird," he says. "Why? I wish I could tell you. Sometimes it's just the way they look at you."

Before he began racing homers, Martinez would go out drinking most nights. Now he's too busy with his pigeons. His choice of friends has changed too. "I find myself associating with other pigeon racers," he says. "If you're one of the best racers in ew York, most people won't be impressed, but other racers are. A lot of us even take our vacations together."

Martinez's first fascination with pigeons dates to his family's move from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn, when he was 4 years old. "As a kid, I always looked up and watched them flying m'ound," he says. "] just liked being around them." As young teenagers, MaIiinez and Jose made a coop in their bedroom window from milk crates. "We had 16 birds," says Martinez. "They weren't homers; they were flights, which stay close to their coop. We'd let them out the window and watch them fly in circles and come back. All the kids had them. The idea was to catch another guy's bird and sell it back to him for a dollar." Mmiinez and his brother built their first rooftop

coop in 1973 and spent most of their time protecting it from pigeon thieves, known as tappers. "When you're living in the ghetto," he says, "the hardest part is making sure no one steals your birds."

Martinez was in his twenties before he could afford his first loft of racing homers. His mentor was a Queens pet shop owner named Frank Klein, who gave Orlando and Jose their first homers. "Frank saw we had potential, that we could be contenders," says Martinez. "He taught us everything."

Klein remembers Martinez as "a njce boy, a little on the wild side. He had the interest right away, but he didn't know anything about the birds." Then, in 1994, the Martinez brothers won the Main Event for the first time. "Orlando's one of the top guns in the sport right now," says Klein.

"Jose lost interest, but Orlando puts all the work in. No matter how good the birds are, if you don't take care of them, nothing happens."

By the end of April, Martinez is spending most of his waking hours with his pigeons. He opens his bedroom closet and climbs a makeshift ladder mounted against the wall.

Poking his head through a ceiling trapdoor, he is quickly surrounded by softly cooing pigeons. The birds groom one another and peck at leftover feed as Mattinez moves about, gently scooping up a pigeon to inspect its wings and carriage. "Just being around them makes me happy," he says.

"The first thing I checked out when I bought this house was the view from the roof-perfect for racing."

Martinez has big plans for his coop. "I'm getting them a filtering system so their air is better than what I breathe downstairs," he says. "I'm putting in a water purification system. And I hope to put in a central vacuum system for them, which Omayra's going to kill me for because we don't even have one." All told, Martinez spends about $4,000 a year on antibiotics, vitamins, supplements and vaccinations-enough to transform his closets into giant aviary medicine cabinets.

With all that is known about caring for pigeons, nobody knows exactly why racing homers home, though the ability has been recognized and cultivated for centuries. In the 12th century, the Caliph of Baghdad maintained a well-organized "pigeon post" complete with pigeon post offices and pigeon postmasters-an early equivalent to Airborne Express given that most travel was done by foot. The use of pigeons then spread to Western Europe, where they were used to carry such history-altering messages as the results of battles. The Flemings even used them to relay stock quotes across the English Channel from the London Exchange.

At the time, a note tied to a pigeon's ankle was the fastest and most reliable means of communication. In the mid- 19th century, Baron Paul Julius Reuter built his early news-gathering empire on the use of 200 message-carrying homers to bridge the telegraphic gap between Brussels and Aachen. And they were used by the U.S. Armed Forces as recently as World War II, when one pigeon, named G.!. Joe, was credited with saving the lives of more than 1,000 British soldiers who had taken the Italian town

Orlando Martinez lives and breathes the age-old sport of pigeon racing. Here he "tosses" his birds on one of many daily trainingflightsfrom this Brooklyn site. Although born with innate homing abilities, homers get better with practice.

of Colvi Vecchia from the Germans but were unable by radio to call off planned American bombing raid. G.!. Joe carried the message back to the American airbase minutes before the planes were due to take off. For his heroics, the bird was awarded a medal for gallantry by the Lord Mayor of London.

As navigators, pigeons appear to rely on a combination of directional tools. First, they apparently use the sun's position to orient themselves. A blindfolded pigeon can also find its loft, but only with difficulty. The birds' other directional device seems to be related to the ealih's magnetic field. When small magnets are placed on the back of a pigeon's head to interfere with its natural magnetic sensing ability, the bird becomes disoriented, particularly if the sky is overcast. And a Belgian study has linked poor race days to disturbances in the ealih's magnetic field caused by solar storms and sunspots. Cellular phone towers also appear to muddy the directional cues that pigeons rely on.

Matiinez's favorite homing story involves a female bird he calls Matiy, winner of many competitions. When she didn't return home from a 480-kilometer race a few years ago, Matiinez assumed a

Clockwise .Fom far left: Twice a week, Martinez gives his birds medicine to help them breathe: Reggie won $]5,000 before Martinez retired him to the stock loft to breedfitture champions; a leg band certifies ently in the highstakes Viola, one of the richest pigeon races.

Right: Martinez gets his birds ready for the big race.

Later, Fiends will gather at the loft to clock the pigeons' speed of return.

hawk had gotten her. But two weeks later he found Marty on his doorstep. Her wing was broken. She had walked home.

Although bom with innate abilities, homers get better with practice, which is why Martinez is fanatical about training. It isn't uncommon for birds to take off in the wrong direction and reorient themselves in midflight. The more familiar a bird is with the terrain, the more likely it will find its way home quickly without losing time for corrections.

It is July 22, three months before the Main Event. Martinez pulls up to a deserted parking lot beside an abandoned factory on Staten Island's north shore. It is an ug1y patch of weed-infested asphalt that looks Iike a good place to dispose of a body. But Martinez has other plans. While some men search for the perfect trout stream, Martinez drives around Staten Island looking for the perfect spot to accustom his pigeons to the route home to Brooklyn. He thinks this may be it.

"We're exactly 10.3 air miles due west from my pigeon loft," he explains. This is homestretch for his club's races. "When the pigeons reach this spot," he says, "they'll be tired, hungIy and thirsty, and I don't want anything to make them deviate from their path home.

I'm teaching them to fly a straight line. They won't even know they're doing it, they will have done it so many times."

Martinez, a graphic designer, takes the entire summer off to train his pigeons. He lives cheaply. Work, for him, is an occasional necessity but hardly a priority. "I race pigeons," he says. "That's what I do." In summer, he routinely wakes before 5 a.m. so he can get in his first toss of the day before the moming rush hour. He fits in two or three more training flights before sundown. Today, Martinez places his crates on the cracked asphalt and waits. The birds sit quietly, orienting themselves, their brains like compass needles settling on a direction. When they begin to peck one another gently, it's called "music": it means they're ready to fly. Martinez opens a little mesh door on one of his crates and releases five birds. Quickly airborne, they swoop around frantically in patterns, flying left, right,

then under a set of softly humming power lines. Mm1inez winces, but the birds make it through the wires unhmmed, regroup and swing out towm'd Brooklyn and home. Mm1inez checks his watch and waits five minutes before releasing another set of birds. He wants each pigeon to learn to lead, not just follow the pack.

Back in Brooklyn, Reyes listens to salsa and waits on the rooftop loft for the birds. Beside her rests a Im'ge net called a hoople and a bag of raw Spanish peanuts, the pigeons' favorite snack. Eleven minutes after the launch, Reyes phones Mat1inez with good news: the first birds have arrived, 10 minutes faster than last week. In the days that follow, Mm1inez will release his birds fi:om fat1her away, at truck stops along the New Jersey and Pennsylvania tumpikes.

But he will end each day with another drive across the VetTazano NmTows Bridge to the abandoned Staten Island parking lot for yet another toss. "You can't just race pigeons," he reflects. "You might win a race, but it'll be by accident. If! win, it's not luck. I'm training them four times a day. What's lucky about that?"

By October 19, Mm1inez's training has paid off. His birds have dominated the fall races with seven first places. Tonight is shipping night for the Main Event, and the Bronx Homing Pigeon Club is swamped with people and food of all ethnic persuasions. There's rice and beans, stuffed peppers manicotti, fried chicken and greens, keilbasa and sauerkraut. In the clubhouse garage, racers from all over the New York metropolitan area drop off their birds of shipment to Triadelphia, West Virginia, more than 560 kilometers away.

The club's vice president inspects each bird's wings to make sure they have molted properly. Because molting uses up a lot ofbird's energy, some racers try to retard the process by keeping their birds in the dark for 16 hours or more a day. But that's cheating, so each bird's wings must pass muster before it's allowed to race. Another official seals the race clocks as club members bet on their favorite birds. In the clubhouse, the race's organizers, Joe Musto and LatTY Doherty, collect fees and enter contestants.

phone. "Yo, you heard? Bert & Harry got one at 2:16. I ain't kidding. Nobody else got squat. I haven't seen a feather."

Reyes is wearing her lucky maroon sweatshirt. She's dying to call out for fried chicken, but she knows the rules. No unnecessary phone calls on race day. Ten more minutes pass. Martinez tries to make sense of what's happening.

"It's the Blue Ridge Mountains," he says to no one in particular.

"They're tall, and it gets misty up there. Most birds don't like to cross them. They go back and f0l1h trying to find a way around them. But some of the birds go right through."

Suddenly Martinez is silent, motionless. "Dios mio!" shouts Reyes. A pigeon circles above. Martinez releases the chico. His racing pigeon lands on the coop, and Mat1inez approaches it, whistling softly. Reyes grabs a handful of peanuts and squats under the coop entrance to snatch the elastic race band off the pigeon's ankle.

Clocking is a critical element of winning. With hundreds of birds aITiving at nearly the same time, evety second counts.

Martinez spends hours training his birds to go right into the coop, but this time the pigeon doesn't budge. "Come on, Mami," he urges.

"Come on!" The bird looks skinny and exhausted, as if it has lost some of its breast meat. It grooms itself, then looks away. Mat1inez is about to hemorrhage. He can't wait any longer; there is too much money and prestige at stake. He traps the pigeon with the hoople.

Reyes removes the race band, places it in a metal capsule, drops it, finds it again, then sticks it in the clock, where it is time-stamped.

The clock reads 2:39 p.m. Martinez gets back on the phones. Six more of his birds come in. "Quality shows," he says proudly. "1 bred a lot of winners this yeat路."

But not today. Of the 790 birds in the Main Event, one of Martinez's birds will fmish 23rd, and others 94th and 96th. The other 12 don't even rartk. Martinez grows silent, and Reyes phones out for chicken.

"I thought I had the winners," Martinez says later. "Pigeon racing has a way of humbling you." Then he jumps to his feet and walks around the room. "I'm going to do things differently next year," he says at last, with growing animation. "I'm going to start them later and let them fly as a pack a little longer. That way they won't get bored. It's up to me to motivate them. This year they got bored. That was the problem."

D

"It's endless work, 365 days a year," pipes up Donna Musto, Joe's wife. "To be honest, 1 don't get it. He's always with birds, and when he's not, they're always on his mind. We plan our vacations around them, our nights out around them. It's always pigeons, pigeons, pigeons."

Musto shoots Donna a look and asks her to "go get the picture."

Donna doesn't budge. Musto gets up and retums with a Polaroid of a pigeon standing on a pedestal, staring blankly into the camera.

"Out of 2,048 birds, she comes in first!" Musto says excitedly.

"First! It's something I've never done before." Musto folds his aIms across his banel chest and beams.

"I'm matTied 50 years," chimes in Doherty, "and I told my wife that as long as we have the blue-cheque hen upstairs, we're O.K." The hen is Doherty's best breeder. "When you breed young birds, you put all your hopes in them," he says. "To breed future winners, that's an aspiration we all have-to see that bundle of 16 ounces fly home from 480 kilometers away just to come back to what you've been giving it. Well, it satisfies everything."

October 21, it is just after 2 p.m. and the Main Event birds are on their way home. Martinez, on his Brooklyn roof, stares at the horizon above Staten Island, which is filled with dark specks: distant planes, insects, sparrows, common pigeons known as "street rats," starlings, seagulls. Somehow Martinez can always tell which speck is one of his pigeons, yet he is feeling today's race slipping away.

He tenses as a cell-phone consensus builds around a reported sighting of someone else's returning pigeon in Queens. "That's impossible!" he shouts into a phone. "Well, it's not impossible, but that bird's supersonic. 1 got to go." Switching to his cordless, he yells, "Nobody else has birds! Are you sure you heard right? Something's wrong here! 1want a Congressional investigation!"

About the Author: Andrew D. Blechman is editor-in-chief of 5th Dreams of winning the Main Event are fading fast. Martinez Estate, an Internet-only voting magazine, and vice president of content picks up a "chico"-a bird that is thrown up to help guide pigeons . for Vote.com, which accepts opinion from people on various political home once they are sighted-and scans the horizon. Back to the cell issues and forwards them to politicians.

Breeding pigeon~ in India, is an art that goes at least asfar back as the Mughal Emperors,fir whom it was afavorite pastime. Over the centuries, its secrets werepassed down flom one generation to the next. Not ontJ arepigeons a serious hobby, but until very recenttJ the Indian police used themfir communications. Although telecom and e-mail hasfirced retirement upon the IPS pigeons, enthusiastic pigeon keepers may still befiund. Here photographer Santosh J7erma captures the pigeons and their keepers in the skies and lanes qf Lucknow.

All open spaces are devoted to breeding and training pigeons in this enthusiast:S home.

Pigeon lover Kishori La! Yadav from Varanasi inspects pigeons on a pigeon keeper:S terrace in the old city.

A band of warrier pigeons fly together on a sortie over the Gol Darwaza area in the old city.

Lucknow has two kinds of pigeons. Thejirst, girahbund, are homebound pigeons, reared and trained for performance flying and acrobatics.

Gala, or warrior pigeons, the second categOly, are trained to fly in bands. They attack and jight other bands, capturing pigeons and assimilating the prisoners into their own group.

A typical coop on a pigeon keeper s terrace.

Pigeon keepers ji-om near and far converge at a Sunday market in the old city to buy, sell and trade birds.

Pigeons for sale.

A boy carries his birds to the Sunday market in a net tote.

BRAVE Everything you wanted to

World

know about stem cells, cloning and genetic engineering but were afraid to ask cent debates have raised questions not only about changes in cience and medicine but about such profound issues as the nature and value of human life, and whether humans have the moral right to tamper with genetic material, on the one hand, or the obligation to develop technologies that would alleviate the suffering of millions, on the other. Such questions are important, but only by understanding the science involved can we begin to address the ethical conundrums coming our way.

With nearly every advance in medicine, from the smallpox vaccine to organ transplants, there has been controversy over how much we should be altering nature.

When Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby (now a healthy 24-year-

K

old), was born in England in 1978, some people called conception outside the body immoral and tried to have the technique banned.

Back in the 1970s, science made advances in two areas that seemed, on the surface, unrelated-but which have veered ever closer to each other. One was a growing understanding of, and ability to manipulate, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the molecule that provides our genetic code. The other involved the advent of in vitro fertilization (IVF), the technology responsible for Louise Brown and nearly a million babies since.

IVF is a process by which eggs are removed surgically from a woman's ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a laboratory. After undergoing a few cell divisions, several of the resulting embryos are inserted into a woman's uterus where, with luck, at least one will develop into a full-term fetus. In anyone trial ofIVF, as many as 10 to 20 eggs may be extracted and fertilized, and the majority of the resulting embryos are often frozen at an early stage of development, in case they will be needed for later attempts at implantation in the uterus.

Though IVF offered new hope to many who could not otherwise conceive, it also opened up a slew of ethical questions, beginning with the status of those embryos that remain unused in the lab. Then there is the fact that the woman who donates the egg need not be the one who carries the embryo or who raises the child. It is, in fact, possible to have as many as five adults who could claim parenthood in an IVF scenario: the sperm donor, the egg donor, the woman who carries the fetus and a couple responsible for its upbringing.

Sti II, for all the potential issues it raises, IVF was in many ways just the beginning, a relatively simple manipulation of the natural order. The closer science has gotten to deciphering our genetic makeup, the more complicated the landscape has grown.

Genes and DNA By the middle of the 20th century, scientists had begun to realize that "genes"-the name given to whatever it was that passed down inherited traitswere made of DNA and that they were located on chromosomes, threadlike

structures found in cell nuclei of almost all living things.

For molecular biologists, the second half of the 20th century was devoted to divining the structure of the D A molecule (the double helix, discovered in 1953) and then figuring out how the molecule's fundamental components-called nucleotides-eombined to form genes, how genes provided the instructions for making the molecules that allow living things to function, which genes did what, and where they were located. Just last year, scientists announced that they'd sequenced the human genome. Though they are far from figuring out what all of our genes do, they now know the order and location on our chromosomes of all of the nucleotides and have identified about half of our genes.

Much of the research on human D A has focused on diseases that are prevalent in families or in certain ethnic groupsstalting with such single-gene disorders as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease and sickle-cell anemia-because medical histories of affected families were available and the fruits of such research might save, or at least improve, countless lives.

As our understanding of our genes has increased, so have our choices dealing with birth and conception. For several decades, couples with family histories of particular diseases have sought the advice of genetic counselors about whether to have children. With amniocentesis-a procedure in which amniotic fluid is extracted from the womb and examined-

expectant mothers have long been able to determine if a developing fetus has certain chromosomal disorders. But more recent advances have brought the potential for couples to be advised not only on the basis of family history but on the presence of genetic markers of hereditary disease in their DNA. And with IVF technology came the ability to screen embryos for chromosomal anomalies-and for specific genetic traits, including genetic diseases.

Along with advances in screening in recent decades, there has been a surge of research on ways to treat existing genetic disorders. That research was based largely on two great truths that had been revealed about DNA. The first is that the sole function of most genes is to give cells encoded instructions for churning out particular proteins, the building blocks of life. There are tens of thousands of different proteins in the human body-from collagen and hemoglobin to various hormones and enzymes-and each is encoded by a particular order of nucleotides in a gene. (Many diseases are caused by defective genes that don't produce their protein correctly-and treatments that introduce missing proteins have long been used for such disorders as diabetes and hemophilia.)

The second insight is that all living things use the same basic genetic code.

Just as all the books in a great library can be written in a single language, so, too, are all living things the result of different messages "written" in the same exact DNA language-and "read" by our cells.

This means that if a stretch of DNA is

taken from a donor and inserted into the D A of a host's cells, those cells will read the new message, regardless of its source.

Though there are endless possible applications for this phenomenon (and at least as many complicating factors), doctors found particularly promising the idea of fixing broken genes by manipulating DNA through a process known as gene therapy, a form of genetic engineering.

Gene Therapy In some ways, manipulating DNA is a completely natural phenomenon. Certain kinds of viruses-including HIV and others-infect us by inserting their genetic information into our cells, which then haplessly reproduce the invading virus. In some forms of gene therapy, this kind of virus itself is engineered so that the viral gene that causes the disease and allows the virus to reproduce is removed and replaced with a healthy version of the human gene that needs "fixing." Then this therapeutic, engineered virus is sent off to do its work on the patient's cells. There are hundreds of procedures using such "viral vectors" in clinical trials today, targeting diseases that range from rheumatoid atthritis to cancer. So far there have been few, if any, real successes-and Timothy Olson, a livestock geneticist with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, feeds a miniature cow in Gainesville. The mini cattle, with a height of about one meter and weighing about 230 kilograms, are becoming more populw:

Nicole Barna, a senior operations coordinator at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, holds a tray o/human DNA undergoing the sequencing process-a step in the effort to map the human genome.

the field received a serious setback in 1999 when a patient died whjle undergoing gene therapy trials for liver disease.

But even if this form of gene therapy, or one like it, can be made to be safe and effective, it still represents a relatively short-term approach to genetic diseasecompared with what is theoretically possible. After all, even if individuals can be successfully treated, their descendants would likely still inherit the gene or genes that caused their ailments. The fOlm of gene therapy we've been discussing affects socalled somatic cells, whjch make up the vast majority of cells in our body. But it is not somatic cells but geml cells---our eggs and speml-that pass our genes to oW"offspring.

Genetic Engineering When talking about changing the DNA in human germ cells, scientists use the term "germ line therapy." But in plants or animals, it's what we commonly think of as "genetic engineering." Either way, it means altering the DNA of an organism in a way that increases the likelihood (or, in some cases, ensures) that all of its offspring will have the same, engineered, characteristics.

So far, this form of genetic engineering has not been attempted on humans (as far as we know), but it is used on nearly every other life-form-from bacteria to plants to livestock. Virtually all insulin used to treat diabetes comes from bacteria whose DNA has been modified by the addition of the human gene for insulin, which the bacteria then produce. Plants are routinely engineered so that they will be resistant to certain pests or diseases, withstand particular herbicides or grow in previously unusable soils. One area of intense debate concerns the extent to which such genetically modified organisms should be used in agriculture. In the United States, about half of the soybean and a quarter of the corn grown on farms have been genetically modified.

While the industry and many experts argue

that products that are easier to grow or contain more nutrients (or even produce pharmaceuticals) could help prevent worldwide hunger and disease, critics 'question the possible side effects-particularly to the environment-of introducing new genes into agricultural products.

The truth is, there is still an inestimable amount that we don't know about the functions of particular genes or how they work in tandem. Much of the concern about genetic engineering-in plants or in people-rests on this fact. Yet with the promise of tomatoes that prevent cancer, salmon many times the size of those produced in nature, even pets engineered to be nonallergenic, many people hope that similar enhancements can be made to human genes as well. After all, such techniques as genetic screening of embryos, gene therapy and genetic engineering have the potential not only to prevent disease but to increase the likelihood of desired traits-fi'om eye color to intelligence and other attributes. (Though we're very far from custom-designing our offspring, there are already cases of genetic

screening of embryos for desired traitsincluding parents seeking bone-marrow matches for older, ill children.)

Cloning There are also those who see great promise in another form of customdesigned offspring: cloning. Though most scientists oppose human cloning, three researchers caused quite a stir earlier this year when they each, independently, announced that they were working to create human clones.

The modern age of cloning can be said to have begun in 1996, when Ian Wilmut of Roslin Institute in Scotland oversaw the birth of Dolly, the first mammal known to have been produced by cloning from an adult cell. Worldwide "Hello, Dolly" headlines announced the breakthrough, and subsequently, scientists working with goats, pigs, mice and cows followed in"Wilmut's path.

To "create" Dolly, Wilmut and his colleagues took an unfertilized egg from a ewe and removed its chromosomal mater-

ial, replacing it with a somatic cell (replete with DNA) from another ewe. In normal fertilization, when sperm and egg merge, the resulting cell-containing all the genetic information necessaryimmediately starts dividing. In cloning Dolly, the somatic cell and the egg were fused with an electric current, which somehow prompted the package to act as though it were a newly fertilized egg.

The resulting embryo was inserted into the uterus of a third ewe, using the techniques that had seen such success in in vitro fertilization.

In some respects, cloning can be likened to a construction project. The egg is like a crew of workers ready to build according to the specifications on a blueprint (DNA) once the plan is finalized and the whistle blows (fertilization). Whatever the crew sees on the blueprint, it will build. [n the cloning process, scientists insert an already-completed blueprint and-in the form an electric current or some other prompt-blow the whistle.

But just as independent builders using the same blueprint can build slightly different structures, so cloning does not create absolute replicas. Though a newborn clone will have chromosomal DNA identical to that of the adult donor and in that way would be adult's genetic twin, it would also be a twin developed as a fetus in a different womb, flooded with a different bath of chemicals at different points in its development, born decades later and raised in a different environment. The clone could also differ from the donor due to trace DNA in the donor's eggin structures called mitochondria, for instance-that could affect the clone's development. (In fact, there have been recent reports of human babies who have genetic material from three adults, due to a technique that uses healthy mitochondria from a donor's egg to enhance fertility.) So, though Dolly resembled her DNA donor, other sheep that Wilmut and his colleagues have cloned vary in appearance and temperament from their DNA donors as well as from other clones developed from the same DNA. It is also important to note that Dolly was born only after more than 200 other

clones were spontaneously aborted or stillborn. Attempts to clone animals since have often resulted in severe birth defects-from dramatically increased birth size to enlarged organs to immune deficiencies. Going back to the blueprint analogy, Cornell professor and cloning expert Jonathan Hill adds, "It seems the cloned DNA is not only a 'used' blueprint but one that may have certain pages stuck together, making some of the details particularly had to read."

As a result of these and other factors, many scientists-and politicians-believe there should be a ban on human cloning. Others are wary that such a ban might be too restrictive, since some techniques used in cloning are also used in other promising areas of science-including applications of IYF technology and stem cell research.

Stem Cell Research Cloning and stem cell research are connected in at least one important way.

Every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies (including om eggs and sperm, which have but one set instead of two) contain the same DNA. The cells in your skin, for example, contain the same gene for producing insulin as those in certain regions of your pancreas, but only the latter actually make the protein. Most of the genes in our cells are inactive, leaving only the relevant ones to do their work.

Though we know little about how this occurs, we do know that there is a period early in development when the cells have yet to begin the processes of detetmination and differentiation into blood, muscle or any other kind of cell, and all cells can still develop into any cell in the adult. In humans, this property-called pluripotency-is lost by the end of the second week after fertilization.

Part of what made Wilmut's success with Dolly so extraordinary was that he seems to have been able to revert an adult sheep cell back to its pluripotent state (though with all of the unexplained complications we've already detailed). Other techniques are being pursued for isolating adult stem cells-cells that are only par-

tially differentiated-and reverting them to a pluripotent state, or nudging them to develop in particular directions. In the meantime, there is another source of pluripotent cells: the embryo itself.

Pluripotent cells from human embryos are the embryonic stem cells at the center of last summer's debate.

Much of that continuing debate centers on the fact that human embryonic stem cells are obtained, almost exclusively, from embryos left over from lYE Though proponents of research on them point out that they would be destroyed anyway, many opponents believe that these embryos, though composed of just a few dozen cells, are human lives, and so should be saved.

The other reason that stem cells have burst into the news has to do with their exceptional promise. Scientists have learned to culture human embryonic stem cells and allow them to divide and multiply, while preventing them from switching on or off any of their genes. By exposing these stem cells to different molecular compounds, they are trying to understand how that switching process works so that they can direct this cell to become a neuron, say, or that one to become a blood cell. (These two examples, in fact, are feats at which they have already had some measure of success.)

Eventually, some believe, we may be able to control the development of these plmipotent cells so that we can replace tissues damaged by disease or accident.

Nerve cells damaged by Parkinson's or spinal cord injury, for example, or heart tissue of cardiac patients, might ultimately be replaced by tissue grown fi路om stem cells.

Some scientists see even the potential to create custom-made tissue by using stem cells that are exact matches to a particular person, thus obviating the greatest problem in transplant surgery-rejection of the implant by the host's immune system. "Therapeutic cloning," as this procedure has been called, would involve inserting a patient's own DNA into an egg and then prompting the cell and egg to fuse and start dividing, as was done in creating Dolly. Each cell in the resulting embryo, and thus its stem cells, would

Right: Piglets Millie, Christa, Alexis, Carrel and Dotcom, born on March 5 2000, were cloned from an adult sow by Scotland-based PPL Therapeutics. A slightly different technique than the one used to produce Dolly the sheep, was used. By producing geneticallyengineered pigs, researchers want to switch off certain genes so that their organs can be more readily accepted by the human body.

Below: DNA being removed Fom a mammalian egg using suction through a pipette at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts.

!l:creating embryos for ~o research or therapy all -8 the more so. ~ President Bush ann~ ounced in August 2001 that the federal government would fund research with human embryonic stem cells but only that which uses those "lines" (cells developed from the original stem cells of a single embryo) already in existence. The scientific community has argued (and the administration has conceded) that there are fewer lines developed for research than the "more than 60" the President mentioned in his speech. Those that do exist, they say, may be inappropriate for use in human therapies, because they have been cultivated in mouse-cell cultures and represent a very limited gene pool. Other critics of the President's position point out that-as in many areas of researchcurbing public funding does not mean that the research won't go on, just that it

I

have exactly the same DNA as the patient, and tissues derived from these cells would match exactly the patient's own tissues.

Along the wide spectrum of debate, there are those for whom embryonic stem cell research is acceptable as long as embryos are used with the consent of the egg and/or sperm donors (or, in the case of therapeutic cloning, the sole DNA donor); there are those who believe it is acceptable as long as it is done with embryos that would be destroyed anyway; and there are those for whom destroying even these "extra" embryos is abhorrent, and

will go on, unregulated, under private sponsorship. Still others feel that the President was wrong to let any such research continue, let alone with public funding. Clearly, the debate isn't ending any time soon.

We are often reminded that just because we can do something-such as exploit the latest technology-does not mean that we should. Ian Wilmut-a vocal opponent of human cloning despite (or perhaps because of) his work with animalsoffers a complementary observation: "What is 'natural,' " he points out, "is not necessarily right, and what is 'unnatural' is not necessarily wrong."

It is always risky navigating unchat1ed territory. President Bush stated it adroitly, in August, when he said: "As we go forward, I hope we will always be guided by ... both our capabilities and our conscience."

D About the Author: James Trefzl is a professor of physics at George Mason University in Fail/ax, Virginia. He has served as a science commentator for National Public Radio, is a member of the Public Information Advisory Committee of the American Institute of Physics, and is afi~equent contributor to Smithsonian.

lease-move-forward ...a-lit-tle," a robotic yet oddly sultry female voice commands. A camera whirs to focus on the eyeball of a visitor to Thales Fund Management, on the 45th floor of an ebony tower in Lower Manhattan. "We-are-sorry.

You-are-NOTidentified," says the disembodied voice. "We like the Star Trek feel," grins Laurel Galgano, who manages the automated security system. "And it impresses the investors."

They're not the only ones taken with biometrics. Iris scanners are among the sexiest of these technologies, which convert distinctive biological characteristics, such as the patterns of the iris or fingertip or the shape of a hand or face, into a badge of identity. Even before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the industry was growing sharply as scanners and software became cheaper and more accurate. The International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA) estimates that sales reached $170 million in 2001, a 70 percent jump over the previous year. Now, the IBIA predicts that sales will rise to $1 billion by 2004, propelled in part by new security worries at airports and other critical facilities.

Thousands of systems are being tested or are already up and running. Employees at some businesses punch in and out by placing their hand on a reader, and digital finger-scan devices verify thousands of schoolchildren's enrollment in lunch programs. At a handful of airports, face scanners are scrutinizing passengers, and the New York State lottery uses iris scanners for employee access to a secured room containing its data system.

Nothing's perfect. Yet biometrics experts and even some vendors worry about promising too much, too soon. In theory, when your fingerprint or face structure becomes your identity card, you no longer have to worry that it will be lost or

stolen-nor does an employer, a government agency, or anyone else with a stake in knowing who you are. But biometrics systems, like traditionalID cards, can be fooled, and some, like hand and face scans, are less accurate in practice than in theory. "The people who say biometrics provides foolproof, fail-safe, positive identification are just wrong," says Jim Wayman, director ofbiometric research at San Jose State University. What's more, face scanning can be done without people's permission, raising privacy concerns and prompting calls for laws that would regulate how biometric data could be collected and used.

Some biometric systems have been a hit, providing a real boost in security and convenience. At a Gristedes grocery store in Manhattan, a hand reader has replaced the time clock. "You can't

Maps the distinctive striations, futTows, and patterns of the iris Pros: High accuracy because the iris is very distinctive and rarely changes Cons: Large, expensive hardware; requires user training and controlled lighting Applications: Prisoner identification, access to high security sites like nuclear plants

cheat the boss, and he can't accuse you of buddy punching," says a store clerk. It takes just minutes for New York State to emoll an applicant for public assistance in a digital fingerprint system, which has boosted arrests for attempted fraud. To allay privacy concerns, legislation prohibits the state from sharing the data with the FBI unless it is subpoenaed. And travelers laud INSPASS. The program allows over 65,000 passengers who regularly fly abroad to breeze by immigration lines at nearly a dozen airports by passing through a hand-scan reader, linked to a database of known travelers. There's an appealing backup system, too. When a hand reader fails, the passenger gets to cut to the front of the customs line.

But the technology has glitches. Digital fingerprint readers can draw a blank on some people, such as hairdressers who work with harsh chemicals, and the elderly, whose prints may be worn.

Recent tests by the independent research and consulting firm International Biometric Group showed that some systems are unable to collect a finger scan from up to 12 percent of users. And the IBG found that the performance offace-scanning systems can be dismal. Six weeks after test subjects had "enrolled" with an initial face scan, some systems failed to recognize them nearly one-third of the time-and that was under ideal conditions, The companies say they've since upgraded their software.

Yet an increasing number of airports, including Boston's Logan, Fresno, St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Palm Beach, and Dallas-Fort Worth, are testing or deploying the face-scan tech-

Methods vary; some systems analyze distances between features like chin, nose, and eyes Pros: Easy to use and requires only software and a camera Cons: Significant privacy concerns, can easily be thrown off by poor lighting Applications: Surveillance, mug-shot matching, access control, casinos

nology-in some cases at security checkpoints but also for covert crowd scanning. The systems compare passing faces against a database of images from FBI lists of suspected terrorists and wanted felons. Independent privacy and security expert Richard M. Smith, who has studied these systems, says that because they are so easily fooled by changes in lighting, viewing angle, or sunglasses, they serve merely as a deterrent. "The camera in the ceiling is like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard oj Oz. It's all for show," says Smith. "Crowd scanning can be problematic," says Tom Colatosti, CEO of Viisage Technology, a face-scan company. "If you're talking about an airport, you need a chokepoint" for scanning people one by one.

Gummy dummies. Many systems can be deliberately fooled.

A new study from Yokohama National University in Japan shows that phony fingers concocted from gelatin, called "gummy dummies," easily trick fingerprint systems.

Manufacturers of some systems claim to guard against such tactics by recording pupil dilation, blood flow in fingers, and other evidence that the biometric sample is "live." And although some makers assert that biometrics solves the problem of identity theft-no one can steal your iris or hand, after all-many experts disagree. A hacker who broke into a poorly designed system might be able to steal other people's digital biometric templates and use them to access secure networks. This trick, called "replay," could take identity theft to a whole new level.

Measures the length, width, thickness, and surface area of the hands Pros: Fast and easy to use; durable equipment Cons: Equipment is bulky; injuries, jewelry and fingernail growth can throw it off Applications: Access to buildings, immigration, employee time clock

Reads the ridges, whorls, and loops of the fingerprint Pros: Can be built into small devices; fingerprints are very distinctive Cons: Fingerprint quality can vary by age and occupation; scanner can be fooled by fake fingers Applications: Public assistance programs, criminal investigations, access to computers, and driver's licensing

Sensitive to behavioral characteristics such as voice cadence and pitch, and handwriting style and pressure Pros: Low cost, little user training required Cons: Voice and signature vary over time and are affected by illness and stress Applications: Check or document signing, telephone banking, verification that inmates are under house arrest

at makes you unique? Is it the ridges beneath your fingernails, the creaking of your bones, the shape of your ears, your very own odor? The biometric frontier, where researchers are looking for new and better markers, is not exactly the stuff of poetry.

Except, perhaps, for a little silver device called a light print sensor. Among the most promising of the new approaches, it works by measuring the play of many-colored light through your skin. Skin layer thicknesses, capillaries, and other structures all affect the light, creating the distinctive pattern of changes. The system works on any skin surface and is unaffected by cuts, burns,

and dilt. Only about 500 people have been tested, but so far each light print has been unique, "even identical twins," says Rob Rowe, cofounder of Lumidigm, the Albuquerque, New Mexico, company developing the technology.

Smart gun. By the end of the year, a Lwnidigm sensor could actually be in use. Combined with a hand reader, it would control access to the University of New Mexico's new hazardous-biomaterials lab. The sensor has also caught the eye of engineers at Smith & Wesson, which is working with Lumidigm to build a "smart gun." A light print sensor built into the grip would prevent the gun from being fU'edexcept by authorized users. One challenge now, the gunmaker says, is to get the

"Your fingerprint is uniquely yours, forever. If it's compromised, you can't get a new one," says Jackie Fenn, a technology analyst at the Gartner Group.

Privacy concerns-although they seem less pressing to many these days-may also slow public acceptance of the technology.

Yet in some cases, biometrics can actually enhance privacy. A finger-scan system for controlling access to medical records, for example, would also collect an audit trail of people who viewed the data. But face scanning, with its potential for identifying people without their knowledge, has alarmed privacy advocates.

In January this year, for example, Visionics Corp.'s face-scanning system was redeployed as an anticrime measure in a Tampa, Florida, entertainment district. Detective Bill Todd says the system had been taken down two months into its 12-month trial because of a bug in the operating system, but it has been upgraded and is now back in use. The 36-camera system is controlled by an officer at the station, who can pan, tilt, and zoom the cameras to scan faces in the crowd so that the software can compare them with faces in a database.

While Todd says the database contains only photographs of wanted felons, runaways, and sexual predators, police department policy allows anyone who has a criminal record or might provide "valuable intelligence," such as gang members, to be included. So far, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union, the technology has produced many false matches. And Todd confirms that it hasn't identified any criminals. "We have our limitations," says Frances Zelazny, spokesperson for Visionics. "It's an enhancement to law enforcement, not a replacement."

At times, the privacy problem is more perception than reality.

The Lower Merion school district near Philadelphia had installed finger-scan devices for school lunch lines. Students would place their finger on a pad to verify their identity, and money would be deducted from their account. The optional program was instituted to make lines move faster, and to spare embanoassment to students entitled to free or discounted meals. But even though the system did not capture a full fingerprint image, but rather a stripped-down dig-

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ital version, some parents felt that it came uncomfortably close to traditional fingerprinting. After a spate of bad press, the program was killed last year. Forty other school districts still use the system.

Bioprivacy. Such privacy dust-ups are causing some biometrics experts and vendors to call for laws to govern the fledgling industry. Samir Nanavati, a partner at IBG, says his company stresses "bioprivacy" rules: Tell people what data you're collecting and why; minimize the amount gathered; use the data only for the purpose originally stated; and give users a chance to correct their records.

Nanavati also worries that the technology is not always used to best advantage. On a recent, informal tour of biometric installations in Manhattan, where the dapper consultant lives, it was easy to see what he meant. At a New York University dorm, the handscan access system seemed to offer little security benefit. Fewer than half the students used it. The others gained entry the oldfashioned way, slightly faster and a lot less secure-by casually flashing an ID card to the friendly security guard. And at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where long queues sometimes form at hand-scan readers, frustrated employees smashed machines two weeks in a row. Yet Joe Salerno of New York-Presbyterian says every building has a hand reader. He speculates that employees may be upset about the rigorous timekeeping.

The real trick, says Nanavati, is to choose the right biometric system and design it with both security and convenience in mind.

And sometimes that means no system. One client, who desired the cachet of owning the most secure, high-tech residence on Manhattan, hired IBG to set up an iris-reader system for tenants of his 24-hour doorman building. "I told him it was already very secure," Nanavati laughs. "Biometric access would've only cost money and annoyed people."

Sometimes, Star Trek just isn't the answer.

D About the Author: Dana Hawkins is a senior editor with U.S. News & World Repo11.

i9Bel!f this game means gambling on untested science Biotech investors place their bets along a continuum of risk. Profitable blue chips are less dicey, as are drug company stocks with biotech exposure.

The greater risks-and potentially greater rewards-come from up-andcomers on the verge of their first big product. Investors who swing for the fences may consider early-stage firms with cutting-edge technology.

THE BLUE CHIPS ome this spring, Miya Weber, 48, expects to welcome her seventh grandchild into the world. If it hadn't been for the biotechnology drug Rituxan, the juvenile probation officer in Roseville, Cal ifornia, probably would never know this baby or any of her other grandchildren.

Lymphoma would have killed Weber before her 42nd bi11hday if she hadn't emolled in the final-stage clinical trial ofRituxan conducted by its manufacturer, Genentech.

Such tales of good fortune are helping the biotech industry thrive. Genentech's blockbuster successes with Rituxan and other drugs have allowed it to boast of a rare accomplishment in the industry-profitability. Blue-chip investments are a relative concept in this sector, but the four

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largest biotech companies-Amgen, Genentech, Serono, and Medimmune-finally appear sturdy enough to warrant close attention from mainstream investors.

Genentech, at 25, is regarded as the industry's elder statesman. It markets an industry-record 10 products and has about 20 projects in its pipeline, an established sales force, and strong distribution channels. Genentech was among the first ofthe biotech blue chips to turn a profit, based initially on sales of a drug for hormonegrowth deficiency in children. Later on, it marketed a clotbuster treatment for heart attack and stroke patients, as well as Rituxan and a gene-specific breast-cancer treatment, Herceptin. In its pipeline, Genentech has a promising drug for psoriasis, Xanelim. But even Genentech can stumble. Last spring, its drug for acute heart failure-partnered with Actelionfailed in clinical trials, and its asthma drug, Xolair, has been delayed.

Arngen, the industry's largest company, has just four products on the market, in-

eluding a rheumatoid arthritis drug, Kineret, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November. Amgen's staJ1ling decision in December to buy Immunex makes sense, in retrospect; Immunex's rheumatoid arthritis drug, Enbrel, was approved in 1998 and is expected to generate revenue of$3 billion by 2005. While Immunex has struggled to make enough Enbrel to meet demand, Amgen brings a long manufacturing track record.

Amgen last year had revenue of just under $3 billion with its two biggest-selling products: Epogen, used to treat anemia in kidney dialysis patients, and Neupogen, which stimulates the production of white blood cells. Key to the company's fortunes was the approval in September of a next-generation anemia drug, Aranesp.

Yet Amgen has been faltering elsewhere.

In the past year, it has dropped development of at least two drugs following poor clinical trial results-one that had shown potential for treating Lou Gehrig's disease

and another intended to attack Parkinson's disease. Amgen also recently failed to win FDA approval of a new prostate cancer drug and has gone back to the drawing board on its much-ballyhooed weight loss protein, Leptin.

Serono, the world's third-largest biotech firm, has successfully focused on reproducti ve health, specifically fertility drugs. The 95-year-old Swiss drug manufacturer has six biotech-derived drugs on the market: three fertility treatments, two versions of a growth hormone, and a multiple sclerosis drug, Rebif, not yet approved for U.S. sale. While Serono focuses on developing the large-molecule, or injectable, proteins common to biotech companies, it also seeks potential small-molecule drugs, the oral medications more often developed by pharmaceutical firms.

MedImmune is more typical of the industry as a whole. While it has had several profitable quarters stemming from sales of its three drugs on the market, its limited repertoire and hefty research expenses contributed to a third-quarter 2001 loss.

MedImmune seized an opportunity early this year by agreeing to acquire Aviron for $1.5 billion. The lure: FluMist, a nasal flu vaccine that's predicted to be a billiondollar seller after anticipated approvals are received. Because of uncertainty about timing of the approvals, analysts are more

cautious about MedImmune than about other blue-chip biotech stocks. Yet MedImmune's prospects are considered good. "It's one of the safest biotech companies [for investors] because it's still relatively cheap," says Franklin Berger, senior biotech analyst at JP Morgan.

BIG

PHARMA y now, you may have heard: Over the next five years, patents on nearly $40 billion in drugs manufactured by the nation's large pharmaceutical companies are set to expire, jeopardizing not only Big Pharma's bottom line but its stranglehold on global drug sales. This should crack open the door, the argument goes, for smaller biotech companies to help medicate the world.

But this trend is having another effect.

As smaller companies have begun bringing profitable drugs to market through biotech, Big Pharma has followed their lead. Some, like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Schering-Plough, have their own biotech units. Others have looked outside, forming joint ventures with biotech rivals.

In August, Eli Lilly committed more than $200 million to Isis Pharmaceuticals, in w part for the rights to an anticancer ~ drug. "It seems that most compa~ nies are heading in this direction," ~ says Michael Dauchot, manager of l the Dresdner RCM Global Health ~ Care fund.

There's enough critical mass at .~many of the large pharmaceutical :J ~ companies for investors to gain ~ exposure to biotech through Big ~ Pharma stocks, argues Edward ~ Jones analyst Bob Kirby. "What ~ you avoid by going with a comiii pany like Johnson & Johnson is the narrow focus of many biotech companies," he says. You also avoid skyhigh valuations. While the stock of a profitable biotech trades at an average price-earnings ratio of 41.6, J&J trades at a PIE of about 30.

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Hunien "John" Maassab, professor of epidemiology at University of Michigan School of Public Health, developed FluMist, an influenza virus vaccine that is delivered as a nasal mist.

At the same time, investors get stable growth, accelerated by the promise of biopharmaceutical research. Take J&J. The company, which derives about half of its sales through its pharmaceutical business, "became a biotech powerhouse by buying Centocor" in 1999 for $4.9 billion, says fund manager Dauchot. The deal brought into J&1's burgeoning pipeline fast-growing biopharmaceuticals such as Remicade, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease. And J&J has company.

Rival Pharmacia began Phase III trials this year on its own drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Also, Pharmacia helped establish a biotech company, Biovitrum, which is based in Sweden and will develop drugs to treat metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

The drug company with perhaps the most extensive work in the biotech arena is American Home Products (AHP). The biggest news to come out of the biotech sector in recent months was Amgen's bold move to buy rival Immunex. AHP, which makes Advil and Robitussin cough syrups, now owns nearly 8 percent of Amgen-because AHP earlier owned 41 percent of Immunex. It also received 45 percent of the gross profits ofImmunex's promising rheumatoid arthritis drug, Enbre!' AHP, through its Wyeth pharmaceutical division, has its own biotech operation, Genetics Institute (GI), which is a major player in the oncology and hemophilia markets. In 1997, the company received FDA approval for Neumega, a human factor that stimulates the production of platelets, which helps clotting and prevents bleeding. The company is also a leading supplier of a recombinant form of Factor VIII, a protein that sufferers of Hemophilia A lack.

One of AHP's competitors and partners in the hemophilia field is Baxter International, once a slow-growing medical products company that has transformed itself into a leading biotechnology concern, partly from the continued growth of its work in vaccines and hemophilia.

Since the early 1990s, Baxter has manufactured and marketed Factor VIII products for hemophiliacs like David Tignor. The 26-year-old Tennessee resident infuses

Factor Vll I from once a week to as often as six or seven times a month, to stem routine bleeding episodes. An avid rock climber, he says hemophiliacs use even more doses of Factor VIll for preventive pmposes before such strenuous activities. This demand is one reason Baxter's Factor VllI sales are expected to rise from $800 million to $1.9 billion by 2005.

Meanwhile, Baxter is poised to grow in an altogether different fashion. "Baxter is well positioned to be a paltner to biotech start-ups and also bigger companies looking to increase capacity," says Baxter BioScience President Thomas Glanzmann. Baxter is investing more than $2 billion to expand its manufacturing capacity, which analysts say is a smart move.

The future of biotech may well involve more cooperation-rather than competition-among Big Pharma and smaller biotech concerns.

UP-ANDCOMERS s there a sweet spot in biotech investing? Some top investors think so. They see a four-year window, starting two years before and stretching two years after the launch of a biotech company's first big product. "That's when you really see the share price rocketing," says Sam Isaly, manager of the top-performing Eaton Vance Worldwide Health Sciences Fund.

MedImmune's history is a case in point.

Its stock was selling for about $3 in 1996, when it initiated the final phase of human testing for Synagis, its drug for treating respiratory illness in premature infants.

When the FDA approved Synagis in the summer of 1998, the stock had tripled to $10. It rose through 1999, reaching $40 by that autumn, when biotech stocks began catching investors' fancy. Medlmmune doubled again by mid-2000.

That's the kind of home run that fills the dreams of many savvy biotech investors.

They aren't as interested in the establishment biotechs such as Amgen, or earlystage companies with fascinating-yet

I

unproven-technology.

In the middle are these up-and-comers with products nearing the market. The good news? "There are a lot more late-stage companies than ever before," says Tom Dietz, head of biotech research at Pacific Growth Equities. Of the 340 publicly traded U.S. biotech firms, only 60 or so are profitable.

But that number is expected to at least double over the next four years. The bad news? These companies are still quite risky. Even among drugs entering the final stage of human testing, a hefty 20 percent never are approved for sale.

Though hit by recent disappointments, Protein Design Labs is an up-and-comer that poses an opportunity. PDL's strength lies in its patented know-how in "humanizing" mice antibodies; its methods helped rid the treatments of dangerous side effects. Investors were unhappy with the company's recent announcements about two drugs in its pipeline, and the stock fell 30 percent in December. But PDL is convinced that the data on the more advanced drug-Zamyl to treat leukemia-are good enough to file for FDA approval in 2003.

CIBC World Markets analyst Matthew Geller thinks the market has overreacted.

"This company has seven drugs in its pipeline. If even two get approved, the stock will more than double," he says.

One company that has had only good news recently is CV Therapeutics, a biotech focusing exclusively on cardiovascular disease. CV's lead drug is aimed at the 6 million Americans who suffer from angina. CV's compound, which lets the heart use oxygen more efficiently, represents the first new approach to angina in 20 years. In November last year the company announced boffo results for its final human trials. Mark Monane of the Needham investment firm expects CV to break into the black by 2004 and thinks the stock could reach $72 from its current price of$49.

Investors who want the comfort of a company that has already run the FDA gantlet might consider Gilead Sciences.

Its new AIDS drug, Viread, was approved in October last year. Viread has been eagerly awaited because it is effective against viruses that have become resistant

to older drugs and is slow to induce mutant viruses itself. Geoffrey Harris of UBS Warburg believes Viread's sales could reach $600 million annually, helping it achieve profitability this year. Other upand-comers worth looking into are Neurocrine Biosciences, which is completing clinical trials for a new sleeping pill that doesn't cause next-day drowsiness, and ICOS, which is awaiting the FDA's decision on its new drug that could pose competition to Viagra (minus some of Viagra's bothersome side effects). In the cancer field, the lead drug candidate of Alios Therapeutics "has true blockbuster potential," according to SG Cowan analyst Eric Schmidt.

As salutary as a single drug can be for a biotech's stock price, there's no guarantee that it will be enough to build a long-term player. So if you pick a winner among today's crop of up-and-comers, don't get sentimental about it. If, after a few years, the company doesn't have other promising drugs in the pipeline, consider taking your profits.

THE CUTTING EDGE 0 years ago, Jesse Gelsinger, a teenager, died during a gene therapy experiment. So in August last year, as scientists began one of the most-watched gene therapy trials since then, their nerves were on edge. "Certainly, we were very cautious and careful," says John Monahan, CEO of Avigen, a small biotech stal1-up in Alameda, California, And, indeed, the small dose of a gene-carrying virus infused into the liver of the first patient-a hemophiliac-showed no toxicity. But something totally unexpected happened: The gene therapy agent turned up in the 63year-old man's semen. Federal officials immediately stopped the trial, igniting a debate on the risk that the extra gene could get passed on to future generations.

1:

Seattle-based Dendreon Corporation is dedicated to the discovery and development of therapeutic products through its innovative manipulation of the immune system.

Early this year, officials let the trial proceed, though this episode illustrates how biotech start-ups constantly grapple with scientific and regulatory uncertainties.

Cloning, gene therapy, stem cells, genetically modified organisms-all of these areas face new social, legal, and regulatory hurdles that could do in small firms. The human-cloning work of Advanced Cell Technology, for example, might be banned outright. "A good chunk of the innovation in biotechnology is coming from these smaller companies," says Dan Eramian of the Biotechnology Industry Association.

But their unproven technology makes them much too risky for the average investor.

They typically have no profits, and their stock prices can fluctuate wildly.

And frankly, average investors can't buy into the most cutting-edge companies anyway. Only 340 biotech companies, just under a quarter of the U.S. industry, are publicly traded. But to see what the science can offer, here are a few emerging areas of biotech science and some publicly traded companies struggling to transform their ideas into reality: Gene therapy. Once the most-hyped area of biotech, gene therapy has struggled over the past decade. But scientists

have recently been re-energized by better ways to shuttle genes into cells. Monahan founded Avigen in 1992 to exploit one apparently harmless virus that showed a great ability to get genes into cells with a long-lasting therapeutic effect. Previously, the virus loaded with a clotting-factor gene had some success when injected into thigh muscles of hemophiliacs. Avigen is now testing infusions of this agent into hemophiliacs' livers, where clotting factors normally get produced. Avigen has received millions in backing from Bayer.

But it faces competition from at least four rival start-ups pursuing gene therapy for hemophilia.

Cancer vaccines. Another cutting-edge biotech strategy nearing the market aims to harness the power of the immune system against cancer. While existing treatments involve toxic chemicals with many potential side effects, so-called cancer vaccines teach patients' immune systems to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

Several clinical trials are underway, and the FDA could approve the first cancer vaccine this year. "There's an element ofa race," acknowledges David Urdal, chief scientific officer at Dendreon, a Seattle firm; at least 17 others are pursuing cancer

vaccines. Dendreon makes use of specialized cells that recognize invaders and tell the immune system to attack. It isolates these cells and exposes them to telltale tumor proteins, and then reinjects them into the body. In one study of 80 men with prostate cancer, a third of patients improved; a larger trial is set to conclude this year.

Proteomics. Newly identified genes coming out of the just completed Human Genome Project are pumping energy into start-ups that identify proteins linked with those genes. At MDS Proteomics in Toronto, much of the work has been automated. "We've identified thousands of novel interactions among proteins," says company President Frank Gleeson.

Proteomics firms hope their work will lead to more drugs like Gleevac, a leukemia treatment that targets a protein found only in cancerous cells. But with at least a dozen firms crowding the proteomics plate-including Celera, which once raced to sequence the genome-investors may have trouble predicting the home-run hitters.

D About the Authors: The authors are editors with U.S. News & World Report.

e a e Plant biotechnologist C.S. Prakash speaks on genetically-modified crops and the related debate

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ast October Mexico discovered some of its nati ve corn varieties had been contaminated.

One study in Nature reported some evidence of certain transgenic gene pods in native crops in Mexico. But the scientific study was later found to be flawed, according to C.S. Prakash, director of Center for Plant Biotechnology Research at Tuskegee University, Alabama.

He goes on to cite another, similar Mexican study where no contamination was found. How well-founded the fear of conventional crop contamination by genetically modified crops is remains unclear, and valid points are made on both sides of the debate. Yet Prakash remains a standard bearer for meticulously tested genetic modification in agriculture, and maintains that opponents are reacting with an emotional fear rather than a wellsubstantiated ecological fear. He discussed his views during a

visit to India early this year to deliver lectures on biotechnology in various cities.

How are such studies, like the one in Mexico, done? One method uses marker genes, Prakash explains. For instance, a green fluorescent protein that can be very easily detected has been put into transgenic plants such as canola, which have high chances of crossing with distantly related strains. Scientists then measure the progeny of other non-transgenic crops, planted at various distances, tracking the marker gene to see how far it spreads.

Genetically modified (GM) crops cannot run amok, according to Prakash. These are not wild crops or water hyacinth but are domesticated crops completely dependent on man for survival.

Crop plants have been removed from the wild for about 10,000 years. Introduction of a single gene is very unlikely to make plants more aggressive and invasive. The risks of such invasiveness and gene flow are not unique to GM crops either, he says.

When any new variety of rice or wheat is introduced, the same issues occur, but questions are seldom raised.

The risk in a GM crop depends on the product and not necessarily the process. A self-pollinated crop does not have much pollen flow and there are no wild relatives. If a gene from a known source with a history of food consumption is used and the protein of the gene has clear data about Jack of toxicity and allerginicity, three to four years of test data are required. Cases where the crop is cross-pollinated and genes without much history of use as a food crop are used, then probably a lot more data needs to be generated. On an average, GM crops need five to eight years of rigorous testing before commercialization. India, however, does not have to do this testing, because Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton is being grown in about 10 countries, says Prakash. The United States Depatiment of Agriculture (USDA) has extensive data on its toxicity and all the food safety issues.

India still conducted tests because the environmental aspect is more location specific, says Prakash.

Currently most testing of GM crops consists of comparison of GM crops with the non-GM varieties-called "substantial equivalence." But opponents say that GM crops should be treated as new drugs with extensive testing and human trials before they enter markets. "What opponents are saying is completely rubbish," asserts Prakash. "How can a human trial with Bt cotton or Bt corn be started? Are you going to place somebody in a room and feed him with corn for 10 years?" He says such opponents have absolutely no knowledge of what the food safety issues are, and how testing has traditionally been done. Genetic engineering does not make anything more risky, he claims. A GM crop is developed with substantial scientific and streamlined knowledgewhat kind of gene is put in, its origin, what kind of protein it encodes, any properties of allergens, and toxic effects on animals. After all these are determined, "substantial equivalence" is studied with tests for proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates, oils and other nutrients and non-nutrients. If everything is the same in both the GM and non-GM varieties, then there is no risk.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), quoting reports from the World Health Organization, acknowledges that one

could potentially transfer a gene that codes for an allergen into a GM crop. "But why would anybody want to do that when we can have strong scientific methods to detect allergens like it happened in one case 10 years ago, where a brazilnut gene for an improved protein quality was put into soybean. Right in the preliminary testing it was detected to be an allergen. Now we have got substantial advancement of knowledge for detecting allergens. And no company would want to, even if there is a small doubt," he says.

The Starlink corn released in the U.S. by Aventis had one property of an allergen and it raised doubts. But Starlink was approved. The company, however, suffered $1 billion loss and had to recall it. "We are just making a mountain out of a molehill," says Prakash. The risks are less. On the positive side, by using this technology, scientists are developing hypoallergenic peanuts, wheat with an altered gluten (the dominant nutritional protein in wheat), so that people with celiac disease who cannot digest gluten can enjoy wheat, he says. Three agencies in the United States-Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and FDA-look after the safety aspects of GM crops.

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n labeling of GM products, Prakash suppOliS the current FDA regulation that GM products must be labeled if they are substantially different and if they use any gene sources from allergenic foods. "One does not label a product based on the process. Only if a corn variety is of higher protein content, if it has an altered oil quality, will it be labeled," he says.

There are clear guidelines on what can be labeled and also a method for voluntary labeling of products that are non-genetically modified. For those who don't admire GM food there is organic food, which does not contain any ingredient developed through biotechnology.

But Prakash thinks that if labeling is made mandatOlY, it stigmatizes the new food when it is no different. It is counterproductive and works against the development of this technology.

Labels serve two main purposes: they contain the nutrition information and they warn against presence of allergens. "Those who want labeling on biotech foods want to kill this technology," Prakash maintains.

There have been cases of planting of GM crops without the permission of the authorities in Europe, the United States, India and Brazil. Prakash does not approve of illegal planting because it brings down consumer confidence. Through extensive testing and approval by government agencies, GM products have generated a tremendous amount of confidence in the U.S. Complex regulation and red tape, like that in India over Bt cotton, could lead farmers eager to try it to importing and planting it illegally, says Prakash.

India's decision not to put GM crop testing data in the public domain has received flak from opposition groups. Prakash agrees that not all scientific data can be made public due to cetiain issues related to business practices and competition. Admitting that much of these data should be available, he says there is some proprietary information during testing. Companies do not want com-

3

Scientists at the University a/California Plant Gene Expression Center are the first in the world to report success in genetically-engineered barley, some a/which can resist attack by barley yellow dwmf virus.

petitors to know their secrets. Also people who are scientifically "not very literate" can take the data, twist it around and report it negatively. If somebody wants the data, it is not that difficult to obtain. Once a product is commercialized, all related regulatory infOlmation must be made public, he says.

Prakash feels that experts and not the public or activists should decide what is safe. Before any product is approved in the United States, there is an opportunity for public comment-notification is put on the Federal Register and people can oppose or give an opinion about the product. Environmental organizations do participate. There have been instances where companies have been asked to do further studies, and their applications rejected.

In the United States some environmental organizations are very actively involved. They do not oppose biotechnology but

they want greater scrutiny and more transparency. The system has benefited from their participation. Prakash feels decisions should not be made based on flawed data.

Consumer acceptance is important. In Europe and other places where there is opposition to GM crops, the consumer apprehension is based more on "perception of risk" rather than the reality.

"I am sure when consumers, even in Europe, start recognizing that U.S. and many other countries have been growing it, with farmers making profit, the environment getting cleaner, food products getting cheaper and better and there is absolutely no risk from the approved crops, then they will start seeing light at the end of the tunnel," says Prakash.

Resistance development is a factor in GM crops as it is with pesticides. It is a general cause of worry for seed companies.

Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (Mahyco), which has invested around $20 million in GM crops, does not want its cotton to go off the market within five years. The United States has been growing Bt cotton for the past seven years and not one single bollworm has adapted to it. It will adapt eventually but putting the "refuse area" concept, wherein Bt cotton has to grow in 80 percent of an area, has clearly worked even with Bt corn. "Just because a knife is going to become blunt after repeated use, you are not going to stop using a knife," avers Prakash.

But is the refuse area criteria suitable for Indian falmers most of whom have small holdings of less than one hectare? Prakash agrees that is a constraint, as enforcement of that rule is very difficult in India and farmers may not agree for fear of losses. Add to that the very heterogeneity of Indian system and the mosaic nature of cotton planting. Prakash thinks monitoring is needed for the first few years. It is the natural mosaic nature of cropping patterns that would itself provide a buffer.

What does he think about segregation of seeds and contamination? Segregation of GM and non-GM seeds is essential during transport. It is being done in the United States. If you are exporting food, it is a different story but the seeds have to be labeled so that one knows what is being planted. There will be some amount of contamination, and that is natural. Moreover, biotech seeds cost more so they have to make sure that these are segregated.

Europe once imported canola seeds from Canada which were planted. It was later found that about one percent of those seeds was GM. If you import white maize you will have one percent of yellow maize. There is no such thing as 100 percent gold. Even medicines, prepared under pure conditions, will have small amount of contamination, Prakash says.

C.S. Prakash started the AgBioworid community in early 2000, as there was no appropriate forum for objective and independent professionals and scientists to have a voice. He brings out a newsletter with a readership of about 5,000. The AgBioworld Web site, www.agbioworld.org, offers scientific papers, extensive information and referrals to experts with whom the media may interact. Initial funding was solely by Prakash. He has been actively involved in enhancing awareness of food biotechnology issues around the world, and serves on several government committees in the United States and India.

0

How I was swept up in the sound and the furious genius that was Charles first met Charles Mingus late one night in July 1964. I had gone down to the Five Spot, ajazz club in Lower Manhattan, because the producer of a film I was acting in had commissioned a jazz soundtrack from the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and my friend Sam Edwards, who was working on the film, suggested I check out the scene. I didn't know the first thing about jazz. Sam warned me I was not with it, especially for someone in New York, but added in his usual upbeat fashion that anyone could learn. Members of the cast had given me an Ornette Coleman album called "Something Else!" and I had listened over and over to a Miles Davis record called "Miles Ahead," because the director of the film had played it over and over in the apartment where we were shooting during the long intervals between takes. But that was, at that point, the extent of my baptism into the music.

Sam picked me up at my apartment on the Upper West Side, and we began that summer evening at the Village Gate, where the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie was performing. Around midnight, when Dizzy's set ended, we drove across town to the Five Spot to hear Mingus play his music and his bass. In those days, the Five Spot was one of the liveliest jazz hangouts in New York City. Jazz was peaking, and Mingus, who would have his breakthrough performance later that year, and Thelonious Monk could play at the same place for six months straight and keep people coming. It was a time, Sam explained, when Mingus was referred to in the press as jazz's angry man.

I had barely heard of Mingus, though echoes of his reputation had filtered down: the ornery, sometimes violent, of-

ten unjust blustery figure who fired his musicians onstage, hired them back, denounced the audience for inattention, picked fights, mastered his instrument, agitated for his political beliefs and created on-the-spot performances for all to see.

He was, people said, the essence of a 60s "happening. " After surveying the room, Sam pointed to someone at a distant table and said it was Mingus. I had already noticed the solitary individual who was eating alone at a table for four. His sleeves were rolled up, a steak bone was in his fist and his eyes were focused on the round plate offood before him, as intense and private as if he were a holy man meditating on his chakra. He looked as if he might lavish the same brooding intensity on everything he touched.

I liked him immediately. I liked his aloneness in the tumultuous room. An unselfconscious man, exposed and unimpressed, a man too concentrated within himselffor fear. My own life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners, and yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew, a relation in the family, some critical presence or weight like my father, looming beyond scale or size.

As I watched, Mingus rose from the table and shouldered his way through the crowd to the bar, where he called for a bottle of Bordeaux. I decided to ask him whether he had seen Ornette Coleman, the musician Sam and I were looking for, whose free style of playing was still causing disputes among jazz fans.

"You mean the calypso player?"

Mingus replied scornfully. He looked at me with curiosity. "You his old lady?" he asked.

"His mother?" I said. I hadn't the faintest notion what he meant.

Mingus laughed. "No, baby, I mean his woman, his lady."

"He's writing some music for a movie I'm in."

"You in a movie?" He seemed surprised. "With those teeth?"

Now I laughed. "It's an underground movie," I said. "They're not fussy."

"Isn't your daddy rich?" Mingus persisted. I looked sideways at Sam. He was sitting straight-backed and noncommittal, staring at himself in the mirror across the bar. I imagined he was waiting to see exactly how far down this communication failure was headed.

"I lived in Italy," I said. "The dentists aren't so great. I suppose it's not important. " It was time for the next set. The stage lights were on and he looked at me again.

Then he said one more time: "Still, if I was your daddy, I'd tlx your teeth!"

The week after I met Mingus, I drove down to the Five Spot by myself on a Thursday-or "listeners' night," as the musicians called it-when the room was less crowded. I sat at a table directly in front of the bandstand, where a waiter had placed me, wondering whether I should have asked for a seat less visible. I rarely went out by myself. I was glad when the waiter seated at my table someone named Ivan Black, a soft-spoken, pale, middle-aged man who introduced himself as a pub Iicity agent for another club. He was also a blackhistory scholar, he added modestly, moonlighting in the trenches of ew York nightlife. He seemed to possess a brainy reserve of uncommon facts, which he delivered to outsiders like me as well as to friends and musicians who sat around and

bought him drinks, listening to his accounts of centuries and civilizations that never made it to the classroom-not yet, at least.

But things were changing. It was 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, and a new politics was emerging.

Despite all the talk of change, Ivan went on, Mingus was unimpressed.

"Mingus can tell you a lot about life," Ivan laughed as the house lights dimmed, "if you catch him in the right mood."

In the middle of the set, as he had done throughout the evening, Ivan leaned over to explain something to me. This time, however, his words ran on too long. Mingus glowered from the stage. Simultaneously, within the density of the music, a growling bass solo emerged that featured such irate bowing, such dissonant slurs and scratches of protest, that we all snapped to attention.

The scratches continued, becoming almost deafening until, satisfied by their effect, Mingus modulated to a tender chorus of "She's Funny That Way." I ran into Mingus a few weeks later in Central Park, where we had both gone to see a production of Othello. When the play was over, he asked if I would have dinner with him at a steakhouse nearby.

We caught a cab. In the middle of our ride, Mingus changed his mind about dinner and said there was something important he needed to show me first. When we pulled up to Grand Central, he jumped out of the cab and swiftly led me downstairs, hurrying through the corridors until we reached a corner that echoed our voices along the wall. I waited on one end of the long wall while he spoke in a low whisper from the other side, unexpected words of tenderness that roared across the room, shy words oflove that slid along the grimy walls as distant and unreal as the graffiti they swept past. "I love you," he was saying. "I want you to be my woman." I laughed offhis words; I hardly knew him.

Still, I went on listening.

During the rest of the summer Mingus and I met for coffees or meals on the run in the middle of our separate lives. I was separated from my husband, Alberto Ungaro, an Italian sculptor, who despite our differences was my closest friend.

Charles kept moving from hotel to mar-

Sue Mingus became Charles Mingus' anchor in life and keeper of his legacy after his death in 1977. Thanks to her organizational prowess, the Mingus legend lives and his band plays on.

ried life and back, inventing his life, it seemed, from day to day. His personal life was still remote; despite his advances, we were still just friends. In mid-September, Mingus announced that he was heading out to the Monterey Jazz Festival in California. Along with other compositions he had written, he planned to present an extended work about integration that he called "Meditations on a Pair of

Wirecutters." We were sitting in a deli and he was bringing me up to date. "It's fully orchestrated," he said. As people around us were ordering breakfast, he ordered a high-protein array of meat and cheeses from the dinner menu. "Sometimes I call it 'Meditations on Integration' and sometimes 'Meditations on Inner Peace.' I mean, we'll be performing it with an expanded band. We'll rehearse it for three days out there. You know, in Europe we were only playing with a quintet."

I wasn't sure why the expanded band was special, but he was exuberant, and his high spirits were growing higher. He explained that the piece he had written had

become a hynm to injustice, that he had dedicated it to black Americans imprisoned behind electric barbed wire in the South.

"Where are they imprisoned?" I asked immediately. He took for granted that his assertions were self-evident. I was constantly catching up. Sometimes I only half believed him. It was hard to separate his excesses from his truths, although frequently they were the same. He said he had heard about the internments from his saxophonist, Eric Dolphy, before their final tour together. He said he couldn't get them out of his mind.

"They don't have ovens and gas faucets in this country yet," he said grimly as a waitress appeared with a hunk of Gorgonzola and two giant steaks. "But they have electric fences. So I wrote a prayer about some wire cutters. I wrote a prayer we'd find some scissors and get out!"

A week later, only moments after the conceIt was over in Monterey, he called me in New York from a phone backstage.

He said the crowd had roared its approval for five solid, unbelievable minutes while he paced back and forth across the raised platform ofthe band shell, his leather sandals flapping against his bare feet while the crowd stood up and screamed. He said he never even looked; he was too scared.

At rehearsal, he had told his trumpet player, Lonnie Hillyer, that the music was a prayer and that he, Lonnie, was the preacher. "I told him it's like when disorganization comes in and you've got to straighten it out," he said. "I told him it's like a minister in church or like a Jewish rabbi. Everybody's shouting at you.

You've got to chant and put them back into condition."

He was on a roll. He said he had been playing to God and that he felt close to death. The next day, I read about it in the press. "I felt pains in my chest," he had told a reporter. "I felt them once before and it scared me. This time it didn't matter. I said, 'To hell with it, I'll go on playing what I'm playing even if! die.'"

By the end of the week, Time magazine had ranked him among the greatest composers injazz. At the end of his concert, the reporter raved, "5,000 jazz cats rose in a thunderous ovation that they had not ac-

corded Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, or even Thelonious Monk." Another paper compared his bowing with Pablo Casals' and his compositions to Debussy's. The New York Herald Tribune wrote that he had erased the memory of any other bass player in jazz. Mingus told someone else that he was playing to love and to the spirit. When he came home, he said he was playing to me. I didn't really believe him. I didn't understand the size of his feelings-for me or anything else. I wasn't ready to fall in love.

I wasn't ready at all.

It hardly mattered. He paid no attention.

He was bursting with ideas, shouting them over the phone, declaring it was time to start his own record company, listing the crimes of every major label he had had the misfOliune to sign with. He described how they favored white musicians, how they withheld royalties. When I mentioned I had been looking for a job, he told me to help him organize a small mail-order record club that would offer Mingus at Monterey to the public. He said that Frank Sinatra's office had called and wanted to release the music but that he had decided to do it on his own.

"It's the only way," he shouted happily before hanging up the phone, "to get an honest count!" At the recording studio where he mastered the tapes and where I accompanied him, already hooked on a dozen plans for the future, he included three full minutes of applause. Someone talked him out of the remaining two.

Within two months, Charles Mingus Enterprises had set up business, the two of us plus a post-office address, one studio and some cafes. He wrote his own liner notes and included passages from his autobiography, then unpublished. ne afternoon after work, we sprawled on someone's tar roof in Greenwich Village as he improvised verbally on the Manhattan skyline.

From his bottomless briefcase, he brought out a bottle of wine, set two paper cups on a ledge and began to expound on his life's book, Beneath the Underdog. "I received a big advance for it-$25,000 from

McGraw-Hill. But a senior editor, a guy who was about 6-foot-5, called it the dirtiest book he'd ever read and refused to publish it. The worst part was I wrote the truth about powerful people and their names were still in the book when it was passed allover town. lt went to Esquire and everywhere else. When I heard that, I almost went crazy." He uncorked the bottle of wine, tasted it and poured a second cup. Then he continued his StOlY.He said there were people who wanted him killed. He had dreamed he was gunned down in a club.

"See that?" he cried out suddenly, swinging his head uptown as if someone were already stalking him across the tar. I turned around swiftly, but no one was on the roof. Instead, he was staring at the Empire State Building, whose familiar spire loomed above Fifth Avenue.

"What are you looking at?" I asked nervously.

"It's not a spire, you dig!" he laughed.

"It's a hypodermic needle infecting the sky." He examined the Empire State Building as if it had just landed on the horizon and told me he had written a gospel tune for the junkies of the world, advising them to get a spiritual hit in their lives, not in their arms. He said he had called it "Better Get a Hit in Your Soul."

He put his arm around me and recounted a recent visit to Colwnbia Records, where he had gone up on the elevator carrying a shotgun, intent on demanding his royalties.

He was dressed in a safari suit and helmet for the occasion, which he had charged at Abercrombie & Fitch that afternoon. His royalties were brought right up to date. He recalled another appointment at Bethlehem Records, where he had gone to negotiate a contract. He had taken along his drummer, Dannie Richmond, who pulled out a knife on cue, stared at the company executive and then casually cleaned his nails. Mingus called it "creative anger." It got results.

Nothing had prepared me for Charles, an artist for whom music was life itself, for whom everything he lived, all that he was, found its way into composition. The music that he wrote and played for the world outside was as personal as his love letters, as urgent as the messages he scribbled inside his books and Bibles or left on (Continued on page 58)

ompiling an anthology of one's 10 favorite musicians and their recordings is a daunting task.

You are forced to leave out many musicians you have admired and whose music you have enjoyed. However, for me it would be impossible to omit Lionel Hampton, who died at the age of 94 on August 31 in a New York hospital.

Hampton was truly a veteran jazz musician with a natural talent for showmanship.

He spanned several musical eras and styles. He was a mentor to future jazz greats including Quincy Jones, Charlie Parker, Charlie Mingus, Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon, Earl Bostic, Fats Navarro, Joe Williams, Wes Montgomerry, Aretha Franklin and Dinah Washington, whom he showcased in his band.

Lionel grasped the rudiments of music from a Dominican nun at a Wisconsin boarding school where he was placed after his father was killed in World War 1.

Those were hard days. He later had to work as a newspaper seller to pay for his

tuition at school in Chicago, where he joined the Newsboys Band. In his late teens he became a professional musician in Chicago, playing piano, vibraphone and drums.

Hampton's unique contribution to jazz was the introduction of the vibraphone as a jazz instrument. He played the vibraphone, which has metal keys that are hit with soft mallets that produce vibrating tones, with lightning swiftness and harmonic and melodic simplicity. One of his early recordings was Hot Mallets in 1939 which begins with an excellent mute trumpet solo

by Dizzy Gillespie followed by a rousing tenor sax chorus by Chu Berry. This tune is a must in my anthology.

Hampton also excelled at the piano.

His recording of Twelfth Street Rag with his two finger piano playing is a classic.

He has also a few drum solos to his credit, an instrument which he played with a fierce daring rhythm.

In the 1930s racial prejudice against the blacks was pervasive. Integrated groups

Jazz musician Lionel Hampton, who died in August, pel/orms on the vibraphone at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1978.

Last year he donated his vibraphone to the Smithsonian:S National Museum of American History in Washington, D. C.

were not accepted for bookings in American music halls. Black musicians had trouble finding accommodations in most cities. White and black musicians could not enter the hotel together through the same doors.

1936 was a crucial year for Hampton.

Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, was then on tour in California. He came to listen to one of Hampton's sets at the Paradise Cafe. After the interval Goodman joined in a jam session, which continued well into the early hours. The following night Goodman brought along his black pianist Teddy Wilson and the drummer Gene Krupa. A contract was signed with Hampton and the Benny Goodman Quartet was born.

Hampton's partnership with Benny

Goodman broke new ground musically and racially. It had deep symbolic significance and promoted racial integration in music. Hampton said later, "I didn't recognize that it was a social advancement, but it was the first time blacks and whites ever played together out in public."

The next four years were the most creative of Hampton's musical life. As a member of Goodman's quartet, quintent and sextet, he took part in some of the most stimulating jazz recordings. The musicians achieved a remarkable degree of empathy and understanding. One of the most moving recordings is Moonglow, my perennial favorite.

In 1940 Hampton formed his own big band. He was an extraordinary band leader and displayed inexhaustible energy on the stage. The band's fast driving style made it vastly popular.

In his first big band, Hampton gave star status to Illinois Jacquet, a young tenor saxophonist who specialized in wild upper register screams. Illinois gave Hampton a hit record with his playing on the 1942 version of Flying Home. His 64 bar tenor solo became a classic and an integral part of the tune. No Hampton performance was complete without Flying Home, the succession of "hot" tenor-sax solos and the audience howling for Flying Home, one more time.

Legend has it that officials of a Connecticut town sent police into a theater to ensure that the Hampton band did not play Flying Home because the leaping and stomping of feet that had accompanied an earlier show had seriously threatened to bring down the house by collapse of the mezzanine balcony.

Hampton also featured in movies.

Apart from a multitude of shorts, he appeared in Pennies From Heaven (1936) with Louis Armstrong, Hollywood Hotel (1937) and, of course, in The Benny Goodman Story (1955).

Although music was Hampton's lifelong passion, politics, too, was of interest to him. President Harry Truman, a Democrat, was a fan and got Hampton to play at his presidential inauguration.

Hampton's sympathies were with the Republicans because they helped blacks "without ballyhoo." His orchestra played

at a number of gala concelis at the White House. He helped to raise suppOli for Nixon's congressional and presidential campaigns and played fundraisers at the home of Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush.

His political sympathies did not come in the way of his performing with the tenor-sax-playing Democratic President Bill Clinton, who presented him with the National Medal of the Arts.

Hampton had various business interests, guided by his wife Gladys until her death in 1971. He poured money into philanthropic projects, played a major role in setting up a $13-million apartment complex in Harlem for low-income families.

He also contributed to various university scholarships.

I met him briefly in the summer of

Lionel Hampton (extreme right) and President Clinton play music together in the East Room of the White House during a celebration in honor of Hampton's 90th birthday in 1998.

Vet Harris drives a horse-drawn hearse as he leads a funeral procession for Hampton on New York's Upper West Side in September.

Several hundred people joined in the New Orleans' style street procession to honor the 94-year-old showman and bandleader.

1982 in New York at the backstage of Carnegie Hall when Goodman introduced me to him as the Indian lawyer clarinetist.

Hamp responded with his characteristic big grin, "You guys dig jazz in India.

That's great!"

Hampton received several accolades and awards which included a Papal Medal and a certificate by President Eisenhower naming Hampton a goodwill ambassador from the United States to the rest of the world. A road in Berlin named after him is called Hamptonstrasse.

On his death President Bush rightly described him as "an American music legend and will be sorely missed."

D About the Author: Soli 1. Sorabjee is the Attorney General o/India. He is the president of Capital Jazz, a Delhi-based society that promotes jazz.

My Mingus

continuedj-ompage55

his answering machine at home. He once told his friend Nesuhi Ertegun, the record producer, that he was trying to play the truth of what he was.

"The reason it's difficult," he said, "is because I'm changing all the time."

He wasn't writing out music on paper when I met him. He said he didn't like "pencil composers." He wanted his musicians to communicate the freshness of composing on the spot. He changed his composing techniques according to the players in his band, adapting to their strengths as readers or as improvisers, writing more complex parts for those who read easily, shouting out the lines vocally for those who did not. Real life lapped around and folded into the music with ease. As an artist, he was in charge.

Real life off the page was another stOlY. One night at the Village Gate, in the spring of 1965, his band burst on stage like an explosion. Charles wandered across the platform like a man possessed, breathing down the necks of his musicians, shrieking orders, goading his men until they expressed the visions in his head. He shouted to his drummer, insulted his piano player, roared like a locomotive off its tracks-the huge angry shout of an original, contrary voice that would not be stopped. He tromped around the stage, his force and energy and fury and passion bringing the audience to its feet.

Afterward, on his way to the dressing room, he knocked over a slew of chairs.

Soon we were arguing about his drinking.

"I'm not drunk, baby ... .! didn't knock over all those chairs; they fell over 'cause I'm a big man."

"Go ahead," I said. "Destroy everything. Your job. Other people's acts on stage. Your musicians. Go ahead."

"I know what I'm doing," he replied. "I can play bass hanging from the ceiling.

Up there onstage, I know what I'm doing.

I ain't destroyin' nothin'. Ijust had something to drink and I'm drunk, so what?

Order me another margarita."

There were times when I wished I could have plunked down my money at the door, heard the extraordinary music, witnessed the prodigious event that was Charles and drifted onto the street, a free woman. But I

was caught in his struggle now, no longer outside, trapped in the middle of his vast appetites and imagination, his sexuality, his angry intelligence, his nonsense and his pain.

Mingus went back for a second set that night, and it was fantastic. He wandered around the stage, eyeing people in the audience, playing his "catching and throwing" game with himself or with some other self he had got around, insulted the trombone player, shouted at Dannie and blew everyone away. They were onto something, all ofthem, as he roared across the stage, whipping his musicians together, the familiar intensity and fury exploding full force. At the end of the set, he chased his piano player off the stage, shouting with disbelief: "Ain't that a bitch? I wrote the music, and he's telling me it's wrong!"

One day, Charles took me to meet his former therapist, Edmund Pollock. It was part of a continuing rendezvous with his past that he was determined to share. Like it or not, lovers, girl-friends, wives and I were thrown together in an ongoing stew.

He needed to spill out his flaws, his friendships, his secrets, which were never secrets for long.

At the time of his sessions a few years before, he had invited Pollock to write liner notes for an album he was recording called "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady." It was a unique request, asking your analyst to comment on your music.

As people said at the time, it was typically Mingus. He wanted the public to know how Pollock saw him. (No guarantee, of course, that a month later he might not be somebody else.) Around that time, he had spent several days inside Bellevue Hospital, where he had talked himself in one evening, despite warnings from the night guard that "inside" was not exactly a hotel. He had explained to the guard that he was an insomniac exhausted with ew York and needed some sleep.

Personally, he believed that if he spent time in a mental institution, he could obtain "crazy papers," as he called them, documents that would invalidate a contract a Mafia promoter had induced him to sign.

Once inside Bellevue, however, he quickly found himself a prisoner in a ward. He was unceremoniously yanked from bed at dawn, terrifYingly at risk of a lobotomy and dreadfully aware of his mistake. After a few days, he miraculously succeeded in calling his friend Nat Hentoff, who was able to help secure his release. Later, he recorded a composition based on the chord changes to the classic tune "All the Things You Are" and retitled it "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother."

With a mischievous smile, he would repeat the title from the bandstand. Slow.

Then fast. Then slow. Making sure the audience got it right.

Pollock was grave and cordial when we met, as uncertain as I was about why we had been brought together. Perhaps Charles had some sort of validation in mind. I think he wanted Pollock to serve as a witness to who he once was. Or perhaps to all the things he still could be.

Eight years after we met, we finally moved in together, Charles as tranquil at home, composing at the piano, as he had been combative in the world outside. We married in 1975, not knowing our time together would be cut short. Two years later, the day before Thanksgiving, we found out he had Lou Gehrig's disease and had only months to live. He had just performed what would turn out to be his last concert in Phoenix, Arizona, the state where he was born.

Now, more than two decades after I scattered his ashes in the Ganges, I am at the center of his legacy in a role I could scarcely have imagined-publishing music, producing concerts of his music, founding repertory bands devoted to his work-immersed in his sound and sometimes his fury, hiring and firing musicians, sometimes storming the stage. I suspect Charles, with his mischief and prescience, knew I would be here.

D About the Author: Sue Graham Mingus, widow of legendmy jazz composer Charles Mingus, is the author of Tonight at Noon: A Love Story, published by Pantheon Books in April this yem: This article is adapted from that book, which describes their life together from 1964 to his death in 1979.

iJJ lJJ lJlJJJJ Ramesh Hariharan

Algorithms for Life e's a faculty member at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (nsc), Bangalore, visiting professor at Max Planck Institute in Saarbrucken, Germany, King's College, London and Hong Kong University, and co-founder of Strand Genomics, a private company focused on bioinformatics. Think the workload is too much? Not for Ramesh Hariharan, 31, who was recently nominated as one of the hundred best young innovators

by Technology Review magazine.

Son of a civil engineer, Hariharan was born and brought up in Delhi.

He did his B.Tech in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and received his Ph.D from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University in 1993.

Hariharan, known for his work on genomic sequence analysis, especially repetitive sequences in genes, teamed up with three nsc colleagues-Vijay Chandru, Swami Manohar and V. Vinay-to start Strand Genomics in 2000. It was a bold initiative. The company now is a leading provider of customized high-end software products and solutions to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. Hariharan is currently on leave from nsc to focus on his other assignment as chief technology officer of Strand, an nsc spin-off.

"The success of our technology on high dimensional data sets for several customers across several verticals including microarrays and clinical data, has resulted from the efforts of Ramesh and his team and we are very

H

pleased with the honor given to him," DNA, allow researchers to observe says Strand Genomics CEO Srinivasan the response of whole genomes to Seshadri. Translated, that means the various stimuli instead of one gene software helps interpret tiny bits of at a time. Hariharan, who aspires to genetic information to form a clear piccultivate interesting ideas that can have ture of how genes work. an impact on society, would like to In biology, the structure and funcsee Strand Genomics become a living tion of only about 10,000 proteins are example of how research and industry known out of a total of about 80,000. can be synergised.

The primary focus of Strand is to [md Hariharan is also a core member of out the structure and function of the the team which developed Simputer, a rest of the proteins. Its strength lies in low cost simple computer which has a its unique software that enables one to touch-sensitive liquid crystal display visualize computational data, which (LCD) screen, a speaker, a microphone are otherwise chaotic and are difficult and a stylus to touch and drag icons. to interpret.

Rural users can surf the Net using a Strand's business model is a combiSimputer. Its text-to-speech feature nation of a high-end service provider enables the user to listen to the contents and innovator. It is building a suite of in Kannada, Hindi or Tamil. The ecoproducts called "Oyster" to improve nomically-priced Simputer is meant the result of drug discovery to provide free software processes. Strand's prodâ&#x20AC;˘ access and encourage open ucts have been tested in source software code iniseveral big pharmaceutical tiatives. and biotech companies in "Algorithms for Life," the United States and the slogan for Strand Europe. Pharma companies Geonomics, aptly desbank on Strand's acumen to cribes Hariharan's path 4...;>'-' '-',-" â&#x20AC;˘ discover new drugs.

--''so far. His work on comApart from having a milputer algorithms, seqlion dollar research contract, --T,-h-e-S-i-mp-ut-er uence analysis, computaStrand has also attracted $2.5 million tional biology and geometry earned from American venture capitalists. him the prestigious Association for Strand Genomics now collaborates with Computing Machinery Machtey Prize Genomics USA, Inc., a Chicago-based in 1994. He also bagged the 2001 company, for software development.

Indian National Science Academy "This collaboration brings together Medal for Young Scientists. His assoGenomics USA's extensive hands-on ciation with foreign universities is priexperience on microarray design and marily for collaborative research. usage with the advanced computational Miles to go still, says the man who skills at Strand," says Hariharan. defines success as "just doing a job Microarrays, or multiple spots of -K. Muthukumar well."

Some say it's too big a job, but scientists would sure like to try

By PAUL BECK

M

ore than half of America's electricity comes from coal-and coal is dirty stuff, contributing mightily to smog, acid rain, and climate change. Can it be cleaned up? The U.S. government says yes: President Bush has pledged $2 billion for his Clean Coal Power Initiative. But environmentalists scoff at the idea.

"The term 'clean coal' is like 'safe cigarettes,'" says David Hawkins of the National Resources Defense Council.

"There's no such thing." Available technologies do little to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, critics say, and these emissions are a major contributor to climate change. What's more, coal has to be mined (often by tearing up irreplaceable ecosystems) and transpolied, producing substantial emissions before it's even burned.

So who's right? Both sides are. The government is not wrong to seek ways of making coal cleaner and more efficient, but it won't be easy. According to

a senior official at the Department of Energy, the best hope may be the Zero Emission Coal Alliance (ZECA), a program started at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. ZECA's goal is a coal power plant that produces no emissions at all. The plant would extract hydrogen from coal and water, and then use the gas to power a fuel cell.

The ZECA plant is simple and elegant, recycling nearly all waste products and heat. Coal, water, and lime (calcium oxide) combine in two chemical reactions to produce hydrogen, limestone (calcium carbonate), and waste ash. Hydrogen powers fuel cells, which produce electricity, water, and heat. The water goes back into the coal gasification process, while the heat drives a chemical reaction that separates the limestone into lime and pure CO2, The lime then goes back into the process, and only the CO2 is left.

Finally, the CO2 combines with powdered soapstone to produce magnesium

carbonate, an inert, stable mineral that can be safely disposed of.

ZECA claims its plant could produce electricity with an efficiency of70 percent, compared to an average efficiency of about 34 percent at current coal power plants (though designers say the necessary fuel cell technology is still at least five years away). That would be twice the energy for the same amount of coal. With a quarter of the world's coal reserves in North America, such a process could keep us in electricity for a very long time.

It's not a perfect solution-a renewable energy source would be far superior. But for now, says Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University and a co-inventor of the ZECA technology, "The world is energy starved. We would be foolish to remove our biggest player."

D About the Author: Paul Beck is aJi'eelance writer who contributes to Popular Science.

each in H

oW are we interconnected? How is the welfare of the whole affected by the welfare of the individual? What if people couldn't speak freely? What if people couldn't share?

These are but a few of the questions posed by educator Stacey Coates during the "Teaching Tolerance Through Drama" workshops she conducted with teachers and students at several venues in India, including the Gurgaon center of Delhi-based Sanskriti Foundation and at Lawrence School in Sanawar, Himachal Pradesh. She combines physical exercises with mental gymnastics and role playing to explore ways of interacting in diverse groups.

"Each ofthe pictures within us, these collected ideas, are so unique that we can't say that ours is better than anyone else's," she says.

She calls non-verbal, verbal or emotional behavior calculated to isolate or invalidate another person "pouring paint," words or deeds that make another person feel small. She believes there are better ways to effectively interact and express opinions and demonstrates them in her workshops.

Raised by a mother who participated in the Civil Rights Movement alongside Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the importance of tolerance was inculcated at an early age. Eventually Coates merged her strong background in teaching the dramatic arts with her commitment to tolerance amid diversity. She developed specialized workshops for teaching tolerance. She also teaches the use of drama to enhance the learning process in schools. Stacey Coates is a presenter of nationally touring arts education teacher workshops at the John F. Kennedy School of Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. D

Clockwise Fom left路路 Stacy Coates, all smiles at her October "Teaching Tolerance" workshop at Sanskriti Kendra in Gurgaon; Coates in conversation with Sanskriti founder OP Jain; a workshop member gets the tap to act out in a roleplaying exercise conducted at Lawrence Schoo!'

Sanawar: Sanskriti workshop participants amused at their teacher :~ lively histrionics: tea break at Sanskriti al101rs a