SPAN: September/October 2003

SeptembedOctober

2003

SPAN MCA: Millennium Challenge Account

By Pram it Pal Chaudhuri

Publisher Michael

H. Anderson

Editor-in-Chief

A Virtual Primary

David Kennedy

Democrats MoveOn

By Lea Terhune

Editor Lea Terhune

America's Passionfor Baseball

Associate Editor

By Stephen Holgate

A. Venkata Narayana

Indians Ploy (Base)8all

Hindi Editor Govind

Singh

By Jyoti Sharma

Urdu Editor Anjum Naim

Copy Editor Dipesh

K. Satapathy

Editorial Assistant K. Muthul'Ul1ur

Madurai on My Mind

By Saleem Peeradina

The English Teacher An Interview with Paul Linder Love

by Nachammai Raman

Art Director Hemam

Bharnagar

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Business Manager R. Narayan

Sabu: The Elephant Boy

By Daniel B. Haber

What Is Nature Worth?

Part II

By Edward 0. Wilson

Where the Wild Things Are Text by John FRoss Photographs by John and Karen Hollingsworth

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Wind Power for Pennies

By Peter Fairley

Front cover: New York Yankees' Derek Jeter follows through on his home run in the sixth inning durin'g the first game of the American League Division Series against the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium in New York on September 30, 1997. The Yankees beat the Indians 8-6. AP photograph

by Kathy Willens. See story on page 10.

On the Lighter Side Escape from Corporate America

By Laurel Delaney

Pluto or Bust

Note: SPA does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does no! assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 1I000J (phone: 23316841), 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 No part of this magazine U.S. Government. may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

By Charles W Petit

Published

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

The Healing Paradox

By Abraham Verghese

Trash Talker

By Steve Kemper

Consular Focus New Rules for U.S. Visa

A LETTER

FROM

robably no sport has the same sentimental associations for Arnericans that baseball has. Boys and girls begin playing at a tender age, and go on to be lifelong fans even after they leave the baseball diamond behind to begin careers and families. Our cover story 'J\merica's Passion for Baseball," by Stephen Holgate, pays homage to the sport. And "Indians Play (Base)Ball," by Jyoti Sharma tells the unexpected story of baseball sluggers in the cricket heartland of India.

Play isn't everything, however, and Pramit Pal Chaudhuri turns to serious issues in his article "MCA: Millennium Challenge Account," about a new U.S. aid policy for developing countries which links grants to good governance.

Challengers for the 2004 U.S. presidential election are lining up, and MoveOn.org has already tested the political waters with the first ever Internet primary. Voters were encouraged to choose the Democratic candidate of their choice. See the results in ''A Virtual Primary: Democrats MoveOn,"

by Lea Terhune.

Tamil Nadu is the scene of poet Saleem Peeradina's reflections, "Madurai on My Mind," written after his residency at the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation (SCILET) at American College, Madurai. SCILET was founded by Paul Linder Love, an An1erican who came to India in the 1950s and never looked back. He is still there, and was interviewed by Nachammai Raman.

In the 1930s 14-year-old Sabu Dastagir, later known Simply as "Sabu," became one of the hottest child stars in America after his first film Elephant B!?y hit the theaters. He was the first Indian to become a Hollywood star. To mark the 40th anniversary of his death, Daniel Haber traces his short but memorable career in "Sabu: The

P

THE

PUBLISHER

Elephant Boy." And A. Venkata Narayana ""rites about Bollywood films that are packing theaters in the U.S. in "Indian Films Win New Hearts."

One hundred years ago President Theodore Roosevelt started what would become one of the world's most successful experiments in conservation by creating Pelican Island Reservation in Florida. It was the beginning of the vast National Wildlife Refuge System, which extends across the United States. "Where the Wild Things Are," by John F. Ross, vividly portrays these sanctuaries through photos by John and Karen Hollingsworth.

Staying with the environment, "Trash Talker,"

by Steve Kemper, tells the story of one man's successful battle to clean up the Mississippi River.

"What Is Nature Worth?" Part II, concludes Edward O. Wilson's essay on the importance of preserving biodiversity and how science and nature complement each other. Bridging the gap between the environment and business, "Wind Power for Pennies," by Peter Fairley, examines the new, lightweight turbines that are being developed by private sector companies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men and have a significant presence in both traditional and e-businesses. "Escape from Corporate America," by Laurel Delaney, focuses on women who are gaining not only independence but financial success as entrepreneurs.

Rounding out the issue are Abraham Verghese's observations on the essence of medicine in "The Healing Paradox," and Charles Petit's "Pluto or Bust," where he discusses the planet Pluto, target of NASA's New Horizons program.

We wish you good reading.

HELPING THOSE

WHO HELP THEMSELVES

oreign aid is generally a source ofbipartisan political cynicism in the United States. Which is why there were a few raised eyebrows when President George W. Bush, in a speech at Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, called for "a new compact for development defined by greater accountability for rich and poor nations alike."

The Bush Administration has since begun putting flesh on those rhetorical bones. When it

F

comes to ideas, the most remarkable is the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Bush has described the MCA as "an entirely new approach to development aid" and floated the draft legislation earlier this year.

The MCA is part of a broader decision by the U.S. government to rejuvenate U.S. foreign assistance, a revival which has included pledging billions of dollars to fight HIY/ AIDS. As U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Andrew Natsios told a U.S. congressional committee in March: "We need to see the MCA as only one piece of an unprecedented and concetied commitment of President Bush to increase and improve the effectiveness of foreign assistance."

U.S. government officials have laid out plans to "dramatically" increase the country's foreign assistance budget from $7.7 billion in 2001 to $11.29 billion in the next few years. Much of this increase is committed to the MCAs. This calculated policy of increasing U.S. foreign aid expenditure was part of an acceptance, following the terrorist attack of September 11, that development was an essential part of U.S.

target set by Washington they will only constitute 10 percent of the $50 billion presently given in overseas development by all donors worldwide. But aid pales in comparison to the $200 billion the developing countries earn from foreign investment; the $2 trillion in goods and services they earn through trade; and, by one estimate, the $7 trillion in goods, services and savings the peoples of the Third World produce and set aside at home.

Second, the real goal of foreign assistance is to help a developing country tap these much larger and more significant sources of money. The answer, the international aid community has concluded, is to reward countries that pursue good governance and growth-oriented economics.

As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs E. Anthony Wayne noted in an article in March this year, "research evidence shows that where good governance and sound economic policies are in place, each dollar of foreign aid invested attracts two dollars of private investment."

Wayne wrote that MCA embodied the following lesson of foreign aid: "It affirms that economic growth is key to development

he MeA has generally been praised by development experts for its transparent process from start to finish.

It provides a breath of fresh air in the way the aid business has been conducted for the last 40 years. national security. As was stated in the sweeping U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) document of September 2002, development, along with defense and diplomacy, is one of the "three vital pillars" of U.S. security.

The decision to launch the MCAs followed months of careful interagency brainstorming among the U.S. State and Treasury Depatiments and USAID. What was more crucial was that Washington carefully drew on the experiences-successes and mistakes-of decades offoreign assistance and decided, as one U.S. official said, "to organize and run the MCA in a whole new way."

What places the MCA apart from the rest?

One tangible difference will be organizational. Under the present plan, the accounts will be managed by a streamlined Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with less than 100 employees. The corporation will be overseen by a cabinet level review board and chaired by the U.S. Secretary of State.

But the real difference will be the philosophy undergirding the MCAs, a new thinking derived from the lessons learnt from nearly a half-century of overseas development experience.

First, it was recognized that in the post-Cold War world foreign aid constitutes a small pOliion of the capital available to developing countries. When MCAs reach the $5 billion future allocation

and targets assistance at those countries that have adopted the governance, health, education and economic policies that enable growth. In this way, MCA increases the odds of spur ring successful development and, at the same time, encourages more countries to adopt growth enabling policies."

A seminal World Bank study on foreign assistance, Assessing Aid, made a similar argument. Give money to a government uninterested in reform, it won't be spent wisely, no matter how much money one gives. But give even small amounts to a govermllent with sound policies, you can expect green shoots at the grassroots.

The new way of foreign aid today is help those who want to help themselves. The MCA is designed, said one Republican Party think tank study, to "put an arrow in the quiver of the reformers."

It also corrects an anomaly in past aid-giving. As Assessing Aid pointed out, foreign assistance only works in countries that follow good policies but such countries have until now tended to get less aid than their wasteful brethren.

Third, the history of foreign assistance shows that donor countries find it hard to resist attaching political strings to the aid they provide. The result is a diffusion of the purpose of the aid and a red tape jungle that strangles the program.

The MCA attempts to inununize itself against this problem by securing a clear cut legislative mandate and, most importantly, transparency and clarity in its function. "One of the central principles of the MCA is that it be a transparent process from start to finish," explained Natsios recently.

One source of transparency wi II be an automatic, public and objective selection criteria. To get MCA funding, countries will have to score above the median in at least half of 16 statistical categories. Two indicators, one on corruption and another on inflation, would be absolute figures. These indicators are derived from diverse sources including think tanks, the World Bank, Wall Street and academic surveys. Pass Go and collect millions of dollars.

The MCA's insistence that a recipient country meet such criteria before it qualifies for money, says Georgetown University'S Carol Lancaster, is in itself unusual. Traditionally, aid programs have only required that some reforms be enacted initially. But as Undersecretary of State for Economics, Business and Agriculture Alan Larson explained, "the MCA requires the integrity of objec-

tive eligibility criteria."

As mentioned already, one absolute criterion is corruption.

U.S. officials have said: "Countries that score high on corruption will be considered guilty until proven otherwise." And if a country fails to meet the corruption median, it will be automatically disqualified from the MCA no matter how well it does on other yardsticks. It has been widely repolied that this hard line on corruption was taken at Bush's personal initiative.

The second source of transparency is that the purpose and manner in which the money will be doled out will be spelt out in a three-year contract between the MCC and the recipient. The contract itself will be a product of public debate in the latter's country. Finally, as a U.S. official explained, results would be "integrated and measured from beginning to end." The contracts will be posted on the Internet for all to see. The idea: Reduce political discretion to the lowest possible level and give public oversight the largest possible window.

Finally, the MCA will also let the aid recipient lead the dance, adopting a basic tenet that aid agencies now generally acceptgiving goes better if it is demand-driven. In other words, having made it past the selection hurdle, the recipient country should be the one to come up with the proposals on how to spend the money. The MCA envisages local non-governmental organiza-

tions, government agencies and members of civil society to come up with competing project proposals requiring funding. This is known in aid circles as the "foundation approach," but comes down to giving the people what they want.

A number of studies have concluded that rather than forcing countries to accept refolms for which there is no domestic suppOli-such as the hated "conditionalities" that went with World Bank and IMF structural adjustment loans-the MCC would stick to funding countries inclined toward reform already.

As Larson told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March this year, the MCA program "recognizes that development must primarily come from within, not conferred from outside."

The MCA has generally been praised by development expelis.

One set of corrective proposals prefaced its comments by calling the MCA as "overall. .. a breath of fresh air in the way the aid business has been conducted for the last 40 years."

There has been criticism, but despite the radical nature of the program, most of this has been about the nuts and bolts rather than the overarching idea behind the MCA. The MCA rightly deserves scrutiny. As one U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal, "There is no model for what we are about to do."

Criticism of the MCA has been in four broad areas. One has been concern regarding the 16-category selection criteria.

Academics Steve Radelet and Sheila Herrling from Center for Global Development have pointed out that the use of median scores would cause problems as the entry of new, eligible nations into the MCA fold would mean a qualifying bar that changes each year. They urged that as the MCA found its feet it gradually switch to absolute scores as exist for corruption and inflation.

U.S. officials say MCA contracts, once signed, will run for three years irrespective of any changes in the median. Another concern is the soundness of the various indices. Can the welfare of entire countries be dependent on numbers derived from sources as various as magazines and academics?

The Freedom House index of political freedom, for example, is often cited as too subjective because each country's final score is voted by the think tank's board members. The Heritage FoundationlWSJ trade policy index is also seen as flawed. Other indices simply don't cover enough countries. "Many of the indicators are based on survey data .... Survey results are always estimated with margins of error," warns another analysis of the MCA, and such margins are sufficient to disqualify a country of its MCA funds.

Fine-tuning the indices is one of the challenges that U.S. officials say they are working on. The second area is skepticism as to whether MCA monies can remain politics-free. Analysts point to the fate of the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act which is today festooned with 33 different goals and 75 priority areas because of a stream of political amendments.

A number of aid specialists have said the MCA, which is supposed to keep widening the basic per capita income criteria to bring more countries into its bag each year, should avoid having to deal with countries like Colombia or Egypt-both countries

MCA criteria to fai led states "that need where the U.S. has a large security stake post-conflict transition or humanitarian that could run into confl ict with the assistance," and finally countries which MCA's strict economic criteria. the United States assists for strategic A third set of warnings have come from Control of corruption reasons. aid specialists who fear the Bush AdminiRule of law As Larson argued, MCA "must complestration may be expecting too much, too Voice Accountability quickly from the MCA. U.S. officials told ment, not replace current assistance." But Civil liberties the Wall Street Journal that the administraNatsios admits that responsible goverPolitical rights nance is such a force multiplier when it tion's goal was to "turbo-charge" the ecoINVESTMENT IN PEOPLE comes to aid-giving that it "must infuse nomic performance of "the best run and CATEGORIES all our development efforts-not just the most promising of the world's poorest Immunization rates MCA." The MCA, he says, "will serve as countries. " Primary school completion rates a model for all our assistance programs."

Economists warn that countries cannot Public primary education In many ways, the MCA is about puttbe jump-statied in prosperity. At best they spending as percentage of GDP Public expenditure on health as ing back the sheen on the entire concept crawl into wealth. Radelet wrote in an percentage of GDP of foreign aid. The Western nations assessment of the MCA, "Development have given, by some estimates, nearly $1 takes time, even under the best of circumECONOMIC FREEDOM CATEGORIES trillion in overseas assistance but their stances." taxpayers are hard put to see what the He provides an example in Ghana, one Country credit ratings Inflation tangible gains have been. It doesn't of Africa's most reform-minded nations. If Regulatory policies "Ghana does everything right under the help that some authorities say about 10 Budget deficit MCA and achieves sustained seven perpercent of the trillion was lost to corrupTrade policy Days to start a business cent per capita annual growth ... it will take tion. The consequence, however, as the it 21 years for it to reach a per capita inNew Republic wrote last year, is that come of $1,435, the upper income level for the first group of "for all its merits, foreign aid lacks a stable powerful American political constituency."

MCA countries."

Combining a security imperative born of September I J and Finally, and probably the most trenchant criticism, is that the MCA tackles a very small subset of the developing world and the lessons learned from past years of aid-giving, the Bush Administration is set on reviving foreign aid in both financial mostly the better-run bits.

Most analyses of the MCA criteria make it clear only about a and political terms. A large chunk of this program is the MCA. Rewarding countries that follow sensible policies and who, dozen countries will clear the benchmarks each year. Radelet has therefore, can convert aid into sustainable economic growth calculated that in South Asia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are likely to be among the first dozen. and long-term poverty alleviation will go a long way in rehaGene Sperling, in an atiicle in Foreign Affairs, warned that bilitating the very idea of overseas development assistance in "the MCA's current design does not address the fact that the large the United States and elsewhere. If all goes well, the adminismajority of poor countries will not only fail initially to qualify for tration's hope is that other countries will mim ic the practices of MCA winners, creating a virtuous cycle of sound policies aid, but are many years away from realistically achieving eligibility." He adds, with an eye on the Afghanistans and Liberias of attracting more money inducing more sound policies.

Admittedly, the Bush Administration has already run into its the world, "the MCA would also do nothing for countries emerging from war." first hiccup. Thanks to budgetary constraints, the initial budget While welcoming the MCA, Mary McClymont, director of request for the MCA was 40 percent less than planned. The MCA is already off to a "slow start," said a report by Washington, D.C.InterAction, the largest U.S. alliance of aid organization, echoed based Center for Global Development. this by saying "we are equally concerned about what will happen But few doubt that foreign aid is back in business in to those countries that won't receive the new money."

The pool of potentially eligible is much larger. In the first year, Washington. President Bush received a surprise thumbs up on 2004, about 75 countries with a per capita income below $1,445 this front from pop star Bob Geldof, famous for his Ethiopian famine relief efforts. The U.S. ational Security Strategy of would be in the running. The next two years would add two more sets of nations, raising the income bar to nearly $3,000. In all, 2002 has identified eight concrete goals and one of them is to "expand the circle of development."

As the NSS warns, about 110 countries would be potential MCA recipients.

"America is now threatened less by conquering states than we USAID's Natsios answered these concerns when he testified are by failing states."

0 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year. He said that while the MCA focused on the best-performing poor nations, US AID would continue to provide assistance About the Author: Pramit Pal Chaudhuri is an associate editor o/the to a range of other countries-from those who just miss the Hindustan Times in New Delhi.

A VllJrt1lllcaJ Democrats Move On

The contest for the U.S. presidential nomination is flagged off by the first online primary election.

ince the last U.S. presidential election the Democrats have been in disarray. Many of their constituents are dissatisfied with the lack of a coherent opposition against controversial neoconservative Republican policies. So what's a dissenter to do? Hit the Internet. On June 24 and 25 MoveOn.org, a vigorous online activist group, got ajump on the politicians by holding the first ever serious Internet primary election-with extraordinary results.

Primary elections are how presidential candidates test the waters at the state level in preparation for the political party conventions where the presidential and vice presidential candidates are actually chosen.

These conventions are held in summer of the election year a few months prior to the November election day. Primaries start early in the year, so that by summer there is usually a clear indication of who the strongest candidate is. Last election, former vice president Al Gore was the shooin candidate for the Democratic Party, endorsed by then President Bill Clinton. After severe criticism that campaign mismanagement and poor focus contributed to loss of the 2000 election, Gore withdrew early from the 2004 race. This made way for a bumper crop of presidential hopefuls to declare themselves, some stronger than others.

Enter MoveOn.org, Democracy in Action, as its banner proclaims.

MoveOn dates back to 1998, when Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two S iIicon Valley entrepreneurs-noted for developing the popular "AfterDark" screensaver software-joined forces with a few friends "to bring ordinaly people back into politics." They were frustrated by the

lack of Congressional leadership during the impeachment efforts against President Bill Clinton. They felt that tax dollars were frivolously tied up in an investigation of President Bill Clinton's love life while much more important issues were being ignored. In their first press release in September 1998 they urged Congressmen to "Censure and Move On." It announced an online petition to "immediately censure President Clinton and MoveOn to pressing issues facing the country," a petition that began with a dozen friends sending it out to another dozen friends. The MoveOn founders felt the voiceless majority needed a platform, and saw the Internet as the perfect place. They put their computer programming skills to work and set up the Web site. "MoveOn," the FAQs reads, "is a catalyst for a new kind of grass roots involvement, supporting busy but concerned citizens in finding their political voice." MoveOn now boasts an international network of more than two million online activistsabout 1.4 million are in the United States. Since their first petition against the prolonged impeachment proceedings, MoveOn has advocated for the opposition on issues such as the war in Iraq, legislation permitting big business to monopolize the media and the "packing" of the Supreme Court with extremist conservative judges. But their most ambitious undertaking was the June 2003 primary.

Nine candidates were selected for the MoveOn ballot. The ballot, designed to look like a typical hard copy ballot, featured two categories: under the first, registered members voted for a single, favorite candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination by clicking the box by his or her name. The second asked voters to cl ick the names of any of the nine

It may not have been a real election, but it gave politicians across the political spectrum something to think about. candidates they would enthusiastically support if they won the nomination. The results were surprising.

The nine candidates were: Carol Mosely-Braun, former Illinois Senator; Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont; North Carolina Senator John Edwards; Missouri Senator Dick Gephardt; Florida Senator and former Governor Bob Graham; Massachusetts Senator John Kerry; Ohio Representative Dennis J. Kucinich; Joe Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut and former vice presidential candidate in 2000; and Al Sharpton, an outspoken civil rights activist.

During the two-day primary 317,647 members voted, a number larger than voter turnout in some U.S. states. No candidate received a clear majority of 50 percent, but dark horse Howard Dean galloped ahead of the pack with a healthy 43.87 percent of the vote. He bested the next runner-up, Dennis Kucinich, by nearly 20 percent (see box for breakdown). The event also helped Dean raise more than a million dollars in campaign funds, largely thanks to individuals contributing an average of$35 apiece (matching government funds did the rest). The other candidates also benefited in pledges of money and volunteer support.

Braun, Dean, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich and Gephardt received the best percentages of "enthusiastic support" votes, all over 50 percent, with

MoveOn Primary Election Results In just a little over 48 hours, 317,647 members voted, making this vote larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined. Here are the vote totals and percentages.

BRAUN DEAN EDWARDS GRAHAM KERRY KUCINICH

I

Dean getting a whopping 86.02 percent potential support. The candidates who :>.

g8

garnered the most popular support are "progressives," politicians who once ~ billed themselves "liberals." Just as the il5 ~ Republican ethos has morphed from centerist to neoconservative right, so have the liberal Democrats, disgusted with the centerist "New Democrat" stance, moved slightly to the left, with similarities in their values to those of the Vietnam War era ew Left. Centerist Democrats, villified for not representing old Democratic values, caving into demands of the Bush Administration without protest and for voting "Republican lite," are miffed by the new developments. Some of them complained that MoveOn allowed only the three front-

running candidates, determined by a prior straw poll, to circulate statements among the MoveOn registered voters, and that the primary was set up for Dean to win. But MoveOn founder Wes Boyd maintains the main purpose of the poll was to involve grassroots and build support generally. The Web site asks voters to volunteer time or donate money to the Democratic candidate of their choice. Each of the nine candidates will get e-mail addresses of those supporters who agreed to let their addresses to be given out.

Admittedly, there is room for abuse in an open voting process like this. According to its press releases, MoveOn took "extraordinary steps to insure its robustness and integrity." This involved limiting one vote per address, testing whether more than one vote came from a single machine, domain, and other possible irregularities. MoveOn also contracted a follow up telephone survey through an independent polling firm to deliver an "exit poll." They found that the poll numbers closely reflected the actual voting results within a projected three percent margin of error.

So it wasn't a real election, but it did give politicians across the political spectrum something to think about. Certainly Democrats will take it into account when assessing the reasons for the party's non-performance and mapping strategy for the elections in 2004.

They might do well to ask themselves where the real energy to win the next election is going to come from. Tens of thousands of MoveOn members have signed up to volunteer for their candidate, which somewhere along the line means getting more voters registered and motivated. Politicians are likely thinking especially hard about the large increase in Howard Dean's campaign coffers as a result of this quirky poll. MoveOn isn't endorsing a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination as yet, since no candidate won more than 50 percent of the vote. But it will be fun watching, because MoveOn doesn't let grassroots fall underfoot. And without a doubt, they will keep movin' on.

D

AMERICA'S PASSION FOR

"Whoever wants to learn the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." most of us spring and summer are different seasons, separate and distinct. But to tens of millions of fans in the United States they are no more than arbitrary curiosities of the calendar, only subcategories of the one true season of the year-baseball season. For them time begins on the day of the new season's first game, when the sun begins to reappear from behind winter's clouds and the flowers have started to bloom.

Now, in these days of late spring, with the arrival of good weather, young men and women are digging out baseball mitts and balls and bats from the back of the closet where they have been hibernating during the winter.

On children's schoolyards and the athletic fields of secondary schools and universities, on neighborhood baseball "diamonds" and in the massive stadiums of the highest professional leagues, Americans have begun again to play baseball and its close cousin, softball.

They play in school leagues, church leagues, privately organized children's leagues, and industrial leagues. They play in co-ed and women's leagues. There are leagues for men over 50, in which grayhairs trot slowly across the field, powered by memories of the speed, power and agility of their youth. A few thousand of the best play in the professional leagues.

It is hard to explain to people fi:om foreign lands, this most American of games; harder still to express its hold on the national soul, the reverential devotion it calls fi'om its fans, and how deeply embedded it is in the very fabric of our national experience.

With its broad green fields and slow pace, baseball is firmly rooted in America's pastoral beginnings and often seems untouched by change. In an age of accelerating 0

rf

change, baseball remains resolutely slow, played at a contemplative pace where one thing happens at a timeexcept when nothing is happening at all.

It is played at a pace at which a father can lean forward, elbows on knees and, between handfuls of peanuts and bites of mustard-smeared hot dogs, pass on to his son the lore and traditions of the game. He wi II try to express the awe he felt for the heroes of his day and shake his head sadly at how today's players don't quite measure up. This is exactly how his father spoke to him. His son will roll his eyes, as his father did when he was young, and have the good sense to admire the great players oftoday.

The crowds are family affairs; fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and old friends. They start to come to the game in spring, bundled in sweaters and coats, when en'ant winter winds whistle around the ball field and spring showers may intelTupt play. The season advances into full summer; Sh0l1 sleeve and cut-offs weather. The young will work on their tans while older fans shelter behind sun visors and layers of tanning lotion as the leisurely game plays out before them. The last games are played as the crisp fall air adds its warning of approaching winter and the end of the season adds imp0l1ance and tension to the last contests.

The core of the game centers on a battle of skills and psyches between the pitcher, who throws a ball about the size of a large man's fist toward a batter who stands with a long wooden bat to intercept the ball's flight and launch it, ifhe can, toward the green and distant comers of the field.

In the child's game the ball comes floating from the grasp of young boy at a speed not much greater than the boy can run; but challenge enough for young hands and minds. At the professional level the ball comes rocketing at speeds up to 160 kilometers per hour toward a batter standing less Pittsburgh Pirates Jack Wilson (12) is safe at the plate as the baseball gets away from the St. Louis Cardinals catcher Mike DiFelice during the third inning of their baseball game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on August 20, 2002. Standing in the background are Pokey Reese (3) and Kris Benson.

What is it about baseball that keeps obsessed fans on edge from spring until September? What makes them keep track of players' batting averages, team performance, collect baseball cards and tensely watch their favorite team win or lose, as the two best teams of the season emerge to play each other in the World Series?

his bat almost faster than the eye can see and hit the ball squarely. As it streaks past the defensive players and rolls freely in the grass, the batter runs to the first of the game's four bases. If, through subsequent hits by his teammates, he can run the course of all four bases he will have scored one run, the tallies which decide the game. Occasionally the batter will hit the ball with incredible force, knocking it so far that he can circle all four bases before he is out, in a play called a home run. In an average game each team will score four or five runs.

For the players and the fans it is a long season.

Youth and amateur teams may play two or three games per week for perhaps three months. The professionals play, with incredible grace and skill, a tough and unforgiving brand of ball almost every day of the week for six months-162 games over that span.

Despite the length of the season, the game rewards-almost requires-elose study. Every action of the professional players, their every game, is scrutinized with the greatest intensity by their faithful fans, whose spirits rise and fall on the results of each game, until the players lives seem sometimes more real than their own. A man who cannot remember his wife's birthday will unfailingly recall the date on which his team won its last championship. A supervisor who can't remember how many people work for him will recall that the great Henry Aaron hit exactly 755 home runs in his career.

In spite oflabor disputes and steroid scandals, despite endless predictions that the quicker, seemingly more modem games of basketball and football will displace it, baseball remains America's game.

It is also something more. In its more than 130 professional seasons baseball has served as the gateway to assimilation for many of the ethnic groups that ~comprise America's diverse population. In the early ~ days of the last century, the downtrodden Irish dom~ inated the game and became the heroes of millions z "J of schoolchildren, helping them gain the acceptance they had so long sought. In the 1930s the great players of Italian ancestry made their mark, and, by excelling at the nation's pastime, became an indelible part of America's rich fabric. In the 1940s and '50s African Americans were at last allowed to show their merit on the previously segregated fields, dazzling fans with their verve and skill, and presaging, through their acceptance on the baseball field, the landmark civil rights victories that soon followed. More recently, Hispanic players, native and foreignborn, have established themselves among the stars of the game, reminding everyone that they are Americans too and have mastered America's game. The newest wave in this traditional yet ever-changing game consists of the remarkable rise in the number of Asian players, particularly from Japan and Korea. Though D-

!

Colorado Rockies pitcher Chin-hui Tsao of Taiwan, bears down while pitching in the fifth inning against the Seattle Mariners on March J 3, 2003, in Peoria, Arizona.

than 20 meters away. When he swings his bat at this missile he will often miss it entirely, seeming overmatched by the impossible task of hitting a ball thrown at such speed. When, in a minor miracle of speed, timing and coordination, the batter hits the ball, other players behind the pitcher will try to catch it before it hits the ground or will throw it to a base before the batter can arrive, and he will be "out," having failed again, as he does more than 70 percent of the time. It is a game that rewards patience. After an afternoon of such failures the batter may, in his last turn, swing

1. Baseball fans watch the action at Anaheim Stadium during a California Angels and Milwaukee Brewers American league baseball game in 1996 in California.

2. JejJNelson of Fox Point, Wisconsin (left), John Reuteler of Milwaukee (center), Philip Grey (second left) of Maple Grove, Minnesota, and Daniel Gorchals (right) of Appleton, Wisconsin at an All Star baseball during batting practice at Miller Park in Milwaukee in July 2002.

3. New York Yankees' Hideki Matsui hits a double against the Boston Red Sox in New York on May 28, 2003

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still only a handful, they have brought with them the rapt attention of their countrymen back home. In Japan television stations have interrupted their broadcasts to give live coverage to the play ofIchiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners.

These new audiences overseas underline an important trend.

Despite its indelible connections with the United States, baseball has become an international sport and is now included in the Summer Olympics. Iran has already taken strides to be part of the increased international interest in the game. An Iranian baseball federation has been formed and American coaches have been working with young Iranians to form a team for international competitions. One day we may have an Iranian player in the American professional leagues.

The game has also enriched our language. Anyone realizing a great achievement can be said to have "hit a home run," better still, a "grand slam"-named after a home run hit with runners already on all the bases. Someone having failed in almost any endeavor is said to have "struck out," a term for a batter who is called out without ever having hit the ball. A "screwball" is a strange and unorthodox person, named after a strange and unorthodox type of throw by the pitcher. Likewise, someone experiencing an unpleasant surprise is said to have had "a curve ball thrown at him," again named after a type of pitch. Almost anything done twice quickly in succession can be called a "double play," after a type of defensive play. Bizarre and unsettling developments are said to "come out ofleft field," because early baseball stadiums were often laid out in such a way that throws

made in the late afternoon from the area known as left field had the setting sun behind them, which blinded players trying to catch them. A conscientious worker is said to "touch all the bases," making sure that all details are taken care of. [fhe doesn't he is apt to be "caught off base," by a surprising development.

The new baseball season began a couple of months ago and, in the professional leagues' patterns are beginning to emerge: the success of the perennial powerhouse ew York Yankees; the surprising record of the unheralded Kansas City Royals; the equally surprising poor play of last year's champions, the Anaheim Angels. But the season is long and there are few truths which can hide the length of a 162-game schedule.

Early bloomers will fade, to be replaced by teams with greater strengths. Talented teams which met with early failure will slowly rise in the standings during the crucial days of August and September. Then, with the regular season over, the best teams wi II meet in the excitement of the playoffs, as the first cold winds of autumn whip the colorful pennants and flags which deco-

-'--" Still a hero to the youngsters, baseball legend Babe Ruth on March 20, 1935, as he autographs baseballs for a group of children at Sf. Petersburg, Florida, just before the game between his team, the Boston Braves, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

rate the stadiums and the nation will pause as the last games are played out in tense and deadly earnest.

All teams but one will finally fail and a new champion will be crowned. The others, and their fans, will suffer the melancholy end of their summer hopes, and face a long winter of waiting until spring anives and time can begin once more.

D About the Author: Stephen Holgate, a former diplomat, has served as Public Affairs Officer at the u.s. Embassy in Sri Lanka.

Indians

IPU0dJ ([mcIID~ It ma~ not be erieket, but if ~ou think Indians aren't interested in baseball, think again

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LB. Chances are that if you ask an Indian what this acronym stands for, he will give you a blank look. It's nobody's fault-baseball is simply not popular in India and the mention of Major League Baseball (MLB) will evoke little response. But say "bat and ball" and the same person is bound to spring from his seat and converse with you for an umpteen number of hours. Excuse me, but that's cricket he is talking about-his heart and soul-and not baseball. However, things might change soon.

Thanks to American MLB coaches Rick Dell and Tom Dedin, who toured the length and breath of India recently, baseball may not just be America's game anymore. The duo was selected by MLB under its Envoy Program which sends the game's best instructors to baseball communities around the world. Since its introduction in 1991, the program has sent coaches on more than 600 assignments, reaching over 500,000 people in nearly 70 countries.

"The Envoy Program is one of several international game development programs operated by Major League Baseball International-MLB's international division which was founded in 1990 with the goal of growing the game through development initiatives, special events, etc.," remarks Dell who is also the head baseball coach at the College of New Jersey. The 49-year-old has toured 67 countries all over the world "developing the game internationally" but it was his first visit to India.

"Baseball is no longer America's game. Today, more than 28 percent of the players in Major League were born outside U.S.A. About 46 percent of the players in the minor leagues-that feed the Major League teams-are not Americans by birth. Developing the game internationally creates better players. Major League games are now played in Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Canada. We want to continue to go into countries to the point where they no longer need us and can promote the game through their own resources," observes Dell.

By the time Dedin, an associate director of athletics at the Regis University in Denver, Colorado, arrived in India-his first ever visit to any Asian country-just ahead of the 10-day coaching clinic in

NBA coach Tom Dedin giving tips to baseball players during a camp held at Chandigarh last July.

Chandigarh in July, Dell had already traveled to a number of Indian cities, including Chennai, gauging the popularity of baseball in his capacity as MLB's Envoy Program Regional Coordinator, Asia Pacific.

"We are interested in India for several reasons. First, it's in my regional territOly so we wanted to know the status of the game here and how we might help in its development. When I sent out invitations and information about the MLB Envoy Program we received an immediate response from P.C. Bhardwaj, the secretary general of the Amateur Baseball Federation ofIndia (ABFI). Our relationship started here and continued to grow. Of course, once we arrived here, we were really impressed with everything and everyone," Dell comments. Truly impressed, and to a certain extent startled, were the American coaches once they convened the coaching clinic at the football ground of Panjab University in Chandigarh. It was attended by around 80 players from 19 states.

From session one on day one of the camp, the two coaches realized that India has the potential of becoming a major baseball power in Southeast Asia, if not in the whole of the continent. "It

was just opposite from what we had initially expected. The boys showed such superb skills and enthusiasm that left both of us quite dumfounded," commented 62-year-old Dedin. Smart young trainees dressed in their kits with their baseball caps in place welcomed Dell and Dedin, anxious to learn their lesson of the day from foreign coaches even if it meant slogging out for more than six hours in 40 degrees Celsius heat everyday. Just about every boy in America grows up dreaming of playing in Major Leagues at some point of time in his life but come on, this is India.

"It was our natural assumption that Indians will not be familiar with the game, but we were proved wrong. They never felt uncomfortable and knew the basics well," said Dell. The reason for it, as the Americans came to know later on, lay in the fact that Indians are brilliant at the game of cricket, which, to a certain extent, bears many similarities to baseball. Both the games not only have familiar terms like batting, bowling and catching but also the playing style isn't much different.

"We are not here to compete with cricket but both, Tom and I, enjoyed watching it on TV every evening in our hotel room and were intrigued by some of the similar movements of the game to baseball.

"I think that cricket compliments the development of baseball (Continued on page 46)

Ma urai on My

ind

A stint as writer-in-residence at American College takes a poet on a nostalgic journey.

yfirst trip to South India in two decades was an eye-opener in many ways.

My destination was American College, Madurai, where I had been invited to spend a couple of weeks as writer-in-residence to conduct a poetry workshop and to do readings of my own work in local colleges. After the workshop, I was going to set out on a poetry reading tour in five other locations.

Within American College, it was the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and in Translation (SCILET) that was my host. The Centre maintains an excellent library, study space and facilities not only for local students and faculty working on their MA, M.Phil and Ph.D degrees but it also welcomes scholars from all over India.

Paul Love, a Midwesterner, who first came to India on a cargo ship at the age of25 in 1954, has now made Madurai his home and heads SCILET. He is the driving spirit behind the Centre's activities which includes Kavya Bharati, one of the few poetry journals now left that still comes out, albeit on an erratic schedule.

Paul and his colleagues have also organized a Visiting Writers Series for SCILET, which has included such names as Meena Alexander, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, Suniti Namjoshi, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande, Ayyappa Paniker, Gita Hariharan, Gieve Patel, Sujata Bhatt and Keki Daruwalla.

The Centre staff is knowledgeable, helpful, and unobtrusive. The atmosphere is very conducive to research. The holdings on Indian writing including the periodicals section are very impressive. There is also a small section of books by writers from other South Asian countries, and some Tamil fiction. Satellite collections of Australian, Canadian, and Native American literature are being added. Titles in ancillary fields such as history, philosophy, social sciences and women's studies can also be found in the neatly labeled and organized book cupboards. In fact, nearly half of the writers in the library's holdings are women.

If there is something comparable to SCILET elsewhere in India, I would like to know about it. Ifthere isn't, more people working in the field of Indian writing in English should be trekking down to Madurai to use this resource center.

The campus itself is large, green, shaded and quiet. Outside the gates is a busy thoroughfare with day long traffic. In the neighborhood are bakeries, farsan shops, fruit and juice stalls, idli and dosa

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joints, Internet browsing centers and other stores. Transportation is easily available. Aside from the awesome architectural marvel of the Meenakshi Temple (and the unique experience of being blessed on the head by an elephant's bristly snout), the splendid but faded Mahal and the hilltop observation point, the bustling city of one million which natives like to call an overgrown village, has little else to offer-a plus, if you are looking not to be distracted from your work.

Further out, there is an inviting landscape of sugarcane and paddy fields, banana plantations and coconut groves. And many other places of interest, depending on which direction you go and how far east or west. I made a day's excursion to Thekadi or the Periyar Lake Sanctuary-a three-hour drive into the hills. The boat ride on the sprawling lake was enchanting and I was lucky enough to spot at a distance, elephants, deer, hogs and bison.

Driving along the southern tip of the Western Ghats that wags its tail into Kerala, I passed through a village notorious for infanticide.

Despite the 1994 Prenatal Diagnostic Technique (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, the practice continues, slanted as usual, toward female infanticide.

The level of literacy in the South has always been high and school and college education is widespread. Everywhere I meet eager, bright-eyed, students. At Farouk College in Calicut, it is heartening to see so many aspiring Muslim women in the audience, most of them in burqas, listening with rapt attention. But although they question and debate, they are not ready to challenge parental dictates leave alone break with them. The majority of them will fit into traditional roles.

Salma is a good example: MA in English; working in the college library; quietly confident and articulate. She gave up the veil while in college, but seems resigned to her future role as wife and mother with no guarantee that the husband chosen by her parents will permit her to work.

In another village I meet Vedha, an ex-graduate of American College, who now runs the high school his parents started 30 years ago.

It has 1,800 students who study in the English medium-a mixed population drawn from agricultural families, children of business fathers (brokers) dealing in cardamom which is a staple crop. Pepper, coffee, tea, clove, cocoa and 50 other spices are also grown in the region. s for the workshop itself,I had a group of 14which produced some good, average, and some pretty bad verse-no different from what students produce elsewhere, including in the United States. It is easy to underestimate these students whose English is not of the highest quality.

City-slick students have a tendency to put down small town students but I found them well-informed, inquisitive, imaginative, alert, politically sensitive, and what touched me most, very earnest.

Having lived and taught on two continents, it never ceases to amaze me how avidly Indian students search out and soak up

A

The Main Hall at the American College in Madurai. new knowledge from everywhere.

In stark contrast, the cultural insularity of average ~ Americans, their lack ~ of interest, indiffer~ ence even to want to 8 know about other ~ worlds dismays me. ~ Up until 30 years ago, ~ most Americans did <3 not even care about "other" worlds within their own geographical boundaries. The redefining of the canon in the interests of making the curriculum more inclusive made a huge impact in opening up and letting in a diversity of voices. Today's students are the beneficiaries of this trend, and are taking it a step further. Even more direct than reading about the philosophy, ali, history, religion, and literature of other countries, is going over to live in those countries. The development of Study Abroad programs is one of the best outcomes of the expansion of American educational horizons.

Madurai offered two such surprises. A program called "Shansi" brings to the American college campus recent graduates from Oberlin College, Ohio. The Shansi program (first started in the city of Shansi, China, after which the program is named, and later expanded to include Madurai) originated long before "multicultural" became a catchword. On this campus it was celebrating 50 years while I was there in January this year.

Another program, this one associated with Lady Doak College in Madurai, is the South India Term Abroad (SlTA), which brings a group of American students for a semester's stay in South India involving academic study, field work, and home stay in middle class family homes. I spoke to the group one afternoon and was amazed at the initiative and courage of these students-wearing Indian attire, learning Tamil, eating the food, observing the customs-to immerse themselves in a culture which is alien even to North Indians! The most amusing gesture was the sideways shake of the head-an ambivalent Indian-style affirmation-which the students had studiously adopted as a badge of belonging!

T

he poetly reading segment .of my trip that followed .the co~c.lusion of the workshop was timely, because the AmerIcan edItIon of my third book of poems, Meditations on Desire, had just been released. The Indian edition will be out later this year.

I started in Madurai, continued through Kodaikanal, Ooty, Calicut, Bangalore, and ended in Bombay. I did 18 presentations altogether, read at book clubs and for private groups, and on many campuses including Thyagarajar, Lady Doak and Fatima colleges, all three in Madurai, Providence College, Calicut University in Kozhikode, National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, and ational Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay.

Everywhere, the response was overwhelming.

My books have been in circulation in India for 30 years and it was reassuring to know that older readers had not forgotten my work even though I have been an expatriate for the last 15 years. The college-going generation was studying selections from my poetry anthology in courses on Indian writing. And for many of them, to hear a living poet-a creature that had not crossed the floor of their classroom before-was truly a thrill. Besides, in addition to its literary appeal, the poetry spoke to the students' own concerns, occupying as it did a shared cultural turf. Recognizable content, familiar nuances and allusions, lowered the customary barriers that surround the study of English literature in India.

Through the poems, I use my privileged position to the fullest extent to provoke questions on issues relating to women's lives, gender bias, religious bigotry and social pretensions. This makes poetry more accessible and more meaningful to an audience. I have seen plenty of good poets-both here and abroad-who do bad readings oftheir own work in a stodgy, monotonous style that fails to do justice to the poetly and strains the listener's patience. My goal is to involve and engage the audience, not alienate it. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that works in conjunction with the poet to ensme effective communication. Getting a sense ofthe make-up ofthe audience is part of the trick. You can't make the same pitch to 12th graders that you make to an older age group.

When I read to American audiences, I have to "explain" a little more before I venture into the poem; this helps smooth over their entry into the poem's historical space. Often, the emotive layering in the poetry can be experienced by the listener without intervention from the author.

The sensation of having touched and moved listeners with the magic of poetry is a delight like no other I have tasted.

The "localization" of the study ofliterature in India has come very slowly but is far ahead than what it used to be in my time. These days, literature students get to study some Indian writing although the choice of texts is uniformly applied to all colleges in the system and is still dictated by intellectually dried out academics living in the past. Younger faculty working on their Ph.Ds engage in fancy research in post-colonial literature but, ironically, are not allowed to teach the material because they can't get it past the elected-for-life committees. This is a crying shame and causes a lot of grief among talented teachers. It is the dead-end I ran into I 5 years ago that propelled my flight abroad.

In the American liberal arts tradition, it is a given that instructors "own" their syllabi. Over the years when I have fOl1llulated new courses like Non- Western World Literature, Autobiography, Women in Literature, and Creative Writing: Non-fiction, aliI had to do was get an outline approved by the department chair, and schedule the class. If six students signed up, I was in business.

About my professional life, I have few complaints. As a poet now slotted in the diaspora, location matters only to the extent that it enlarges the context out of which one writes, and how it enhances one's sensibility.

Visiting India at regular intervals to recover the first half of my divided life provides nourishment for the soul. Feeling "at home" in America? Now that's another story.

D About the Author: Saleem Peeradina is a Bombay-born poet and professor of English at Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan. He has taught at a number of colleges in the United States and given readings all over the world. His publications include two books of poetry, First Offence and Group Portrait.

The

En fish Teacher An Interview with PAUL LINDER LOVE

by NACHAMMAI RAMAN

Paul Linder Love first came to India in 1954 as a 25-year-old without a plan) partly because he was ccpioneering))and partly because he was cJOolhardy.))The first Indian novel he read was R.K N arayan)s The English Teacher. Ironically) after nearly 50 years) that is the title which best describes him. His hair may have turned white) but his memories are colmful.

Now and then) he needs help on Indian facts from his two colleaguesR.E Nair and Premila Paul at the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation (SCILET)) which he currently directs) in American College in Madurai. He spoke to SPAN about his Indian experience.

SPAN: How did you get interested in

India?

PAUL LINDER LOVE: I became interested in India because I grew up in a rather parochial setting in the United States. You may not want to say that Kentucky is parochial, but the Midwest in general does not have--Qr did not have when I was a child-the kind of contacts with overseas countries like the East Coast cities sometimes did. As I grew up, I statted thinking about the sort of work that I wanted to do. I became very interested in a multicultural kind of situation ....I started having that kind of interest because as high school went on my best friend was a German Jewish boy who had escaped the Holocaust ... and I think he enlarged my horizons.

Why teaching?

I knew I wanted to teach. My father was a teacher, my mother was a teacher, it was in my blood. Even in college, in the honors program we had, I was able to do a little teaching there, guest lectures and so on.

How didyou come to India?

Now it happened that in the early 1950s, the church [Presbyterian Church] of which I was a member had a program by which young people who were interested in teaching could be placed in Asian colleges, primarily, India, Japan and Korea. I was most interested in India.

India had gotten its independence by that time. It was an exciting place to live and to teach. One of the opportunities that I was offered was to teach at Baring Union Christian College in Batala in Punjab.

Batala was just [about 16 kilometers] inside the Pakistani-Indian border. It was a so-called backward district where there was no college before the 1950s. This college, to which I went in Batala, was a new college. So there were all sorts of opportunities to innovate, to pioneer. ...I got my appointment in 1953, just about 50 years ago. I had to wait for a visa of course, and I had the opportunity to study under someone while I was waiting for the visa, a man

who had lived in India, an American who had taught here, and I got a very positive orientation to India. His name was Malcolm Pitt at the Center for International Studies at Haltford, Connecticut.

[Pitt had taught for more than 20 years in Jabalpur]. And Malcolm Pitt knew the Ramayana and Mahabharata backward and forward and he gave us a very good grounding in Indian literature. He introduced us to R.K. Narayan. He knew Indian cooking, he played the sitar, he was very, very positive about India and that attitude rubbed off. And after I landed, when I started teaching, that attitude was confirmed.

How long wereyou in Batala?

I taught there for three years. I recognized all the time that I should be doing further studies toward graduate degrees. So, in 1957, I went back to the United States and spent a period of about seven, eight years studying at Northwestern University in Evanston just northwest of Chicago and I did teaching most of the time while I was there as a graduate assistant so that I had some good experience teaching American students as well as Indian students. In 1965, I had an opportunity again to come back to the same college because by that time there was a new principal, a very energetic, and enterprising man named Ram Singh. He was instrwnental in helping us set up the postgraduate English department at Baring College. Here again was the first college in Punjab to have postgraduate English.

What were you teaching, American literature?

Paul Linder Love with Premila Paul and Suniti Namjoshi (centel), a writer who participated in visiting writers program of the Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation in Madurai,

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8 I was mostly te'aching British literature. We had a couple of colleagues who had studied in the United States. They taught American literature much better than I could because at that time my interest was mostly British literature. I did my tutorial studies in devotional literature of the very early Renaissance in England-late medieval, early Renaissance. I scarcely ever had an occasion to use that. At Batala, my interest was primarily in poetry. More of my teaching was in poetry. When I came to American College, there were so many people who were knowledgeable about poetry that I shifted over to fiction.

Why did you come to Madurai?

Now, close to the end of the next decade, 1978-79, I began to realize that it would be good for me to explore another part ofIndia. We had, as I say, some excellent Indian teachers, one who had studied at Duke University in the United States, done his Ph.D. He was well fit to become head of the department by the time we got to 1978-79 and 1 began to look and see where else I might fit into a program. It was about that time that autonomous colleges began to develop. In 1978, a group of eight colleges in Tamil Nadu was the first to obtain autonomy in India.

American College was one of those. In

1980, Nair}i was one of the important peopie who showed me around this college. I was able to have discussions with student groups, share views with faculty members .... At the end of those three days, I was pretty sold that this was the kind of college I would like to teach in.

You founded the first postgraduate humanities department at American College...

Part of the work that I was able to join in was the founding of a postgraduate English department at American College [with five others: R.P. Nair; and professors Nedumaran, Vasanthan, Samuel Lawrence and John Sahayam]. Up until that time, the only postgraduate programs were in zoology, chemistry and physics .... Now, because we had autonomy, we could start from scratch, set up a new kind of syllabus.

We started what I think was one of the first genre-based syllabi in English literature for postgraduates.

How was Study Centre for Indian Literature in English and Translation founded? How did you get involved in it?

It was in the early 1980s that my two friends airji and Premila}i took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and recognized that as people were beginning to learn English and study English literature, it was all well and good for them to study

Shakespeare and Dickens and Thackeray and people like that, but they also needed to be studying literature written by their own countrymen. And by the 1980s, there were plenty of good writers of literature in the English language.

The two of them wrote the proposal for SCILET. At that time [of its founding in 1984], I was head of the postgraduate English department; the next year I began to help out with the administration of the center, which I continued to do concurrently with my work in the department. NaiJji became head of postgraduate English in 1986. I continued to teach in the department thereafter, while administrative duties in SCILET steadily increased from that point onward.

Has tlte college administration encouraged SCILET? Our principal, Samuel Sudanandha, has taken a great amount of interest in SCILET. He has encouraged and advised us in fundraising; he has presided not only over our Board [of which he is chairperson] meetings, but also over many of our public programs when Indian poets and novelists read and discuss their works. And especially, he has been a good "ambassador" for SCILET in publicizing our center when he has gone out to other cities and other colleges. He's one of the most student-centered college principals I've known.

Do you plan to stay on in India?

I'm taking it a year at a time. As long as I feel there is a need for me, as long as my health holds up to the extent that I'm not a burden to anyone, as long as India interests me as much as it still does, I would like to say that I would like to continue. If I sense there is a change in any of these areas, I'm quite open to going back to the United States .... Gradually, India has become an adopted country for me along with native country, which I love just as much as I always have. I go back almost every year to spend two months with my family in the United States. So, I have an

THE ELEPHANT

BOY

Sabu Dastagir became a big child star in the 1930s, an era when Hollywood was ruled by child stars. He was also the first Indian actor to succeed in Hollywood. His bittersweet story is recalled on the 40th anniversary of his death.

then depths of America's Depression years, Hollywood audiences were charmed by a number of precocious child stars. Of course, America's all-time favorite juvenile sweetheart was Shirley Temple, known for her trademark dimples and curls and her song and dance routines. In 1937, she starred in an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "Wee Willie Winkie" set in colonial-era British India. Released in the same year, but filmed thousands of kilometers away from the backlots of Hollywood in a real Indian jungle, Robert Flaherty's adaptation of another Kipling story, Elephant Boy, boasted another child star, the then unknown Sabu Dastagir (later to be known simply as "Sabu").

I

It is said that Sabu's actual name was Selar Shaik Sabu, and that Dastagir was his brother's name, the error made when Sabu and his brother passed through U.K. immigration. In either case, the former elephant boy was to be known by only one name, Sabu. Unlike Shirley Temple, however, whose pushy stage-door mother had her conveniently discovered in a Hollywood theater at an early age, this scrawny lad, the (allegedly) orphaned son of a mahout, was accidentally discovered by Flaherty's cameraman Osmond Boradaille, in the elephant stables of the Maharaja of My sore.

At the same time that little Shirley was carting home the astronomical sum of $10,000 a week, Sabu was subsisting on the

Mowgli and Kaa....Two of Rudyard Kipling's best loved characters in his immortal The Jungle Book as brought to the screen in Alexander Korda's technicolor extravaganza. Here Mowgli (Sabu) receives sage advice from the great snake. equivalent of a few annas or about ten cents. Although an institution in herself, America's favorite child star was allowed to grow up, enter politics and become a United States ambassador. Sabu, on the other hand, even after becoming an American citizen and serving in the U.S. Air Force, was never really allowed to outgrow his image. He would always remain "the elephant boy" up to his premature death at 39 in 1963.

Although most of Hollywood's British imperial adventures take place on India's mythic Northwest Frontier, the jungle setting of Elephant Boy and later, The Jungle Book is also common. The verisimilitude of the fairy-tale Indian jungle admirably served the colonialist stereotype, current at the time, of a picturesque "India"-just as the backlot jungles did for Hollywood's "Africa." Coincidentally, much of the idyllic imagery of Elephant Boy resembles the photographs found in National Geographic of the period. Both the National Geographic and contemporary documentaries followed the formula of rhapsodic discourse of exotic lands whose primitive denizens were depicted as childlike and whose animals were anthropomorphized.

As a "native" child-actor who was taught to speak English, Sabu fit into this formula.

Elephant Boy won the prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival that year. More amazing, however, was that when the little elephant boy was brought to England he took the country by storm.

"The studios went wild over him," recalls Flaherty's wife Frances Flaherty. "His acting amazed them. They insured his life for ÂŁ50,000 and set their best writers to work writing for him a script for Drums, another action film set in India's Northwest Frontier." Meanwhile the lad, formerly clad in a rude loincloth, became a cultural curiosity himself, holding court amongst the London aristocracy while sitting for sculptures and portraits. Sabu's interviews were broadcast worldwide throughout the Empire over the BBC. In 1938 Sabu was sent to America for a publicity tour (for Drums), and returned to Hollywood the following year to complete The Thief of Bagdad which could no longer be safely shot in England during the Nazi blitz. Transplanted to sunny California, Sabu remained there and became the first Indian to become a Hollywood star. Unfortunately, in pre-Civil Rights Act Hollywood, Sabu was rarely able to break away from the stereotypical casting of native boy roles. He continued to be cast in roles ranging from the picaresque hero of The Thief of Bagdad to that of a sidekick opposite technicolor queen Maria Montez in the exotic fantasies made for Universal (such as Robert Siodmak's 1944 Cobra Woman).

His career in America is well documented in the tabloids and glossy movie magazines of the day. A tabloid history of

INDIRN FILMS WIN NEW HERRTS OllYWOOd films are striking gold in America. Lagaan, Taal, Pardes, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Devdas, Dil Se and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon did well at the box office across orth America. According to Komal ahata, editor of Film Information, a trade publication based in Mumbai, last year's release Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham grossed as much among the Indian diaspora worldwide as in India. He adds rather an amusing statistic: "You often see that movies do well overseas and flop in India."

Though India is the largest producer of films in the world with more than 800 movies a year, it has not been quite successful in promoting its films overseas. Despite the success of Raj Kapoor's Awara in the former USSR and Middle East in 1954, Indian film producers have not been able to follow up on promoting films abroad during the past 50 years. But things are changing now.

Bollywood's big-budget filmmakers are pinning their hopes on the global market, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom being their major destinations, where they expect to net Š 2OQ3Rashri Productions P LId

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profits ranging between 20 percent and 40 percent. Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, which tanked in India, has grossed $1.5 million in the U.S. in 60 screens taking the 16th spot in the top 20 charts.

The exhibitors are hopeful that the movie will reach $3 million mark by the end ofthe year.

Bollywood movies with glitzy song and dance sequences, spectacular action and melodrama are considered as a separate genre. U.S.-based film exhibitors like Eros Entertainment and Video Sound, who promote Indian films, have started regular screening of contemporary films at mainstream theaters in North America. In addition to Hrithik Roshan and new releases they offer old fare adding retro- Kareena Kapoor in spectives at every film festival. Recently Indian Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon. films were screened at the American Museum of the Moving Image in ew York City. The Gene Siskel Film Center of Art Institute in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Walker At1 Center in Minneapolis and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta are among the art centers that had regular screenings for Indian films.

Indian films now get space in the review columns of mainstream Atnerican newspapers and magazines.

The two million strong Indian diaspora in America are an eager audience, but a surprising number of non-Indian Americans want to see Indian films. The American movie buff watches even South Indian films.

With growing international market for Indian films, producers plan grand premiers in which the leading Still'Sof the film participate. This July Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai graced the premier of Devdas in New York. The producer's marketing strategy made the film a success.

-A.V.N.

Sabu would include headlines such as "From Loin Cloth to Luxury Flat" (1937), "Sabu to Sell War Stamps; Jungle Star Faces Tough Schedule" (1942), and "Elephant Boy Takes a Wife" (1948). A 1947 interview finally admitted (when Sabu was 23) "Elephant Boy Grows Up: Sabu Star of 'Black Narcissus' is now a wise and charming man of the world." Yet in the same interview he was still identified with his original role retaining, as the reporter put it, "the same simple charm which marked the child who had ridden merrily through one jungle escapade after another." (Silver Screen, February 1947) Practically speaking, after his role as the peacock-like Young General in Powell and Pressburger's technicolor classic Black Narcissus (1947), Sabu's acting career was undistinguished. Despite his charm, as the elephant boy grew up, his career in Hollywood also wound up. Unable to find work in Hollywood as a superannuated elephant boy, Sabu made some low-budget potboilers in ltaly, tellingly titled Buongiorno Elefante (Good Morning, Elephant), and Il Tesoro del Bengala (1953) released in English appropriately enough as Jungle Hell. Shortly afterwards he retired and became, of all things, a furniture salesman. In 1961, The New York Mirror carried the story "Weissmuller, Sabu Eye Comeback Trail. Two of the movies' greatest jungle heroes, Sabu and Johnny ('Tarzan') Weissmuller, have become salesmen but they're trying to get back into films .... " Sabu succumbed to a heart attack in 1963 and was remembered, again, for his first role in a New York Times obituary on December 12, 1963: "Sabu the Elephant Boy Is Dead; Star of Jungle Movies Was 39." It noted, "His white teeth gleaming against a background of smooth coffee brown skin and flowing black hair, Sabu captivated everyone who met him and managed to remain unspoiled."

Because his roles often required him to wear long hair in the years before this became fashionable, Sabu sometimes complained of being mistaken for a girl, despite his wellbuilt physique.

Except for Sabu, all of Flaherty's other boy heroes returned to their respective previous engagements after the shoot. Sabu, however, never went back to the elephant stables again. Flaherty's daughter, Barbara van Ingen, sug.gests that Sabu's death by heart attack was in actuality a broken heart, perhaps caused by a lost innocence of youth that was wrested away from him: he could neither return to the India of his youth, nor fulfill himself in the Hollywood dream factory. Although his films were few, they remain an important part of the Hollywood legend. Sabu found a place in the hearts of several generations of American children, who were less interested in stereotypes than in the adventures of a boy their age from a far-away place who could ride and converse with elephants.

D About the Author: Daniel B. Haber is a freelance writer based in Kathmandu.

The

English Z!:f3ÂŁ~!~ adopted country and a native country like a family that has an adopted child and a child of their own that they love equally.

How do you reconcile the two?

The only time I have trouble reconciling them is when their political leaders start squabbling with each other as in the 1970s [during Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan]. I think I am correct in saying that the relationship between the two governments has been a little more encouraging [in recent years]. .. .I think there's been a maturing on both sides. Other than that, there's so much that the countries have in common that I don't have very much difficulty moving back and forth between the two. There are superficial difficulties. When I go back to the United States I wonder, where are all the people? I'm used to going out on the streets and having the streets crowded with people. I go back there and everybody is indoors watching television or they're in their cars or in underground walkways or whatever.

What changes have you seen over nearly 50 years in India?

The change in the number of people, the change in traffic. When I first came to American College, it was easy to cross the street. Now, it's very difficult for me to do that because of all the traffic. To shift over to the other side, opportunities for young people seem to have opened up.

That's a change I'm very, very pleased about. Our students can go and get many more different kinds of jobs than they could 10 or 15 years ago. They can go out and start their own work if they want to. There's an opportunity for entrepreneurship. Former students tend to do very well in that kind of thing.

What can India and the U.S. contribute to each other?

Both countries still need to know a great deal more about each other. They need to have a much more open curiosity about each other. What we know about each other is still mostly what the media tell us. What we can contribute is an openness to visitors coming, an opportunity to show visitors more than just the standard things that they expect to see. If only we could have more of [exchange] programs [for American students to study in India] and especially if the United States would open up a little bit more to Indians going on this type of study program-I think that's something we need very much.

D About the Interviewer: writer based in Chennai.

Nachammai

Raman

is a freelance

What

Is

Worthil Both genetic engineering and discoveries of new medicines from plant and animal kingdoms contribute to quality of life. But the search for natural sources is a race between science and extinction. A large part of nature's treasure trove remains unexplored, making preservation of biodiversity essential.

s I write, public opinion and official policy toward genetic engineering have come to vary greatly from one country to the next. France and Britain are vehemently opposed. China is strongly favorable, and Brazil, India, Japan, and the United States cautiously so. In the United States particularly, the public awoke to the issue only after the transgenie (so to speak) was out of the bottle. From 1996 to 1999, the amount of U.S. farmland devoted to genetically modified crops had rocketed from 1.5 million to 28.3 million hectares. As the century ended, more than half the soybeans and cotton grown, and nearly a third (28 percent) of the corn, were engineered.

There are, actually, several sound reasons for anxiety over genetic engineering, which I will now summarize and evaluate.

Many people, not just philosophers and theologians, are troubled by the ethics of transgenic evolution. They grant the bene-

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fits but are unsettled by the reconstruction of organisms in bits and pieces. Of course, human beings have been creating new strains of plants and animals since agriculture began, but never at the sweep and pace inaugurated by genetic engineering.

And during the era of traditional plant breeding, hybridization was used to mix genes almost always among varieties of the same species or closely similar species. Now it is used across entire kingdoms, from bacteria and viruses to plants and animals. How far the process should be allowed to continue remains an open ethical issue.

The effects on human health of each new transgenic food are hard to predict, and certainly never free of risk. However, the products can be tested just like any other new food products on the market, then celtified and labeled. There is no reason at this time to assume that their effects will differ any fundamental way. Yet scientists generally agree that a high level of alertness is essential, and for the following reason: All genes, whether original to the organism or donated to it by an exotic species, have multiple effects. Primary effects, such as manufacture of a pesticide, are the ones sought. But destructive secondary effects, including allergenic or carcinogenic activity, are also at least a remote possibility.

Transgenes can escape from the modified crops into wild relatives of the crop where the two grow close together.

Hybridization has always occurred widely in agriculture, even before the advent of genetic engineering. It has been recorded at one or another time and place in 12 of the 13 most important crops used worldwide. However, the hybrids have not overwhelmed their wild parents. I know of no case in which a hybrid strain outcompetes wild strains of the same or closely related species in the natural environment. Nor has any hybrid turned into a superweed, in the same class as the worst wild nonhybrid weeds that afflict the planet. As a rule, domesticated species and strains are less competitive than their wild counterparts in both natural and human-modified environments. Of course, transgenes could change the picture. It is simply too early to tell.

Genetically modified crops can diminish biological diversity in other ways. In a now famous example, the bacterial toxin used to protect corn is carried in pollen by wind currents for distances of60 meters or more from the cultivated fields. Then, landing on milkweed plants, the toxin is capable of killing the caterpillars of monarch butterflies feeding there. In another twist, when cultivated fields are cleared of weeds with chemical sprays against which the crops are protected by trans genes, the food supply of birds is reduced and their local populations decline.

These environmental secondary effects have not been well studied in the field.

How severe they will become as genetic engineering spreads remains to be seen.

Many people, having become aware of the potential threats of genetic engineering in their food supply, understandably believe that yet another bit of their freedom has been taken from them by faceless corporations (who can even name, say, three of the key players?) using technology beyond their control or even understanding. They also fear that an industrialized agriculture dependent on high technology can by one random error go terribly wrong. At the heart of the anxiety is a sense of helplessness. In the realm of public opinion, genetic engineering is to agriculture as nuclear engineering is to energy.

The problem before us is how to feed billions of new mouths over the next several decades and save the rest of life at the same time-without being trapped in a Faustian bargain that threatens freedom and security. No one knows the exact solution to this dilemma. Most scientists and economists who have studied both sides of it agree that the benefits outweigh the risks. The benefits must come from an evergreen revolution that has as its goal to lift food production well above the level attained by the green revolution of the 1960s, using technology and regulatory policy more advanced, and even safer, than that now in existence.

Genetic engineering will almost certainly play an important role in the evergreen revolution. Energized by recognition of both its promise and its risk, most countries have begun to fashion policies to regu-

late the marketing of transgenic crops. The ultimate driving force in this rapidly evolving process is international trade. More than 130 countries took an important first step in 2000 to address the issue by tentatively agreeing to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which provides the right to block imports of transgenic products. The protocol also sets up a joint "biosafety clearing house" to publish infonnation on national policy. About the same time, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, joined by the science academies of five other countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom) and the Third World Academy of Sciences, endorsed the development of transgenic crops. They made recommendations for risk assessment and licensing agreements and stressed the needs of the developing countries in future research programs and capital investment. edicine is another domain that stands to gain enormously from the world's store of biodiversity, with or without the impetus of genetic engineering. Pharmaceuticals in current use are already drawn heavily from wild species. In the United States, about a quarter of all prescriptions dispensed by pharmacies are substances extracted from plants. Another 13 percent originate from microorganisms, and three percent more from animals-making a total of about 40 percent derived from wild species. What's even more impressive is that nine of the 10 leading prescription drugs originally came from organisms. The commercial value of the relatively small number of natural products is substantial. The overthe-counter cost of drugs from plants alone was estimated in 1998 to be $20 billion in the United States and $84 billion worldwide.

But only a tiny fraction of biodiversity has been utilized in medicine, despite its obvious potential. The narrowness of the base is illustrated by the dominance of ascomycete fungi in the control of bacterial diseases. Although only about 30,000 species of ascomycetes-two percent of the total known species of organismshave been studied, they have yielded 85

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percent of the antibiotics in current use.

The underutilization of biodiversity is still greater than these figures alone might suggest-because probably fewer than 10 percent of the world's ascomycete species have even been discovered and given scientific names. The flowering plants have been similarly scanted. Although it is likely that more than 80 percent of the species have received scientific names, only some three percent of this fraction have been assayed for alkaloids, the class of natural products that have proved to be among the most potent curative agents for cancer and many other diseases.

There is an evolutionary logic in the pharmacological bounty of wild species.

Throughout the history oflife, all kinds of organisms have evolved chemicals needed to control cancer in their own bodies, kill parasites, and fight off predators.

Mutations and natural selection, which equip this armamentarium, are processes

The problem before us is how to feed billions of new mouths over the next several decades and save the rest of life at the same timewithout being trapped in a Faustian bargain that threatens freedom and security.

Cultures of mycoparasites isolated ji-om wood-decay fungi and Aspergillus sclerotia will be used in laboratory studies to identifY antifungal chemicals.

of endless h'ial and error. Hundreds of millions of species, evolving by the life and death of astronomical numbers of organisms across geological stretches of time, have yielded the present-day winners of the mutation-and-selection lottery. We have learned to consult them while assembling a large part of our own pharmacopoeia. Thus, antibiotics, fungicides, antimalarial drugs, anesthetics, analgesics, blood thinners, blood-clotting agents, agents that prevent clotting, cardiac stimulants and regulators, immunosuppressive agents, hormone mimics, hormone inhibitors, anticancer drugs, fever suppressants, inflammation controls, contraceptives, diuretics and antidiuretics, antidepressants, muscle relaxants, rubefacients, anticongestants, sedatives, and aboliifacients are now at our disposal, compliments of wild biodiversity.

Revolutionary new drugs have rarely resulted from the pure insights of molecu-

lar and cellular biology, even though these sciences have grown very sophisticated and address the causes of disease at the most fundamental level. Rather, the pathway of discovery has usually been the reverse: The presence of the drug is first detected in whole organisms, and the nature of its activity subsequently tracked down to the molecular and cellular levels.

Then the basic research begins.

The first hint of a new pharmaceutical may lie among the hundreds of remedies of Chinese traditional medicine. It may be spotted in the drug-laced rituals of an Amazonian shaman. It may come from a chance observation by a laboratory scientist unaware of its potential importance for medicine. More commonly nowadays, the clue is deliberately sought by the random screening of plant and animal tissues. If a positive response is obtained-say, a suppression of bacteria or cancer cells-the molecules responsible can be isolated and

tested on a larger scale, using controlled experiments with animals and then (cautiously!) human volunteers. If the tests are successful, and the atomic structure of the molecule is also in hand, the substance can be synthesized in the laboratory, then commercially, usually at lower cost than by extraction from harvested raw materials. In the final step, the natural chemical compounds provide the prototype from which new classes of organic chemicals can be synthesized, adding or taking away atoms and double bonds here and there. A few of the novel substances may prove more efficient than the natural prototype.

And of equal impOliance to the pharmaceutical companies, these analogues can be patented.

Serendipity is the hallmark of pharmacological research. A chance discovery can lead not only to a successful drug but to advances in fundamental science, which in time yield other successful

drugs. Routine screening, for example, revealed that an obscure fungus growing in the mountainous interior of Norway produces a powerful suppressor of the human immune system. When the molecule was isolated from the fungal tissue and identified, it proved to be a complex molecule of a kind never before encountered by organic chemists. Nor could its effect be explained by the contemporary principles of molecular and cellular biology. But its relevance to medicine was immediately obvious, because when organs are transplanted from one person to another, the immune system of the host must be prevented from rejecting the alien tissue. The new agent, named cyclosporin, became an essential part of the organ transplant industry. It also served to open new lines of research on the molecular events of the immune response itself.

The surprising events that sometimes lead from natural history to medical breakthrough would make excellent science fiction-if only they were untrue. The protagonists of one such plot are the poison dart frogs of Central and South America, which belong to the genera Dendrobates and Phyllobates in the family Dendrobatidae. Tiny, able to perch on a human fingernail, they are favored as terrarium animals for their beautiful colors: The 40 known species are covered by various patterns of orange, red, yellow, green or blue, usually on a black background. In their natural habitat, dendrobatids hop about slowly and are relatively unfazed by the approach of potential predators. For the trained naturalist their lethargy triggers an alarm, in observance of the following rule of animal behavior: If a small and otherwise unknown animal encountered in the wild is strikingly beautiful, it is probably poisonous, and if it is not only beautiful but also easy to catch, it is probably deadly. And so it is with dendrobatid frogs, which, it turns out, secrete a powerful toxin from glands on their backs. The potency varies according to species. A single individual of one (perfectly named) Colombian species, Phyllobates horribitis, for example, carries enough of the substance to kill 10 men. Indians of two tribes living in the Andean Pacific slope

Serendipity is the hallmark of pharmacological research.

A chance discovery can lead not only to a successful drug but to advances in fundamental science.

Cyclosporin, derived from a Norwegian mountain fungus and epibatidine, an opium-like toxin secreted by dendrobatid frogs, are two examples.

A poison dart Fog (phyllobates bicolor) is native to the tropical rain forests of Central and South America.

Research on the deadly toxin it secretes resulted in the development of a potent painkilla

forests of western Colombia, the Embeni Choco and Noanama Choco, rub the tips of their blowgun darts over the backs of the fi'ogs, very carefully, then release the little creatures unharmed so they can make more poison. the n1970s a chemist, John W. Daly, and a herpetologist, Charles W. Myers, gathered material fi'om a similar Ecuadorian frog, Epipedobates tricolO1; for a closer look at the dendrobatid toxin. In the laboratory, Daly found that very small amounts administered to mice worked as an opium-like painkiller, yet otherwise lacked the properties of typical opiates. Would the substance also prove nonaddictive? If so, it might be turned into the ideal anesthetic. From a cocktail of compounds taken from the backs of the frogs, Daly and his fellow chemists isolated and characterized the toxin itself, a molecule resembling nicotine, which they named epibatidine. This natural product proved 200 times more effective in the suppression of pain than opium, but was also too toxic, unfortunately, for practical use. The next step was to redesign the molecule. Chemists at Abbott Laboratories synthesized not only epibatidine but hundreds of novel molecules resembling it. When tested clinically, one of the products, code-named ABT-594, was found to combine the desired properties: It depressed pain like epibatidine, including pain from nerve damage of a kind usually impervious to opiates, and it was nonaddictive. ABT-594 had two additional advantages: It promoted alertness instead of sleepiness, and it had no side effects on respiration or digestion.

The full story of the poison dati frogs also carries a warning about the conservation of tropical forests. The destruction of much of the habitat in which populations of Epipedobates live almost prevented the discovery of epibatidine and its synthetic analogues. By the time Daly and Myers set out to collect enough toxin for chemical analysis, after their initial visit to Ecuador, one of the two prime rainforest sites occupied by the frogs had been cleared and replaced with banana plantations. At the second site, which fortu-

I

nately was still intact, they found enough frogs to harvest just one milligram of the poison. From that tiny sample, chemists were able, with skill and luck, to identify epibatidine and launch a major new initiative in pharmaceutical research.

It is no exaggeration to say that the search for natural medicinals is a race between science and extinction, and will become critically so as more forests fall and coral reefs bleach out and disintegrate. Another adventure dramatizing this point began in 1987, when the botanist John Burley collected samples of plants from a swamp forest near Lundu in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo.

His expedition was one of many launched by the U.S. ational Cancer Institute CI) to search for new natural substances to add to the fight against cancer and AIDS. Following routine procedure, the team collected a kilogram of fruit, leaves, and twigs fi'om each kind of plant they encountered. Part was sent to the NCI laboratory for assay, and part was deposited in the Harvard University Herbarium for future identification and botanical research.

One such sample came from a small tree at Lundu about eight meters high. It was given the voucher code label Burley-andLee 351. Back at the NCI laboratories, an extract made from it was tested routinely against human cancer cells grown in culture. Like the majority of such preparations, it had no effect. Then it was run through screens designed to test its potency against the AIDS virus. The NCI scientists were startled to observe that Burley-and-Lee 351 gave, in their words, "100 percent protection against the cytopathic effects of HIV-I infection," having "essentially halted HIV-I replication." In other words, while the substance the sample contained could not cure AIDS, it could stop cold the development of disease symptoms in HIV-positive patients.

The Burley-and-Lee 351 tree was determined to belong to a species of Calophyllum, a group of species belonging to the mangosteen family, or Guttiferae. Collectors were dispatched to Lundu a second time to obtain more mate-

rial from the same tree, with the aim of isolating and chemically identifying the HIV inhibitor. The tree was gone, probably cut down by local people for fuel or building materials. The collectors returned home with samples form other Calophyllum trees taken in the same swamp forest, but their extracts were ineffective against the virus.

Peter Stevens, then at Harvard University, and the world authority on Calophyllum, stepped in to solve the problem. The original tree, he found, belonged to a rare strain named Calopsyllum lanigerum, variety austrocoriaceum.

The trees sampled on the second trip were another species, which explained their inactivity. No more specimens of austrocoriaceum could be found at Lundu. The search for the magic strain widened, and finally a few more specimens were located in the Singapore Botanic Garden.

Thus supplied with enough raw material chemists and microbiologists were able to identify the anti-HIV substance (+)-calanolide A. Soon afterward the molecule was synthesized, and the synthetic proved as effective as the raw extract.

Additional research revealed calanolide to be a powerful inhibitor of reverse transcriptase, an enzyme needed by the HIV virus to replicate itself within the human host cell. Studies are now underway to determine the suitability of calanolide for market distribution.

The exploration of wild biodiversity in the search for useful resources is called bioprospecting. Propelled by venture capital, it has in the past 10 years grown into a respectable industry within a global market hungry for new pharmaceuticals. It is also a means for discovering new food sources, fibers, petroleum substitutes, and other products. Sometimes bioprospectors screen many species of organisms in search of chemicals with particular qualities, such as antisepsis or cancer suppression. On other occasions bioprospecting is opportunistic, focusing on one of a few species that show signs of yielding a valuable resource. Ultimately, entire ecosystems will be prospected as a whole, and all of the species assayed for most or all of the products they can yield.

The extraction of wealth from an ecosystem can be destructive or benign.

Dynamiting coral reefs and clearcutting forests yield fast profits but are unsustainable. Fishing coral reefs lightly and gathering wild fruit and resins in otherwise undisturbed forest are sustainable.

Collecting samples of valuable species from rich ecosystems and cultivating them in bulk elsewhere, in biologically less favored areas, is not only profitable but the most sustainable of all. ioprospecting with minimal disturbance is the way of the future. Its promise can be envisioned with the following matrix for a hypothetical forest: To the left, make a list of the thousands of plant, animal, and microbial species, as many as you can, recognizing that the vast majority have not yet been examined, and many still lack even a scientific name. Along the top, prepare a horizontal row of the hundreds of functions imaginable for all the products of these species combined. The matrix itself is the combination of the two dimensions. The spaces filled within the matrix are the potential applications, whose nature remains almost wholly unknown.

The richness of biodiversity's bounty is reflected in the products already extracted by native peoples of the tropical forests, using local knowledge and low technology of a kind transmitted solely by demonstration and oral teaching. Here, for example, is a small selection of the most common medicinal plants used by tribes of the upper Amazon, whose knowledge has evolved from their combined experience with the more than 50,000 species of flowering plants native to the region: motelo sanango, Abuta grandi/olia (snakebite, fever); dye plant, Arrabidaea chica (anemia, conjunctivitis); monkey ladder, Bauhinia guianensis (amoebic dysentery); Spanish needles, Bidens alba (mouth sores, toothache); firewood tree, or capirona, species of Calycophyllum and Capirona (diabetes, fungal infection); wormseed, Chenopodium ambrosioides (worm infection); caimito, Chrysophyllum cainito (mouth sores, fungal infection);

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toad vine, Cissus sicyoides (tumors); renaquilla, Clusia rosea (rheumatism, bone fractures); calabash, Crescentia cujete (toothache); milk tree, Couma macrocarpa (amoebic dysentery, skin inflammation); dragon's blood, Croton lechleri (hemorrhaging); fer-de-lance plant, Dracontium loretense (snakebite); swamp immortelle, Erythrina fusca (infections, malaria); wild mango, Grias neuberthii (tumors, dysentery); wild senna, Senna reticulata (bacterial infection).

Only a few of the thousands of such traditional medicinals used in tropical forests around the world have been tested by Western clinical methods. Even so, the most widely used already have commercial value rivaling that of farming and ranching. In 1992 a pair of economic botanists, Michael Balick and Robert Mendelsohn, demonstrated that single harvests of wild-grown medicinals from two tropical forest plots in Belize were worth $726 and $3,327 per hectare respectively, with labor costs thrown in. By comparison, other researchers estimated per hectare yield from tropical forest converted to farmland at $228 in nearby Guatemala and $339 in Brazil. The most productive Brazilian plantations of tropical pine could yield $3,184 per hectare from a single harvest.

In short, medicinal products from otherwise undisturbed tropical forests can be locally profitable, on condition that markets are developed and the extraction rate is kept low enough to be sustainable. And when plant and animal food products, fibers, carbon credit trades, and ecotourism are added to the mix, the commercial value of sustainable use can be boosted far higher.

Examples of the new economy in practice are growing in number. In the Peten region of Guatemala, about 6,000 families live comfortably by sustainable extraction of rainforest products. Their combined annual income is $4 million to $6 million, more than could be made by converting the forest into farms and cattle ranches.

Ecotourism remains a promising but largely untapped additional resource.

Nature's pharmacopoeia has not gone unnoticed by industry strategists. They are

well aware that even a single new molecule has the potential to recoup a large capital investment in bioprospecting and product development. The single greatest success to date was achieved with extremophile bacteria living in the boilinghot thermal springs of Yellowstone National Park. In 1983 Cetus Corporation used one of the organisms, Thermus aquaticus, to produce a heat-resistant enzyme needed for DNA systhesis. The manufacturing process, called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), is today the foundation of rapid genetic mapping, a stanchion of the new molecular biology and medical genetics.

By enabling microsocopic amounts of DNA to be multiplied and typed, PCR also plays a key role in crime detection and forensic medicine. Cetus' patents on PCR technology, which have been upheld by the courts, are immensely profitable, with annual earnings now in excess of $200 million-and growing.

Bioprospecting can serve both mainstream economics and conservation when put on a firm contractual basis. In 1991, Merck signed an agreement with Costa Rica's National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) to assist the search for new pharmaceuticals in Costa Rica's rainforests and other natural habitats. The first deposit was $1 million dispensed over two years, with two similar consecutive grants to follow. During the first period, the field collectors concentrated on plants, in the second on insects, and in the third on microorganisms. Merck is now working through the immense library of materials it gathered during the field program and testing and refining chemical extracts made from them.

Also in 1991, Syntex signed a contract with Chinese science academies to receive up to 10,000 plant extracts a year for pharmaceutical assays. In 1998, Diversa Corporation signed on with Yellowstone National Park to continue bioprospecting the hot springs for biochemicals from thermophilic microbes.

Diversa pays the park $20,000 yearly to collect the organisms for study, as well as a fraction of the profits generated by commercial development. Funds returning to Yellowstone will be used to promote

Plantlets of a Hypericum perforatum, also called St. Johns Wort. The herb is used in medicines for depression, insomnia and burn healing and is among those being actively researched by pharmaceutical companies.

Collecting samples of valuable species from rich ecosystems and cultivating them in bulk elsewhere, in biologically less favored areas, is not only profitable but the most sustainable of all.

Bioprospecting with minimal disturbance is the way of the future.

conservation of the unique microbes and their habitat, as well as basic scientific research and public education.

Still other agreements have been signed between NPS Pharmaceuticals and the government of Madagascar, between Pfizer and the New York Botanical Garden, and between the international company GlaxoSmithKline and a Brazilian pharmaceutical company, with part of the profits pledged to the support of Brazilian science.

Perhaps it is enough to argue that the preservation ofthe living world is necessary to our long-term material prosperity and health. But there is another, and in some ways deeper, reason not to let the natural world slip away. It has to do with the defining qualities and self-image of the human species. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that new species can one day be engineered and stable ecosystems built fi'om them. With that distant prospect in mind, should we go ahead and, for short-term gain, allow the original species and ecosystems to be lost?

Yes? Erase Earth's living history? Then also bum the art galleries, make cordwood ofthe

musical instruments, pulp the musical scores, erase Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Goethe, and the Beaties too, because all these-or at least fairly good substitutescan be re-created.

The issue, like all great decisions, is moral. Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do. The ethic from which moral decisions spring is a norm or standard of behavior in support of a value, and value in turn depends on purpose. Purpose, whether personal or global, whether urged by conscience or graven in sacred script, expresses the image we hold of ourselves and our society.

A conservation ethic is that which aims to pass on to future generations the best part of the nonhuman world. To know this world is to gain a proprietary attachment to it. To know it well is to love and take responsibility for it.

0 About the Author: Edward 0. Wilson is Pellegrino University professor and curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

hen he heard that Palm Beach yachtsmen were shooting brown pelicans for sport as the ponderous birds flew to their nests on a small island not far from Melbourne, Florida, President Theodore Roosevelt reportedly asked an aide, "Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a federal bird reservation?"

"No," the aide replied. "The island is federal property."

"Very well, then, I so declare it."

The exchange may be apocryphal, but Roosevelt did sign an executive order, 100 years ago in March, creating Pelican Island Reservation, the first federal bird preserve and the first piece of the vast patchwork of sanctuaries known as the National Wildlife Refuge System.

The refuge system marked its centennial with special events at Pelican Island and other refuges and, in November, with an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Totaling nearly 38,445,600 hectares, or roughly the size of Montana, the system

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consists of 540 refuges spread across all 50 states and 12 U.S. territories and possessions. National parks cover 13 percent less land but seem to get all the glory because "parks are for people," says Daniel Ashe, the refuge system's chief. "Refuges are for wildlife." They protect the llist existing habitats for some of the most endangered animals and plants, including the lightfooted clapper rai I, desert pupfish, leatherback sea turtle, American crocodile and green pitcher-plant. The refuge system is "one of this country's greatest conservation success stories," says Eric Jay Dolin, author of The Smithsonian Book of National Wildlife Refuges, published by Smithsonian Institution Press. (The photographs here are from the book.)

By the late 19th century, conservationists had already begun focusing public attention on the consequences of industrial-scale hunting. By then, the nearly countless bison that once thundered across the plains were a memory.

Passenger pigeons, once so plentiful that naturalist John James Audubon reported seeing a flock of more than a billion in Kentucky in 1813, no longer

filled the sky, driven to extinction by hunters wielding huge nets to meet the demand for pigeon meat.

But nothing galvanized opposition to wholesale slaughter more than the plume trade. Fashionable turn-of-the-century women promenaded in hats resplendent with feathers or even entire stuffed birds.

In 190 I, the American Ornithologists Union persuaded Florida lawmakers to protect nongame birds, but the state didn't have the manpower to enforce the laws, and the shooting continued. That's when Roosevelt, alerted to the killing by conservationists, created the Pelican Island refuge, where U.S. warden Paul Kroegel, newly hired for $1 a month, protected the birds from poachers.

It wasn't the first time the federal government sought to spare wildlife by setting aside land. In 1869, two years after the United States bought the Alaskan territory from Russia, Congress created a sanctuary in the Pribilof Islands to preserve fur seal rookeries. And in 1894, lawmakers made it a crime to harm wildlife within Yellowstone National Park, which had been established 22 years earlier. But Conservationist John Muir with President Theodore Roosevelt on Yosemite's Glacier Point in 1903 (left). Muir is credited with urging creation of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks and helping raise the President's environmental awareness. Roosevelt. a hunter himself, was apalled by the wholesale slaughter of mammals (right, above, bison skulls) and birds, which were killed by the millions for their feathers (right). Paul Kroegel (far right, in Florida) was the rejilge system's first warden.

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historians credit Roosevelt-a Republican who was, famously, an avid big game hunter-with making the first concerted federal effort to protect wildlife. In his two terms as President (1901 to 1909), he created 51 bird refuges in 17 states and three territories as well as five national parks and 150 national forests.

Some critics charged that his actions were undemocratic for bypassing Congress. "If this practice is to continue, there is no telling how many bird preserves we may have or how much of the territory of the Union these federal bird preserves may ultimately cover," Wyoming congressman Franklin W. Mondell harrumphed in 1909. Since then, debate has largely centered on the question of how much human enterprise the refuges can withstand and still protect wildlife. Today, hunting is allowed on more than half of national refuges-an important tool in managing wildlife. After careful review, regulators also permit public and private parties to conduct business on a particular refuge, including

Recreational activities, such as hunting andjishing (above, at Alabama:S Choctaw refuge), and even commercial endeavors (oil drilling, left, at Louisiana:S Lacassine refuge) may take place on protected land if they don ~ threaten or otherwise bother wildlife.

Refuge locations range ji-om the extremely remote to the exurban.

Above: The Philadelphia skyline seen from the John Heinz refuge.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 tripled the Us. refuge system by adding and expanding six others to protect both wildlife (left, above, a brown bear) and flora. The Florida Panther refuge (left, a male panther) protects habitat critical to the species, which numbers only 30 to 50 individuals in the wild.

livestock grazing, logging, military exercises, farming, oil drilling or gas drilling.

A proposal to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic ational Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)-the largest single refuge, at 7.8 million hectares~was the subject of heated debate until the Democrat-controlled Senate killed it in 2002. Now that Republicans are in the majority in both the House and Senate, the Arctic drilling plan is likely to be revived. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that ANWR's 607,000-hectare coastal plain contains between 4.3 billion and 11.9 billion barrels of recoverable oil. (Americans use roughly seven billion barrels annually.) Proponents include Alaska's

governor Frank Murkowski, a Republican, who has argued that "safe development of ANWR represents a great step forward in our national and economic security." Environmentalists oppose the plan, saying those pristine land would be put at risk to obtain relatively small amounts of oil that Americans could readily save by conserving energy.

Among the opponents is Theodore Roosevelt IV, great-grandson of the President. "If we did [allow drilling]," he recently told CBS News, "future generations will look back on us and say, 'What was wrong with those people?'"

Whatever the outcome of the next ANWR debate, few would quarrel with

the original Theodore Roosevelt's belief that refuges are of "capital importance" in protecting wildlife. "To lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm," he wrote in his 1916 memoir, Book-Lover s Holidays in the Open, "or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad ofterns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach-why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time."

-John

F. Ross

About the Author: John F Ross is a senior editor with Smithsonian.

ower or ennles A lightweight wind turbine is finallv on the horizon-and it might just be the breakthrough needed to give fossil fuels a run for their money

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he newest wind turbine standing at Rocky Flats in Colorado, the U.S. Department of Energy's proving ground for wind power technologies, looks much like any other apparatus for capturing energy from wind: a boxy turbine sits atop a steel tower that sprouts two propeller blades stretching a combined 40 metersalmost half the length of a football field. Wind rushes by, blades rotate, and electricity flows. But there's a key difference. This prototype has flexible, hinged blades; in strong winds, they bend back slightly while spinning. The bending is barely perceptible to a casual observer, but it's a radical departure from how existing wind turbines work-and it just may change the fate of wind power.

Indeed, the success of the prototype at Rocky Flats comes at a crucial moment in the evolution of

wind power. Wind-driven generators are still a niche technology-producing less than one percent of U.S. electricity. But in 2001, 1,700 megawatts' worth of new wind capacity was installed in the United States-enough to power 500,000 housesnearly doubling the nation's wind power capacity.

And more is on the way. Manufacturers have reduced the cost of heavy-duty wind turbines fourfold since 1980, and these gargantuan machines are now reliable and efficient enough to be built offshore. An 80-turbine, $245-million wind farm under construction off the Danish coast will be the world's largest, and developers are beginning to colonize German, Dutch and British waters, too. In North America, speculators envision massive offshore wind farms near British Columbia and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

A new wind turbine prototype being tested at Rocky Flats, Colorado, by the Wind Turbine Company.

But there is still a black cloud hovering over this seemingly sunny scenario. Wind turbines remain expensive to build--Dften prohibitively so. On average, it costs about $1 million per megawatt to construct a wind turbine farm, compared to about $600,000 per megawatt for a conventional gas-fired power plant; in the economic calculations of power companies, the fact that wind is free doesn't close this gap. In short, the price of building wind power must come down if it's ever to be more than a niche technology.

And that's where the prototype at Rocky Flats comes in. The flexibility in its blades will enable the turbine to be 40 percent lighter than today's industry standard but just as capable of surviving destructive storms. And that lighter weight could mean machines that are 20 to 25 percent cheaper than today's large turbines.

Earlier efforts at lighter designs were universal failures~disabled or destroyed, some within weeks, by the wind itself. Given these failures, wind experts are understandably cautious about the latest shot at a lightweight design. But most agree that lightweight wind

turbines, if they work, will change the economic equation. "The question would become, 'How do you get the transmission capacity built fast enough to keep up with growth,' " says Ward Marshall, a wind power developer at Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power who is on the board of directors of the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group. "You'd have plenty offolks willing to sign up."

And, say experts, the Rocky Flats prototype~ designed by Wind Turbine of Bellevue, Washington~is the best hope in years for a lightweight design that will finally succeed. "I can say pretty unequivocally that this is a dramatic step in lightweight [wind turbine] technology," says Bob Thresher, director of the National Wind Technology Center at Rocky Flats. "Nobody else has built a machine that flexible and made it work."

Clouds gather above windmills at sunset on Watson's Ranch, a few kilometers north of Scottsbluff, Nevada.

Windmills became popular in the prairie states during the 1870s, pumping water for families, farm animals and crops.

Steady as She Blows Wind turbines are like giant fans run in reverse.

Instead of motor-driven blades that push the air, they use airfoils that catch the wind and crank a generator that pumps out electricity. Many oftoday's turbines are mammoth machines with three-bladed rotors that span 80 meters-20 meters longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. And therein lies the technology challenge.

The enormous size is needed if commercial wind turbines are to compete economically because power production rises exponentially with blade length. But these vast structures must be rugged enough to endure gales and extreme turbulence.

In the 1970s and ' 80s, U.S. wind energy pioneers made the first serious efforts at fighting these forces with lightweight, flexible machines. Several startups installed thousands of such wind turbines; most were literally torn apart or disabled by gusts. Taking lightweight experimentation to the extreme, General Electric and Boeing built much larger prototypes-behemoths with 80-, 90and even 100-meter-long blades. These also proved prone to breakdown; in some cases their blades bent back and actually struck the towers.

All told, U.S. companies and the Department of Energy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on these failed experiments in the 1980s and early 1990s. "The American model has always gravitated toward the light and the sophisticated and things that didn't work," says James Manwell, a mechanical engineer who leads the University of Massachusetts's renewable-energy research laboratory in Amherst.

Into these technology doldrums sailed researchers from Denmark's Ris0 National Laboratory and Danish companies like Vestas Wind Systems. During the past two decades they perfected a heavy-duty version of the wind turbine-and it has become the Microsoft Windows of the wind power industry. Today, this Danish design accounts for virtually all of the electricity generated by wind worldwide. Perhaps reflecting national inclinations, these sturdy Danish designs had little of the aerodynamic flash of the earlier U.S. wind turbines; they were simply braced against the wind with heavier, thicker steel and composite materials. They were tough, rugged-and they worked.

What's more, in recent years, power electronics-digital silicon switches that massage the flow of electricity from the machine-further improved the basic design.

Previously, the turbine's rotor was held to a constant rate of rotation so its alternating-current output would be in sync with the power grid; the new devices maintain the synchronization while allowing the rotor to freely speed up and slow down with the wind. "If you get a gust, the rotor can accelerate instead of just sitting there and receiving the brute force of the wind," says Manwell.

Mastering such strains enabled the Danish design to grow larger and larger. Whereas in the early 1980s a typical commercial machine had a blade span of 12.5 meters and could produce 50 kilowatts-enough for about a dozen homes-today's biggest blades stretch 80 meters and crank out two megawatts; a single machine can power more than 500 homes.

The newest challenge facing the Danish design is finding ways for it to weather the cOITosive and punishing offshore environment, where months can pass before a mechanic can safely board and fix a turbine. Vestas, UP for one, is equipping its turbines with sensors on each of their components to detect wear and tear, and backup systems to take over in the case of, say, a failure in the power electronics.

Vestas's approach was tested last summer, as Denmark's power supplier began installing 80 Vestas machines in shallow water 14 to 20 kilometers off the Danish coastline. It will be the world's biggest offshore wind farm, powering as many as 150,000 Danish households.

If a lightweight wind turbine finallv succeeds, costs will drop so much that the question will become "How do vou get transmission capacitv built fast enough to keep with growth;'''

A lighter, cheaper turbine Hinged blades and sophisticated control systems allow the lightweight turbine to survive storms and gusts.

In normal conditions: Blades spin freely, the entire turbine swivels according to wind direction, and a gearbox amplifies blade rotation speed so a generator can produce power.

In high wind or erratic conditions: Hydraulic dampers allow blades to flex up to 15 degrees downwind and five degrees upwind to shed excess wind force. Control systems include a brake to slow blade spin and a yaw drive to counteract swiveling.

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Wind Shadows These upgrades will make big, heavy turbines more reliable, but they don't add up to a fundamental shift in the economics of wind power. Nations like Denmark and Germany are prepared to pay for wind power partly because fossil fuels are so much more costly in Europe, where higher taxes cover environmental and health costs associated with burning them. (About 20 percent of Denmark's power comes from wind.) But for wind power to be truly cost competitive with fossil fuels in the United States, the technology must change.

What makes Wind Turbine's Rocky Flats design such a departure is not only its hinged blades, but also their downwind orientation. The Danish design faces the blades into the wind and makes the blades heavy so they won't bend back and slam into the tower. The Wind Turbine design can't face the wind-the hinged blades would hit the tower-so the rotor is positioned downwind. Finally, it uses two blades, rather than the three in the traditional design, to further reduce weight.

Advances in the computer modeling of such dangerous forces as vibration helped the design's development.

Flexible blades add an extra dimension to the machine's motion; so does the fact that the whole machine can freely swivel with the wind. (Traditional designs are driven to face the wind, then locked in place.) Predicting, detecting and preventing disasters-like rapidly shifting winds that swing a rotor upwind and send its flexible blades into the tower-are control challenges even with the best design. "If you don't get that right, the machine can literally beat itself to death," says Ken Deering, Wind Turbine's vice president of engineering.

Three years ago, when Wind Turbine's prototype was erected at Rocky Flats, there were worries that this machine, too, would beat itself to death. Thresher says some of his staff feared that the machine, like its 1980s predecessors, would not long escape the scrap heap. Today, despite some minor setbacks, those doubts are fading.

Emboldened by its early success, Wind Turbine has installed, near Lancaster, California, a second proto-

Worries over the environ路 mental effects of burning fossil fuels and political concerns about an overde路 pendence on petroleum are spurring a boom in wind turbine construction. But it is advances in the technol路 ogV itself that could provide the impetus for increased use of wind power.

type, with a larger, 48-meter blade span. By the end of this year, the company expects to boost blade length on this machine to 60 meters-full commercial size.

What's more, this new prototype has a thinner tower, aimed at reducing the noisy thump--known as a "wind shadow"-that can occur each time a blade whips through the area of turbulent air behind the tower. And with its lighter weight, the turbine could be mounted atop higher towers, reaching up to faster winds.

Becalmed Whatever the advances in technology, however, the wind power industry still faces significant hurdles, starting with uncertain political support in the United States. In Europe, wind power is already a relatively easy sell. But in the United States, wind developers rely on federal tax credits to make a profit. These vital credits face chronic opposition from powerful oil and coal lobbies and often lapse. The wind power industry raced to plug in its turbines before these credits expired at the end of last year, then went dormant for the three months it took the U.S. Congress to renew them. Congress extended the credits through the end of next year, initiating what is likely to be yet another start-and-stop development cycle.

A second obstacle to broad adoption is the wind itself. It may be free and widely accessible, but it is also frustratingly inconsistent. Just ask any sailor. And this fickleness translates into intermittent power production. The more turbines get built, the more their intermittency will complicate the planning and management of large flows of power across regional and national power grids. Indeed, in west Texas, a recent boom in wind turbine construction is straining the region's transmission lines-and also producing power out of sync with local needs: wind blows during cool nights and stalls on hot days when people most need electricity.

Texas utilities are patching the problem by expanding transmission lines. But to really capture the value of wind power on a large scale, new approaches are needed to storing wind power when it's produced and releasing it when needed. The Electric Power Research Institute, a utility- funded R&D consortium in Palo Alto, California, is conducting research on how to make better one-day-ahead wind predictions. More important, it is exploring ways to store energy when the wind is blowing. "We need to think about operating an electrical system rather than just focusing on the wind turbines," says Chuck McGowin, manager for wind power technology at the institute. Storage facilities "would allow us to use what we have more efficiently, improve the value of it."

In the northwest United States, one storage option being developed by the Portland, Oregon-based

DON RYAN/AP/WWP

Wind turbines tower over a tractor and plow tilling farmland near Wasco, Oregon. Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, one of the world's leading wind turbine manufacturers, has shifted the headquarters of its American subsidiary to Portland, Oregon, from California.

Vestas was motivated to choose Portland because of the growing popularity of wind power in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Columbia River Gorge.

Bonneville Power Administration balances wind power with hydroelectric power. The idea is simple: when the wind is blowing, don't let the water pass through the hydroelectric turbines; on calm days, open up the gates.

And the Tennessee Valley Authority is even experimenting with storing energy in giant fuel cells; a pilot plant is under construction in Mississippi.

Wind power faces plenty of obstacles, but there's more reason than ever to believe these obstacles will be overcome. Worries over the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels and political concerns about an overdependence on petroleum are spurring a boom in wind turbine construction. But it is advances in the

technology itself, created by continued strong research efforts, that could provide the most critical impetus for increased use of wind power.

At Rocky Flats, four rows of research turbines-a total of a dozen machines ranging from 400-watt battery a chargers to grid-ready 600-kilowatt machines-share boulder-strewn lIS-hectare plain. With the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop, their blades whup against the breezes blowing in from El Dorado Canyon to the west.

At least, they do much of the time. "We have a lot of calm days, in the summer in particular, and for a testing site it's good to have a mix," Thresher says.

Calm days may be good for wind turbine research, but they're still among the biggest concerns haunting wind turbine commercialization. While no technology can make the wind blow, lower-cost, reliable technologies appear ready to take on its fickleness. And that could mean a wind turbine will soon sprout atop a breezy hill near you.

0 About the Author: Peter Fairley is a freelance writer on environmental and technology issues based in Victoria, British Columbia.

in India as it creates a 'bat and ball menmitted to MLB International headtality,''' Dell admits. Dedin, who saw quarters in New York, he complicricket being played for the first time in mented the Indian players and sughis life agrees. "The players were very gested more such visits to South comfortable catching and throwing as Asia for the development of game in well as swinging a bat. Cricket will future. "I wrote in my report that certainly supply a number of baseball there is a huge potential for the game players in the same fashion that baseball to develop quickly through the supplies softball players in America," school system and the Indian federahopes the confident coach. "It is like a tion. Presently, we are planning to karate player shifting to boxing," chips assist the federation on the national in Dell. and the state level in conducting But that's were the similarities end. coach certification courses. Some of In cricket, a "fielder" does not catch the these courses will run for six weeks ball with gloves on (except the wicketand others for two days. Once these keeper who stands behind the batsman ~ coaches return to their schools and or "batter" as Americans call a player ~ clubs, they will be able to organize holding the bat); there are II players in ~ teams and train players which I a cricket team instead of nine as in base~ augurs well for Indian baseball," ball; instead of four bases as in baseball ~ Dell tells about MLB's future plans. there are only two in cricket; and so Dedin, on the other hand, was greaton ... "It's not much different and that's ~ ly impressed with the physique of the reason why we didn't have any ;2Indian players. "This is my maiden MLB coaches Dedin (left) and Dell in Chandigarh . problem switching over to baseball. -------------------voyage to India, in fact Asia, but it What these coaches have done is that they have taught us the has left an indelible mark on my mind. I found the players very technicalities of the game of which we were not aware earlier," athletic and way ahead of their counterparts in South America explains 19-year-old Suryanath from New Delhi who bartered where I had gone to conduct similar clinics," he says. his cricket bat for a baseball bat a few years ago and is now a The American duo promised Indians that they'll be back member of the Indian baseball team. He was not the only one to again. Their next visit will be something which up and coming have benefited fi'om the coaching camp. baseball players will be eagerly looking forward to. Says Raju, Around 10 baseball coaches who also attended Dell and one of the campers: "We will continue to play the game in the Dedin's classes could not hide their excitement. "Whatever we same way, like in the last two decades-without much expectahave learnt here will hold us in good stead in future. We should tions. However, if MLB sends such coaches from time to time, not be surprised if baseball gains popularity in our country. The the future of the game could change forever."

0 only thing is that such camps should be held on regular basis," Manoj, a baseball coach, said optimistically. This is something About the Author: Jyoti Sharma is a freelance writer based in Chandigarh which Dell has planned out for India. In his detailed report sub-

l

Baseball in India: The Story So Far... he Amateur Baseball Federation of India (ABFl) was founded in 1983.

However, 20 years down the line the country is still awaiting its first baseball stadium. In the absence of any infrastructure, the young enthusiasts from various states and clubs have to make do with rented playgrounds normally used for football and athletics. India has no standing anywhere in Asian baseball rankings. Even

IT

small countries like Singapore and Philippines are way ahead of it. But this doesn't deter the ABFl officials. "We won a bronze medal in 1995 and a silver in 1999 in the Asian Baseball Championship which was played between countries having lower rankings in Asia. It's no mean achievement considering the fact that we still don't have even a single stadium for the game," states P.C. Bhardwaj, secretary general of ABFI.

Bhardwaj was candid enough to admit that it will take no less than 10 years to get anywhere close to Asian baseball powers like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China.

"You can't compete with them. They are way ahead of us in terms of infrastructure.

But if Major League continues to take interest in developing the game here, we can produce good players in the coming times," Bhardwaj says.

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"My first five marriages were solid-it:S

the one I'm in now that's giving me problems. "

Copyright to The j ew Yorker Collection 2002 J.c. Duffy from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

"There are a lot of extras-the wheels cost extra ... the seats cost extra .. the sunroof costs extra ...

Copyright

to The

ew Yorker Collection 2002 Robert Mankoff from Canoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

from

CORPORATE

RICA More and more women are abandoning big companies to strike out on their own

00

ivorce, dumping, or abandonent: Call it what you like, but many women are trading in Corporate America for entrepreneurship. According to Cheskin Research, they are starting businesses at twice the rate of men and have become a major force in both the traditional and the e-business marketplace. The Center for Women's Business Research estimates that, as of 2002, there are 6.2 million women-owned businesses, employing 9.2 million workers and generating $1.15 trillion in annual revenue.

In the interest of security, women used to be willing to channel their time, energy, and effort to the corporation's needs at the expense of fulfilling their own professional goals-but no more. In starting their own businesses, they're seeking freedom, flexibility, recognition, more money, and opportunities to leave a legacy-all of the

things they once thought they would find within corporations.

Dorothy Perrin Moore, author of Careerpreneurs: Lessons from Leading Women Entrepreneurs on Building a Career Without Boundaries, claims women are breaking away from the constraints of corporate life in record numbers to seek professional fulfillment in their own ways. She refers to it as the organizational push and entrepreneurial pull.

Praise) Jes. Ownership) No Is Corporate America actively pushing out its most talented women? Despite the diversity initiatives that have proliferated in recent years, many organizations still unconsciously treat their women as second-class citizens. Nobody knows this better than Kay Koplovitz, who founded USA Networks and ran it for 21 years. In 1997, USA Networks became a bargaining chip in an unpleasant lawsuit between

Viacom and MCA, and was sold for $4.5 billion. Since Koplovitz had no equity in the company, not a dime of the sale proceeds came her way. "Hell, when I started out in cable in the early I970s, it wasn't just male-dominated. It was male," she says. "The boys had always treated me cordially, had always lavished praise on my performance. But they had never, not even remotely, been ready to make room for me as a co-owner."

Her goal had been to take USA Networks public to recoup her investment; when that didn't happen, she suddenly found herself looking to buy a new company. Despite her extensive experience, she found that women remained at a distinct disadvantage in raising venture capital-at the time, in 1997, only 1.7 percent of venture capital was going to businesses owned or run by women. This spurred Koplovitz, along with some other seasoned and well-connected women, to form Boldcap Ventures LLC, an angel fund for high-net-worth women investors intended to help women start and grow businesses. Although the fund is in its infancy, Koplovitz says, "We have funded three companies: an agribusiness, a cancer diagnostic, and an online security company."

Koplovitz shares her experience with other women entrepreneurs as chair of both Broadway Television etwork and the National Women's Business Council. She also continues to run her angel fund and has authored Bold Women, Big Ideas: Learning to Play the High-Risk Entrepreneurial Game.

What Really lHl;lksOut the Door?

Koplovitz's situation is not an isolated example. According to a study by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business and the professions, 29 percent of women business owners with prior private-sector experience cited glass-ceiling issues as the major reason for leaving

corporate positions. Of those women, 44 percent felt their contributions were not recognized or valued.

Sheila Wellington, Catalyst's president, shares one survey respondent's experience: "'I worked for a corporation in the area, and I just got tired of people coming in, especially male counterparts, who were being promoted above me.'" Onethird of the women surveyed agreed with the statement "you were not taken seriously by your employer or supervisor."

Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said that nothing would attract them back to the corporate world; 24 percent could be lured back by more money, and 11 percent by greater flexibility. In fact, lack offlexibility is an even bigger problem for women in Corporate America than glassceiling issues: 51 percent of the women surveyed cited the desire for more flexibility as the major reason for leaving corporate positions.

What are the repercussions of these results for corporations? "As women walk out the door after years of training," Wellington says, "what really walks out is the potential that those women would have brought to Corporate America."

If anything, women's reluctance to conform to corporate strictures will become even more pronounced as the younger generation enters the workforce and starts ascending the corporate ladder. Marilyn Moats Kennedy, managing partner of Wilmette, Illinois-based Career Strategies, indicates that the women she sees are perfectly willing to work for a Fortune 500 for a few years as a learning experience. Then they're gone.

Kennedy says: "When I've done focus groups with junior and senior women at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, they see corporations as places to hone your skills, but not to stay long-term.

They object to office politics, asking, "Why do I have to toady to some old guy who

ceased to be productive years ago?' They don't value longevity. They don't care about seniority. They want to control their work lives, especially their hours."

A TfOmanTakes On the Bear Market Linda Darragh, vice president of the Women's Business Development Center in Chicago, notes that some of the most successful women business owners are refugees from Corporate America. They have been trained there and built their contacts and knowledge base there over the years. Then they find a market niche that is not being served by their employer, or they arrive upon an idea that complements the business in which they have developed expertise. "These women are the risk-takers who jump from Corporate America to pursue entrepreneurship," Darragh says.

Consider Maxine Clark, founder and CEB (Chief Executive Bear) of St. Louisbased Build-a-Bear Workshops, which designs customized teddy bears and has retail stores across the United States. In

ecutive suite: "The business and the rewards have far exceeded my wildest expectations. The smiles on the kids' faces are worth all the hard work!"

While some women choose entrepreneurship after experiencing all that corporations have to offer, others don't consider the prospect until it falls into their laps.

Take Jane Applegate, founder and CEO of SBTY.com (Small Business Television), a multimedia Web site for business owners that has produced custom video and print content for MasterCard and other clients.

"I never set out to be an entrepreneur," she says. "My small-business column for the Los Angeles Times had become very popular after five million corporate workers lost their jobs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When my first book was published in 1991, I hit the lecture circuit and was unable to keep my newspaper job."

Applegate has founded three successful companies, including a strategic consulting firm and two media companies. "The amazing people I interviewed every day for my columns and books inspired me to start my own business," she says. "I've

Corporations (Jalsely think the lack of senior women has no business impact.))

1972, Clark began her career as a trainee for May Department Stores and climbed the ropes to become president of Payless ShoeSource until she left in 1996.

After running a $2.5 billion retail shoe chain, she was ready to create something of her own. "I wanted to do something more creative and important and leave a legacy behind," she says. "1 loved retailing and wanted to continue to work in a field that had been so good to me."

Although her corporate position was difficult to give up, the fun had gone out of it.

And for Clark, the fun and the emotional aspects of her work are just as important as anything else. When asked if she would do it all over again, Clark's response is one you rarely hear coming out of the ex-

never regretted living the entrepreneurial life, although it has been filled with financial ups and downs." Applegate is currently serving as Sprint's small-business spokesperson, consulting for J.P. Morgan Chase and other clients, and promoting her most recent books, 201 Great Ideas for Your Small Business and The Entrepreneur:S Desk Reference.

Cutting )em Off at the Feet Still other women are looking for entrepreneurial opportunities from the day they start their corporate careers. Upon finishing college, Sara Blakely, CEO and founder of Atlanta-based Spanx, started on the corporate track in the sales group at Danka, a $3 billion office-equipment

company. "When I was working at Danka, I was constantly waiting and wanting to really start my own business," she says.

"In order to be true to yourself, you need to go the self-employed route."

The seed for her new business was planted as she got ready for a party and was anxious about how she could wear her slim-fit designer pants with swanky open-toed sandals and sti 11look svelte.

She grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the feet off of a pair of pantyhose; the pantyhose went on, and the pants looked perfect. As the evening wore on, however, "the stockings rolled up my legs," she says. "If! had this problem, other women must too." A product was born: Spanx, a footless pantyhose.

During her final months at Danka, she formulated plans to launch her company.

Even before turning in her resignation, she had already secured contracts with Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. With orders in hand and only $5,000 in personal savings, she took the plunge. Blakely prefers not to divulge annual sales volume yet, but she is happy to say that Spanx has been profitable every month since launch.

One inspired piece of marketing has helped generate those profits: Blakely sent a sample gift box of Spanx to Oprah Winfrey, who liked the product so much that she asked the entrepreneur to be a guest on her show, and later christened Spanx her favorite product of the year. "I didn't have any money for advertising, and to reach seven million television viewers was any entrepreneur's dream come true in building awareness of a brand," says Blakely.

Delivering the Numbers Like many women entrepreneurs, Blakely enthusiastically offers encouragement to her would-be compatriots. "If you have a great idea, don't wait for the right time," she says. "Just make it happen."

Given the increase in women-owned businesses, a large number of women appear to be following Blakely's upbeat advice. Sandra Peterson, senior vice president of health businesses for Medco Health Solutions-a $29 billion, wholly owned subsidiary of Merck & Co.-sus-

pects she knows the reasons for the massive exodus of talented women from Corporate America. "Many corporations do not think women are critical to their bottom line," she says. "They falsely think the lack of senior women has no business impact. Corporations that put focus and energy into mentoring women, especially by the most senior male executives, make a difference. They need to nurture them, especially the thirtysomethings who have years to go in their career development.

Women progressing up the corporate ladder who find themselves in a hostile environment and without that support often choose to make a career change. They are more willing to take the risk of leaving and starting a new career and in many cases become entrepreneurs."

Why, then, has Peterson chosen to remain with a large corporation? "I have been able to change the environment that 1 work in," she says. "( bting in talented women to work with and then 1 deliver the numbers. Ultimately, it's not about gender--it is all about the numbers and delivering the goods."

As women gain credibility by delivering the numbers, they have the opportunities to make bigger changes, as Peterson would like: "1 want to create a change across America. 1 want to see that women have equal opportunity within a workplace and that 1 can make a positive impact on our society as a whole," she says.

with more control over their work lives in order to manage the overlap between their work and their outside lives. As with most initiatives, atiiculating the business rationale for flexibi Iity is a key step to making it work, as is support from senior managers. Another important element is to focus on work productivity, as opposed to hours spent in the office.

Increase the number of opportunities for women to use their entrepreneurial skills within companies. More and more corporations are learning that they need women with entrepreneurial skills to

Further, to encourage women to take on these kinds of assignments, companies must profile the rewards involved, provide support on obvious high-risk assignments, and empower women to make decisions and exercise independence.

Work to identify women professionals and managers with entrepreneurial abilities and interests early in their careers.

Companies that do not back women at the outset or that do not hold managers accountable for developing and promoting female talent will ultimately fail to retain high-potential women. But for

thrive in the global business climate.

The same risk-taking, innovation, and leadership skills required to launch a business are also needed within established organizations.

One way to go about this is to put more women in sales, since it is one of the most visible entrepreneurial areas within an organization; another is to place more women in start-ups, turnarounds, business and new-product development, and international assignments, which offer challenges to those employees with entrepreneurial abilities.

those that do, diversity can be a cornerstone of the company's success instead of just a buzzword.

Take J.P. Morgan Chase, a Fortune 50 financial-services company with a focus on commercial and investment banking.

Conducting business with 32 million consumers throughout the United Sates and serving a client base in more than 180 countries, Chase breeds continual change in its culture along with a big push to enable women to succeed. for Chase, there are four key initiatives that come into play for a winning approach

I(eeping Them in the Fold But what is Corporate America doing to keep women like Peterson, who want to work for change within the system rather than abandon what they see as a sinking ship? So far, not enough.

According to the Catalyst study, companies need to focus on providing flexibility, as well as continuing challenges and opportunities for personal growth, to retain women whom they view as high-potential or who are already significant contributors.

The study reports a five-step recommendation plan to help companies find and keep top-caliber women: Increase flexibility. Companies should offer part-time arrangements and other forms of flexibility, providing women

to diversity and one that advances women: communication, work and life issues, training, and mentoring and networking programs.

Since inaugurating the four-pronged approach to diversity, the number of high-potential women at Chase increased across all organizational levels, with a particularly notable increase in higher-level management women-from 19 percent in 1996 to 24 percent in 1999.

Chase managers at all levels are held accountable for developing and managing a formal diversity plan and for their results, which are measured using a "diversity scorecard."

Managers report scorecard results to the CEO, share them with others, and have their bonuses based on them.

Recognize and reward women s bottom-line contributions, and articulate the business case for retaining women. Companies need to examine the extent to which women are represented in line functions and to which their contributions are acknowledged and rewarded.

They also need to develop a solid business case for why women are critical to the advancement of the business.

Furthermore, they need to ensure that male managers buy in and feel account-

able for recognizing and rewarding women's contributions.

Recruit female entrepreneurs to corporate boards and senior line positions.

In addition to business experience, women business owners could offer firsthand knowledge of the entrepreneurial mindset and offer insight for companies into how they could expand entrepreneurial opportunities within their business organizations.

IBM is a good example: It believes that women playa significant role in the ongoing success of the company and is dedicated to playing both a direct and indirect role in the future successes of women entrepreneurs.

To enhance its position as a premier employer for women of talent and ambition, IBM devotes a portion of its Web site

'11Natural Condition)) "I believe that growth of women entrepreneurship is beyond a trend. It's here to stay," says Karen Kerrigan, CEO and founder of Women Entrepreneurs Inc., a business association based in Oakton, Virginia. "After all, women as entrepreneurs, at least to me, is such a natural condition."

The rise in female entrepreneurship is not only good for women-it's good for the economy. The 2002 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, published by Babson College, London Business School, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is a study that documents the relationship between global entrepreneurship and economic expansion. According to the study, entrepreneurship is one of the best indicators of a country's economic successand a good way to accelerate the pace of entrepreneurial activity is to encourage women to participate.

Then who loses out? America's leading corporations could, unless they turn the entrepreneurial abilities of their female executives to their advantage. Ray Smilor, co-author of Daring Visionaries: How Entrepreneurs Build Companies, Inspire

((Growth of women entrepreneurs is beyond a trend. It)s here to stay. )) to women entrepreneurs, where women executives can learn about women's business organizations, online communities, techno logy offerings, and business resources. It also hosts a Global Women's Leadership Conference, attended by more than 170 women from 22 countries. The conference's goal is to sustain focus on the bridge between the workplace and the marketplace, share accomplishments, measure IBM's progress on advancement of women, develop strategies for advancing women in the new millennium, and understand the impact of e-business on women. These efforts have paid off: At IBM, women represent 30 percent of the global population and over 22 percent of the management team.

Allegiance, and Create Wealth, says that businesswomen are leaving Corporate America because "they want the chance to create corporate cultures that reflect values that are important to them, the freedom to shape more meaningful and flexible lifestyles, and the rewards-psychological as well as financial-that can come from building their own ventures." If women can find these opportunities within the context of a corporate career, companies will be the ones that benefit.

0

About the Author: Laurel Delaney is founder of GlobeTrade.com, a Chicago-based global marketing and consulting company. She is currently working on her book "Women Entrepreneurs Take on the World. "

Setting a course for the solar system s last unexplored realm I

ipsqueak planet or colossal comet? either? Just plain weird? One thing is certain about tiny, enigmatic Pluto. Since its discovery in 1930, it has cast a spell over both scientists and the general public.

"People just love that thing," says Alan Stem, a solar system scientist who confesses to deep infatuation himself. Yet more than 13 years after the Voyager spacecraft reached Uranus and Neptune, Pluto and the realm of icy miniplanets beyond it remain unexplored, the solar systern's last patch of terra incognita.

It has taken even longer to get a Pluto mission close to reality-30 years-than it will to cross the 4.8 billion kilometers to reach it. Now, finally, solar system explorers are confident they will be crossing Pluto off their to-do list before most of them retire. Last year the U.S. House Appropriations Committee endorsed $105 million for NASA to continue development of a half-ton probe called New Horizons, matching what the Senate OK'd in July last year. Insiders say the endorsement almost guarantees ew Horizons a line in the fmal fiscal year 2003 budget.

This big down payment on a projected $488 million total tab should make it tough for ASA to scuttle the mission, even though it punted on half a dozen earlier Pluto proposals-some because of cost, others perhaps because of an intensifYing debate about what Pluto really is.

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Artist's impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt object. The sun, more than 6. 7 billion kilometers away, shines as a bright star embedded in the glow of the zodiacal dust cloud.

Weird world.

That mystery is part of what draws enthusiasts, including the thousands who supported New Horizons in letters to U.S. Congress and the scientific review panels that gave it top priority. Instead of a tiny and marginal planet, scientists now think Pluto may be the king of comets-the largest known member of the newly discovered realm of icy bodies called the Kuiper Belt. Settling its nature up close is a major reason for visiting it. So is inspecting its Kuiper Belt kin fat1her out.

Many of these millions of balls of ice, rock, and frozen gases should be virtually unchanged since the solar system formed more than 4 billion years ago.

No one is happier that the space probe is on the home stretch to reality than 44-year-old Stern, director of the Southwest Research Institute's Space Studies Depatiment in Boulder, Colorado. Stem is principal investigator for New Horizons, which involves his company as well as the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and many other institutions. And he is astronomy's head cheerleader for Pluto, having pumped for a mission for years. "This is true frontline exploration.

ASA is a frontier organization, and as the frontier moves, it must follow," he says.

Stern was a teenager when NASA canceled its first mission to Pluto in 1972. As he went to work researching comets and the far

reaches of the sun's neighborhood through the 1980s and '90s, a series of other Pluto missions got axed, including one multibillion-dollar project that would have plunked probes right onto Pluto. The most recent, a "Pluto-Kuiper Express," got dinged by NASA in 2000 as the agency poured energy into salvaging a Mars exploration program plagued by hardware failures and as the mission's projected costs soared past $800 million.

Pluto's shifting status may also have played a role. "The justification for the mission didn't stay put," said University of Hawaii astronomer David Jewitt, who in 1992 was a codiscoverer of the first Kuiper Belt object other than Pluto itself. "First it was the smallest, freakiest planet; now it's the biggest KBO." Then there's the distance. NASA boss Sean O'Keefe has nothing against Pluto but wants no jaunts so far out until engineers develop craft canying small nuclear reactors. The reactors would generate electricity to power instruments, a big radio transmitter, and ion rockets that could speed the trip. But it could be a long time before nukes get off the ground, because of technical challenges and Iikely regulatory roadblocks by antinuclear factions.

Scientists don't want to wait for the nukes. If Congress hangs tough this time, the plan is to use conventional rockets to launch the probe in 2006, on a journey that will take nine years.

Electricity for the camera and instruments will come not from a

Above: The clearest view yet olthe distant planet Pluto and its moon.

Charon, as revealed by NASA:SOHubble Space Telescope. The image was taken by the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on February 21, 1994, when the planet was 4.4 billion kilometers from Earth, or nearly 30 times the separation between Earth and the sun.

Right: A view allan Engine on Deep Space 1.

full-bore reactor but from a small generator powered by heat from radioactive plutonium. (Many probes use solar power, but ew Horizons is heading far from the sun.) The spacecraft will collect about five months' data as it approaches Pluto and flies on past. The close-up will surely dispel many of Pluto's mysteries, although it might not settle the largely semantic debate about whether Arizona astronomer Clyde Tombaugh was right 72 years ago when he spotted a dim dot just past eptune and concluded he had found a new planet.

Labels aside, Pluto is surely an oddball. At less than one-fifth of Earth's diameter, it's a planetary runt, yet its moon, Charon, nearly half its size, is propOltionally the biggest in the solar system. Its 248year orbit is not the near circle of other planets but ranges from 4.3 billion kilometers from the sun (putting it at times closer than Neptune) to 7.4 billion kilometers. Its air is a sometimes thing.

When relatively near the sun, as now, it has an atmosphere, mainly of nitrogen kept gaseous by feeble sunlight a tenth of one percent of its intensity at Earth. In about 20 years, as Pluto coasts outward, its air may fi'eeze and stay solid for two centuries.

Swinging low.

New Horizons will study this strange world from around 9,650 kilometers at its closest, imaging features down to the size of large buildings. Spectral chemical analysis will map

its surface minerals. The close-ups may confinTI whether-as some data fi'om eatthbound telescopes suggest-dust stonTISplay across Pluto and volcanoes spurt liquid water and ammonia on Charon.

With insufficient fuel to stop. The probe will sail past Pluto and for several years reconnoiter some of the newly found miniworlds in the Kuiper Belt. The scrutiny just might reveal some clear distinction between Pluto and these icy bodies, giving a boost to those who insist Pluto is a planet. The miniplanets are also intriguing in their own right. So far, astronomers have spotted more than 600 of them in arduous telescope surveys and project that the total might run to the millions, with 70,000 measuring at least 96 kilometers across. Just a few weeks ago Caltech astronomers reported spotting a 1,290-kilometer-wide KBO dubbed Quaoar, the biggest thing found in the solar system since Pluto in 1930.

Better Kuiper Belt censuses could come from new telescopes, including a $100 million-plus instrument called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Starting in 2011, it will be able to scan the sky for objects that move or vary their brightness every week, such as asteroids that could menace Earth, exploding stars, and KBOs. But it's not just numbers, says John Davies, a Kuiper Belt observer at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in Scotland.

"That region is far more complex than any of us dreamed."

Some of the miniplanets have orbits like Pluto's: delicately balanced in sync with giant eptune, often dipping near that planet's path. Others follow wildly eccentric orbits that range well beyond 16 billion kilometers from the sun. A third set follows nearly circular paths around 6.5 billion kilometers out, one-third farther than Neptune, leading observers like Jewitt to wonder how these fragile orbits could have survived for so long. After all, many ofthe comets that swoop past the sun, wreathing themselves in plumes of gas and dust as they warm, dwelled in the Kuiper Belt until something-perhaps the tug of another KBO-jostled them out of their orbits.

Deep freeze. In their birthplace, where they are pristine, Kuiper Belt objects should offer a deep-frozen sample of the material-initially gas and dust-that collapsed to form the sun and its family. Their motions trace out the primordial cloud's shape, and their makeup should reveal what it contained. The edge of the solar system could even hold clues about home: what went into the chemical stew of the early Earth. Mostly, KBOs should consist of water and carbon dioxide ice. But eons ofradiation may have spurred chemical reactions in the top few meters of their surfaces to leave a dark crust ("like toast," says Jewitt) that is rich in carbon and hydrocarbons. Early in the solar system's chaotic history, large Kuiper Belt bodies may have bombarded Earth, delivering not only water but also, in that organic crust, molecules that propelled life's evolution.

The wait for these revelations will be long, but Stern and his New Horizons colleagues say they can live with it. "This mission is bigger than life," says Stern, adding: "For the core group of us who have been pushing for this since 1989,2015 doesn't seem 0 so far. ... We are halfway there."

About the Author: Charles W Petit is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Rep011.

The

H~~ling Paradox Why is alternative medicine so popular?

Maybe because hard science is so successful.

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s a practicing physician, I confess that T learn about the latest medical breakthroughs while reading my morning paper. When my office mail eventually brings me the original study, my pleasure in the journal's . pristine cover and untouched pages has been diminished because the tidings arrived before the messenger. But here is why I cannot complain: The science reported in my newspaper is genuinely newsworthy, deserving its place alongside matters of state and economy. For example, two weeks ago we learned of a promising approach to the prevention of cervical cancer-a vaccine against one type of papilloma virus that is an antecedent to this malignancy. Imagine that. A vaccine for cancer! On the same day as that announcement came the first report of a vaccine that might prevent genital herpes. And then there's the ongoing news of the unraveling of the human genome in all its amazing complexity.

History will draw a line here: Before Genome and After Genome. The Rosetta stone has been found and applied to the sacred scroll, and it promises important breakfast reading for years to come.

But my morning paper, laden with science, also carries evidence of our distrust of science and our search for another kind of healing. You've seen it: a full-page adve11isement for a product that you know is too good to be true. The text has large type, a before-and-after picture, no listing of the contents of the product and a blizzard of endorsements from "scientists" and "patients" that take the place of data. These products are life extenders, fat fighters, growth-hormone releasers, relievers of limb pains, rebuilders of muscle and bone and sometimes all of the above together. I think of them as quark drugs, phantoms that if they could be studied in careful trials would soon lose the "r" for a "c" and be revealed for what they are.

But the market for such remedies is huge. Indeed, estimates are that nearly half of all adult Americans use some sort

A

of dietary supplement, and the sales of these products in 2000 amounted to more than $15 billion! I plead guilty: echinacea and ginkgo have made appearances in my medicine cabinet, as I reached for magic for some ailment or other. I had no guidance, no data of the sort a scientist should accept, no package insert. I tried them on faith. Alas, they did nothing.

The good news is that many such treatments are being systematically and carefully studied through the aegis of the National Institutes of Health; what we know thus far is that few products live up to their claims, many have the potential for toxicity and the quality control on this stuff is awful. Here is the bad news: 70 percent of us would take these products anyway, even if they were shown to be no better than snake oil. Even as science measurably changes our life and extends our life spans, as a society we are suspicious of science.

I am not a crusader against alternative medicines or its practitioners. I am all for things that make us feel better and that don't hurt us. But I do wonder at the paradox of even the most rational of us being drawn to these bottles with pictures of ugly tubers and weedlike plants on them.

Why do we become dreamy-eyed hearing the songs of the New Age pied pipers whose melodies interweave quantum physics and the workings of the colon in beautiful but completely fictional ways?

Like revivalist preachers, they invite our faith, our willingness to search for magic in ancient, undecipherable Oriental practices (as opposed to the new, quite decipherable, Western practices). In return they offer nostrums, tonics, tapes, books, diets, retreats, mantras, votive candles and cruises; they bring color, fragrance and incense to an illness experience that otherwise plays out in black and white.

In this golden age of science, disease and treatment have become demystified. If you went to a doctor clutching your stomach in days of old, the doctor, after a good bit of probing and hemming and hawing, would retreat to the dispensary and with

great

ceremony compound a mistura vividly colored in a medicinal bottle. Short of surgery or an autopsy, no one would be precisely certain what you had. But come clutching your stomach to a medical doctor these days, and after a careful history and exam, the doctor can "see" your gallbladder, measure the distress of your pancreas, examine the lining of your colon and much, much more ifneed be and then institute the precise cure.

Therein lies the rub: we are perhaps in search of something more than a curecall it healing. If you were robbed one day, and if by the next day the robber was caught and all your goods returned to you, you would only feel partly restored: you would be "cured" but not "healed": your sense of psychic violation would remain.

Similarly with illness, a cure is good, but we want the healing as well, we want the magic that good physicians provide with their personality, their empathy and their reassurance. Perhaps these were qualities that existed in abundance in the prepenicillin days when there was little else to do.

But in these days of gene therapy, increasing specialization, managed care and major time constraints, there is a tendency to focus on the illness, the cure, the magic of saving a life.

Science needs to be more cognizant of the other magic, the healing if you will, even as we reach for the proven cures. We need to develop and refine that magic of the physician-patient relationship that complements the precise pharmacologic interventions we may prescribe; we need to ensure the wholeness of our encounter with patients; we need to not lose sight of the word "caring" in our care of the patients. And doggedly, in this fashion, one patient at a time, we can restore faith in the fantastic advances of science we are privileged to witness.

D carminativa,

About the Author: Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. His latest book is The Tennis Partner.

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~EVE

KEMPER

Brushed off by local and state officials, Chad Pregracke grabbed a phone book one day, called a company named Alcoa ("because it started with A," he says) and asked for the "top guy." He eventually talked Alcoa into giving him an $8,400 start-up grant for a Mississippi cleaning project.

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fter ramming his flat-bottomed aluminum boat onto the muddy bank of a nameless island in the Mississippi River, near Grafton, Illinois, Chad Pregracke (pronounced pree-GRA-kee) leaps ashore with a shrill whoop. Within seconds, he has disappeared among logjams and high weeds, happily absorbed in his favorite outdoor pastime: collecting trash. The weather's hot, the mosquitoes are tearing him up and he's knee-deep in muck. Why is he doing this? Because he's true-blue patriot, that's why. "As a national treasure, the Mississippi River is probably more famous than the Statue of Liberty," he says, not sounding the least bit hokey about it. "We wouldn't tolerate all this garbage in Yellowstone Park or on the Mall in Washington, D.C., so why should we put up with it here?"

For Pregracke, 28, nothing beats heaping his boat with river junk and hauling the whole filthy mess back to one of the three 40-meter-Iong barges he uses as sorting depots. He lugs soggy couches, cracked toilets, sinks, furnaces, microwaves, motorcycles and lawn mowers. He piles TV sets, bowling balls and freezers on top of propane tanks and huge slabs of Styrofoam. And, yes, occasionally he does come across a bottle with a message inside-usually, "return to sender."

It's hard to think of anything this boyishly enthusiastic clean-up crusader hasn't brought to light. The cooler with the severed horse's head inside was freaky. So were the two prosthetic legs and the rubber sex doll. The grisliest find of all turned up last summer when a Pregracke helper discovered a human head on an island just north of Fort Madison, Iowa. The local police eventually detelmined that it had belonged to a suicidal young man who had jumped from a bridge a year earlier.

Mary Alice Ramirez, the director of environmental outreach at Anheuser-Busch, the big beer company in St. Louis, remembers her first phone conversation with Pregracke this way: He: "Will you give me some money?"

She: "Who are you?"

He: "I want to get rid of the garbage in the Mississippi River." ~

She: "Can you show me a proposal?"

He: "What's that?"

Ramirez invited Pregracke in for a meeting. When he showed up, the receptionist announced that some deadbeat was in the lobby. "He had a dirty T-shirt, ripped jeans, long hair and a sweaty cap," Ramirez says, "and he looked about 18."

Anheuser-Busch gave Pregracke $25,000 to help expand his Mississippi River Beautification and Restoration Project, which he was running out of his parents' house in East Moline, Illinois. That was in 1999. By now the irrepressible river rat and his ragtag crew have removed and recycled more than 800 tons of debris from the banks of the Mississippi and several tributaries between St. Louis and Minneapolis.

They've also galvanized a couple of dozen towns in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri to undertake annual cleanups of their own. Because of Pregracke, groups that don't usually collaborate, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and environmentalists, now often find themselves working shoulder to shoulder. "We all have our own agendas, but Chad brings people together," says Christine Favilla, a project manager with the Sierra Club in Tllinois.

It won't be long, ifPregracke has his way, before his motto "Coming to a river near you" will be spoken in many languages. Last year at an environmental conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, "I worked out a deal to bring 10 to 15 Russians over here in August to teach them everything T know-the right equipment, how to organize community cleanups," he says. " ext I'll bring some people from China."

Pregracke grew up beside the Mississippi. From his boyhood home in East Moline, where his dad taught high school and his mom directed a child care program, he could take a few running steps and jump right in the water. He and his older brother, Brent, fished and dove for mussels. Nights they camped out like Huck Finn and Jim. Pregracke loved it, except for one thing: too many people treated the river and the shoreline like a dump.

"Sometimes people get upset if you take their trash, " says Pregracke, who was once run off a piece of river property by a small man brandishing a large shotgun.

During summers off from high school and community college, he worked as a commercial shell diver and photographed some of the Mississippi's worst eyesores. Brushed off by local and state officials when he tried to show them his pictures of the trash, he grabbed a phone book one day, called a company named Alcoa ("because it started with A," he says) and asked for the "top guy."

He eventually talked Alcoa into giving him an $8,400 start-up grant. Using an old haul boat and a salvaged pickup truck, he took more than 20 tons from the Mississippi that first year.

Perhaps because Pregracke resembles the actor Tom Cruise and talks like a wired skateboarder ("Dude, you need to let me show you some pictures!"), a number of corporations have found his charms persuasive. Today, his annual operating budget has mushroomed to more than $400,000. His motley fleet consists of a refurbished 20-year-old tug, five hauling craft and a houseboat that doubles as a dormitory and office, as well as those three big barges. Pregracke and his crew, which varies from three to six, start working in mid-February and don't quit until ice forces them off the water in December. Last year, assisted by thousands of volunteers, they got rid of more than 270 tons oftrash.

Those who work for Pregracke, including girlfriend Lisa Eno,

brother Brent and Margaret Abts, a recent biology graduate, make $1,500 to $1,800 a month. The boss pays himself the princely sum of $35,000 a year. They all live aboard the houseboat, where the perks will soon include plumbing and hot water; meanwhile they use portable toilets and bathe in the river.

Pregracke rouses his colleagues early each morning by tugging on their toes and pushes them hard until dark.

Pregracke is patient as well as persistent. One day he spotted a huge raft of old Styrofoam floating downriver. He hauled it up to the marina that had dumped it. "1 thought you might want this back," he told the startled owner. Next day, the same stuff came floating down the river again. "It takes a long time to change things," Pregracke says.

He knows trash is the least of the Mississippi's problems. "But 1 think getting people out removing barrels and tires is worth a lot because now they have a stake in the river. When bigger problems like siltation and runoff come up, they'll be interested.

So half of this project is for the river and half is for the people."

The passion that led Pregracke to clean up the Mississippi now leaves him little time to enjoy it. Recently, he bought a new fishing pole, but his dog, Indy, chewed the handle off before he had a chance to use it. Not to worry, he says. "I really love my job."

0 About the Author: Steve Smithsonian magazine.

Kemper

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New Rules for u.s. Visa he United States continues to be a preferred destination for tens of thousands of Indian citizens who receive visas to travel for business purposes, to study at American universities' and colleges, and to visit family members and for countless other reasons, The number of visa applicants has grown steadily and is projected to increase.

For this reason, potential travelers to the U.S. should be aware of important changes in the visa application process, which came into effect in India on July 14,2003.

The new procedures are being implemented by U.S. embassies and consulates around the world following an extensive and ongoing review of visa issuing practices since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. They have been designed to secure U.S. borders and at the same time continue to welcome foreign visitors and facilitate their travel. The changes will help ensure the safety and security of the United States for all who are there, including foreign visitors.

In order to comply with new worldwide procedures for processing U.S. visas, applicants for nonimmigrant (temporary) visas to the United States must now make an appointment to appear for a personal interview with a consular officer unless they meet one of the criteria listed below: • Persons renewing or replacing a visa of the same category which is still valid or which expired less than 12 months ago.

• Persons 60 years of age or older, provided they have not previously been refused a visa.

• Children under 14 years of age where both parents can demonstrate that they already have U.S. visas and that both are physically present in India.

• Government officials on official travel for the central government, regardless of the type of passport they carry (applications should be accompanied by a diplomatic note).

Persons who meet one or more of the criteria listed above may continue to submit applications through the U.S. Embassy or Consulate General "drop box." Drop box applications are

T

Chennai: Raheja Towers (Facing G.P.Road) S001 - Omega Wing No. 113 - 124, Anna Salai Chennai 600 002 Phone: 04428603164/3165 Fax: 04428603167 E-mail: chennai@ttsvisas.com

Ahmedabad:

Gujarat Chamber

Bangalore: 219, Raheja Chambers 12, Museum Road Bangalore 560 001 Phone: 080 25595002/4996 Fax: 08025091731 E-mail: bangalore@ttsvisas.com

of Commerce

Building, Shri Ambika Mills Compound Ashram Road, Ahmedabad 380009

accepted at the IT Services locations in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Kolkata and at Visa Facilitation Service (VFS) locations in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Pune.

You may contact the local consulate for details.

Persons who have submitted an application before July 14 under the existing drop box guidelines will have their application reviewed under the rules in force at the time they applied. ~ All other applicants must make an appointment for an interview. In ew Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata, applicants should make an appointment online at www.ttsvisas.com.

Applicants from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh may make an appointment online at www.visa-services.com or by visiting the VFS office in Mumbai, Ahmedabad or Pune.

Some applicants from southern India may experience difficulty in making a timely appointment due to increased demand for visas from our Consulate General in Chennai. As the new personal appearance requirement goes into effect, all consular sections will make additional appointments to accommodate the increased demand. Those with an urgent need to travel who cannot make a timely appointment in Chennai and who have not previously been refused a visa may, until further notice, make an appointment to apply in ew Delhi or Kolkata.

To avoid delays, if you need to travel in the next few months, don't wait until the last minute to apply for an appointment.

Make your appointment right away.

Application forms and further information on application procedures are available through TT Services or Visa Facilitation Services. Forms and general information about the visa application process may also be downloaded from the Embassy Web site at newdelhi.usembassy.gov or the Consulate General Web sites at chennai.usconsulate.gov, mumbai.usconsulate.gov, or calcutta.usconsulate.gov The United States Embassy and Consulates will make every effort to assure prompt and courteous service.

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Hyderabad: .

No. 5-10-188/2, Summit Building Hill Fort Road Hyderabad 500 004 Phone: 0403231615/1715 Fax: 040 23232957 E-mail: hyderabad@ttsvisas.com

New Delhi: 2E/23, Ground Floor Jhandewalan Extension New Delhi 110 055 Phone: 011 23554618/4631 Fax: 011 23554247 E-mail: delhi@ttsvisas,com

Kolkata: 22, Camac Street Kolkata 700 016 Phone: 03322813782/3783 Fax: 03322813786 E'-mail: calcutta@ttsvisas,com

Pune: 106, Sohrab Hall, 1st Floor

Mumbai: Tirupati Apartments,

Sasson Road, Behind Pune Railway Station Pune 411001

Bhulabhai Desai Road, Mumbai 400 026, (Below Gabbana, Opposite Cross Word) info@visa-services,com

Opposite

Mahalakshmi

Temple ,