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January/February 1999

SPAN Publisher Francis B. Ward

Bold and Costly Blunders

Editor-in -Chief Donna J. Roginski

By Lee Edson

Editor Lea Terhune

Bowling Down Highway 51

By Gina W. Fitzsimmons

Associate Editor Arwl Bhanot

A Sport for All

Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana

By A. Venkata Narayana

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukwnar

Seeing in the Dark

By Timothy Ferris

Art Director 5uhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemam Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library

Blimps

By Charles N. Barnard

"We Want to Tell India' s Story" An Interview with Michael Clark

The Year 2000 Problem: Front cover: A plant pathologist examines cultures of fungi that may be used for biological control of weeds.

Photographs: Front cover-Scott Bauer, courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Information Staff. 8-Hemant Bhatnagar. ll-Yan On Sheung, courtesy Hong Kong Astronomical Society, Š 1998, all rights reserved. 12-Tomas Paulech & Juraj Toth, courtesy Astronomical Institute of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Comenius University, Bratis]ava, Slovakia. 14-l9--eourtesy the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Akron, Ohio. 21-Hans Betlem, courtesy the Dutch Meteor Society.

23-James W. Young, courtesy the Table Mountain Observatory in Southern California.

24-courtesy Indo-U.S. Business Council, New Delhi. 28, 30-31-courtesy USDA-ARS Information Staff. 33-courtesy Monsanto, Mumbai. 34, 43, 44-courtesy USDA-ARS Information Staff. 46--eourtesy the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. 50courtesy USDA-ARS Information Staff. 54courtesy the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Note: SPAN does nOI accept unsoliciled manuscriplS and materials and does not assume responsibility

for them. Query leners are accepted

WILL THE BUG BITE BACK?

By William G. Phillips

The Next Biotech Harvest

By David Rotman BIOTECHNOLOGY

Catalyst for Change

By Lea Terhune

Making Needles Needless

By Carol Potera

On the Lighter Side

Genesis II

By Jeremy Rifkin

Joining Hands to Fight Disease

By Dinesh C. Sharma

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841). on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Primed 01 Ajant3 Offset & Packaging Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur in this Industrial Area, Delhi 110 052. The opinions expressed magaZine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of lhe U.S. Government.

No part of this magazine may be reproduced without Ihe priorperrnission of the Editor. Forpermissioll wri!e 10 the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125: single copy, Rs. 30.

IN INDIA:

The Carver Chronicles ByD.T. Max

The Poetry of Tess Gallagher

By Niranjan Mohanty

A LETTER

A

FROM

s 1999 begins, our focus is on a subject that will probably engage us and transform our lives for decades to come: biotechnology.

It is the topic of much debate in India, in the United States and around the world.

The miraculous leaps forward that research apsome biotechnological pears to promise are accompanied by vast areas of unknown territory. In this issue of SPAN we bring together a number of articles that examine this important scientific threshold and the impact new developments may have upon all of us.

"The Next Biotech Harvest" by David Rotman and "Genesis II" by Jeremy Rifkin look at the kinds of research being done, who is doing it, and what it means for the future. Rifkin's article, particularly, examines issues of law, ethics and civil rights that may emerge as the gene pool is mapped and cataloged for comnlercial use. The issues are serious, he says, because "genetic commerce, after all, is the most intimate and powerful form of economic activity ever conceived."

The significance of these breakthroughs to countries like India and some of the questions that have been raised is the subject of "Biotechnology in India: Catalyst for Change."

The ways in which genetic engineering may transform vaccine delivery systems from nasty needles to something as painless as eating a baked potato is the point in "Making Needles Needless"

by Carol Potera. And Dinesh C. Sharma takes a look at a unique collaboration between the United States and the Indian Government, developing new vaccines here in India that will benefit both countries.

See "Joining Hands to Fight Disease."

Another millennium topic is the Y2K prob-

THE PUBLISHER

lem. Time is fast running out to fix the outdated programming bits that could make January 1,2000, a memorable day in ways we may not care to recall. What are the armies of programmers doing to buy time, if they can't tie up all the loose ends before December 31st? William G. Phillips tells us in "The Year 2000 Problem: Will the Bug Bite Back?"

One of the greatest American writers of the latter part of this century is Raymond Carver, known for his sensitive, slice-of-life short stories.

Now, 10 years after his death, a controversy has surfaced about his work, as "The Carver Chronicles" by D.T. Max reveals. Carver's wife, poet Tess Gallagher, was a major influence in the last years of his life. Their relationship and her work are assessed by Niranjan Mohanty.

Moving in an elevated atmosphere of a different kind are "Blimps." Charles N. Barnard gives us the inside story on these eccentric airships.

We continue to look skyward with Timothy Ferris as he shares his adventures as an amateur astronomer in "Seeing in the Dark."

Back on earth, A. Venkata Narayana and Gina Fitzsimmons highlight bowling, a sport enthusiastically adopted in America by people of all ages, and which is now making a mark in India, as business and recreation.

Consultant Michael Clark has more serious business on his mind in his interview with Arun Bhanot about economic trends.

All of us at SPAN wish you a very Happy New Year.

BOLD AND

COSTLY

he boneyards of technological history are littered with inventions that looked highly promising at one time but never made it to the winner's circle. Some of these inventions (dubbed technoturkeys by The Economist) went belly-up because they appeared too late and missed their market. Others were quickly overshadowed by better, more advanced and more appealing devices. Still others were simply failures that resulted from basic miscalculations by the manufacturer or overexpectations by the consumer.

Who today, possessed of a modicum of historical memory, can forget GM's sporty rear-engine Corvair, bil1ed as the most important postwar car? The unconventional compact was so tricky to handle and accident-prone that it became the focus of Ralph Nader's famous 1965 expose Unsafe at Any Speed and was scrapped a few years later. Then there was Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, the oversized wooden seaplane that flew once, for one minute, and was retired to a museum. And let us not forget the resplendent first Tacoma Narrows Bridge (a.k.a. Gal10ping Gertie), originally hailed as the most modem, most scientific bridge of its time-be-

T

Some inventions look good on paper but turn out to be nonstarters or major embarrassments in practice.

fore it collapsed in a mild gale in 1940 because of an aerodynamic glitch in design.

The 20th century, with its explosive scientific, industrial and technological growth and instant access to hype, has been a natural breeding ground for technoturkeys. Many of them come from the mismatch of fantasy and reality. The search for endless energy from hot plasma fusion, for instance, is a long-held scientific dream that has drawn government support for decades without yielding a whisper of a practical replacement for oil.

The do-it-all humanoid robot, a la C3PO of Star Wars, was expected to serve martinis and take over household chores, among other things, by the year 2000but so far it has been able to do little more than help in the heavy lifting in warehouses and. factories and share tasks in

out-of-the-way places like the surface of Mars and the bottom of the sea.

Even the great Albert Einstein was not immune to the seduction of invention and ended up fathering a technoturkey of his own. In 1926, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, already world-renowned for his theory of relativity, decided to put his genius to work at reinventing the household refrigerator. His goal was to build a device without moving parts so it wouldn't require lubrication and other maintenance.

Einstein expected to sell millions of these refrigerators. In fact, Mrs. Einstein confided to a friend, aerodynamicist Theodor von Karman, that at last her husband was on track to make some money.

But it didn't work out that way.

Einstein pursued various refrigeration concepts and eventually took out some 45 patents in six countries with his associate, atomic scientist Leo Szilard. He created some working models that attracted industrial interest, but none took off in the marketplace-possibly because they were too complicated or not superior to the refrigerators then coming into use to replace the icebox. As an ironic note, von Karman later wrote that refrigerators with moving

parts have worked for years without lubrication. So why reinvent them?

Einstein's experience with the refrigerator showed that even the 20th century's most famous scientist can press the wrong button. But great companies can also go wrong-and on a massive scale, losing millions of dollars and fraying the corporate ego in the process. The three cautionary tales that follow have played an important role in the maturing of corporate America. These techno turkeys are, in retrospect, paradigms that teach us lessons about why things fail and the part that failure plays in the development of an industry.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes Let's look first at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's (RJR) brilliant but ill-fated attempt in the late 1980s to create a cigarette that would preserve the pleasures of smoking without incurring any of its well-publicized health hazards. The New Cigarette, as it was first identified, would look and feel like any other cigarette. But it wouldn't burn tobacco in the old-fashioned way-it merely heated the tobacco-and therefore wouldn't generate smoke containing the tar and associated chemicals that have been held accountable for lung cancer and other illnesses.

The search for a safer cigarette has a long pedigree. Most of the early emphasis was placed on substitutes for tobacco such as sun-dried tassels of cornsilk, lettuce leaves and "lime flower," used by the Germans during World War I because of the blockade of tobacco. During World War II, more innovative substitutes for tobacco included clover, watercress, raspben'y leaves, coltsfoot, mint and peanuts.

These generally disliked substitutes were discarded when the war was over and tobacco was easily available.

The New Cigarette broke new ground by focusing on the tobacco-burning process. RJR set up the project in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the 1980s and kept it under tight security wraps for the next five years as teams of chemists, engineers and biologists set

General Motors' rear-engine Corvair was sporty but accident-prone. It became the focus of Ralph Nader s famous expose Unsafe at Any Speed and was scrapped a few years later.

about reengineering the cigarette.

Millions of dollars later (some estimates go as high as $500 million), the company unveiled the Premier and offered it to the public as "the next stage in the 500-year evolution of the cigarette."

There was some truth to this boast. The Premier incorporated a novel puffing-andheating system that had as much in common with the usual paper tube of pressed tobacco as a spacecraft with the early Chinese rocket. Starting at the tip, the cigarette contained a small insulated carbon-fuel unit, followed by a miniature aluminum capsule sUlTounded by a layer of tobacco and filled with porous beads of alumina impregnated with glycerol and flavor.

The entire system was neatly tucked into a cylinder of paper with two filters, one of which served as a mouthpiece.

When the Premier cigarette was lit and puffed, the carbon heated up. The heat traveled through the capsule and vaporized the glycerol beads. This hot vapor then moved through the filtration system and through the tobacco and was eventually emitted as "smoke." The cigarette

continued to be magically consumed without establishing the conventional fire cone from burning tobacco. Only the exhausted capsule and a small gray ash fi'om the paper were left.

Because the cigarette smoke was composed mostly of gaseous particles of glycerol, a common substance found in vegetable and animal fat, the company researchers contended that the cancer-producing tars usually found in commercial tobaccoburning cigarettes were substantially reduced, if not virtually eliminated. Moreover, since there was no combustion of tobacco, other toxic chemicals found in smoke-notably nicotine, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide-were also minimized.

Claiming that the Premier was the most important development in tobacco since the filter, the company introduced the cigarette as "the cleaner smoke" and awaited applause from test marketers. Only then did RJR management discover something they should have known, or at least suspected, from the very beginning.

Nobody (except perhaps RJR employees) liked the cigarette-it smelled bad and tasted worse.

RJR, in its single-minded intensity, had ignored the obvious: People smoke for pleasure, regardless of the risks. Most smokers simply didn't care about statistical safety or didn't believe that they would be affected. RJR's technology, brilliant though it was, couldn't save the day. The company abandoned the Premier in 1989, a few months after it came out. But it never abandoned the idea of smokeless cigarette.

An interesting coda to this tale: The recently proposed multibillion-dollar settlement between cigarette companies and anti-tobacco forces may revive the Premier concept as an approach to the safer, cleaner cigarette oftomorrow.

Heart of Brass An equally bold and costly 20th-century technoturkey that was hatched with high hopes but ended as a curio in the Smithsonian was the bionic heart, a fully

artificial organ that was expected to save thousands of lives and revolutionize heart surgery.

Conceived in the exuberant KennedyJohnson era of the 1960s-when scientific research was heralded as the savior of mankind-the artificial-heart project was proposed by the National Heart Institute in 1964 with the encouragement of Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, who urged Congress to harness America's industrial capabilities for medical research at a time when defense requirements might have peaked.

The proposal gathered immediate support from university experts thirsting for grants and from industrial enterprises sensing a profitable product. Some management firms envisioned an artificialorgan industry running into millions of dollars. The Heart Institute set up a taxsupported program that looked to an expenditure of$l 00 million a year. Congress responded with the alacrity it usually reserves for a national emergency. An artificial-heart office was actually set up in Washington with direct communication to Capitol Hill.

The program was designed like an assembly line. Some companies would build the engine. Others would make the pump, and still others the materials. Years later, it was discovered that nobody had been assigned to figure out how to put it all together.

In 1979, 15 years after the program's inception, the government had spent $125 million, with no workable artificial heart for human beings in the offing. Moreover, the early attempts to develop an artificial human heart were marked by tragedy. The only trial of a whole mechanical-heart implant in a human being took place in the late 1960s, when Dr. Denton Cooley of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston planted a temporary artificial heart in the chest of a dying patient named Haskell Karp. The patient lived for 65 hours on the mechanical heart and was then given a humanheart transplant, but died 32 hours later. This event resulted in a lawsuit, considerable questioning of the

morality of the procedure, and a return to more-conservative approaches to treating terminal heart disease.

What went wrong? How did this potential eagle end up a turkey? In this case, the scientist's reach exceeded his grasp.

Unresolved technical details, like how to make plastics compatible with biological materials, were strong obstacles to successful development of the artificial-heart implant.

The project's key difficulty proved to be the mechanism for making the heart function. A nuclear pump was suggested and gained considerable support from the former Atomic Energy Commission because it showed a dramatic peacetime use for atomic energy. The first nuclear healt, which used a capsule of plutonium as fuel, worked for two years in a dog-earning the animal the dubious distinction of being the world's first nuclear canine.

But the leap to human application was an entirely different matter. Critics challenged the entire idea, noting that a human being walking around with a nuclear heart might be a danger to his fellow man. In 1972, the Heart Institute assembled a panel of scientists and laymen to examine the legal, ethical, economic and social implications of the artificial heart. The panel issued a report a year later in which it warned that a nuclear heart might hold un-

Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose was an oversized wooden seaplane that flew once, for one minute, and was retired to a museum.

seen social dangers, pointing out that nuclear "typhoid Marys" might carry contamination to others.

The panel also hinted that terrorists might kidnap the owner of a nuclear heart in the hopes of using the plutonium as a weapon. It is not feasible to turn the plutonium pellet into a bomb, but with proper equipment it could be used to dispatch a deadly cloud over a city as large as San Francisco. This idea became the theme of a popular novel of the time.

The nuclear-heart program was phased out, but the artificial-heart program stayed alive. In fact, two new modes of heart pump-one using air pressure and the other using a battery pack-attracted the attention of medical researchers.

At Pennsylvania State University's Hershey Medical Center, a novel electromechanical heart powered by a tiny battery has kept a calf alive for months, and researchers are looking toward conducting clinical tests on humans. If these tests pan out, this techno turkey may yet take off.

What Goes Around ...

The 20th century's third major industrial technoturkey was the so-called "field-sequential" system of color television. It was invented by Peter Goldmark, a Hungarian-born physicist and head of CBS Labs, best known for his development of the long-playing record.

Goldmark convinced CBS management to research the possibilities of color TV, creating what was to be labeled the first practical color system. This system was first used successfully to demonstrate color TV just prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it wasn't introduced to the public at large until the war was over. When it was disclosed, the event created a bombshell, especially in the laboratories at RCA, where CEO David Sarnoff and his teams were working feverishly on an allelectronic system compatible with black-and-white sets, which dominated the TV market. The competition for public support between the color TV that was available and the one that was pie-in-the-sky grew into

a personal vendetta and escalated into a full-fledged media battle between CBS and RCA, and, more precisely, between the principal contenders, Goldmark and Sarnoff.

To determine which system should be licensed for public sale, the FCC held a test in 1950 that resulted in a clear Goldmark victory. His color transmission was superb, while the RCA demonstration looked, as Newsweek put it, "like a crazed Van Gogh." Sarnoff ruefully admitted, "The monkeys were green. The bananas were blue, and everybody had a good laugh." Variety headlined its report: "RCA Lays Colored Egg." The FCC granted CBS a license and a monopoly to manufacture color TV sets. Before it could get started, however, an infuriated Sarnoff took CBS and the FCC to court, arguing that the public would be cheated by a mechanical contraption that was expensive and incompatible with blackand-white. Sarnoff lost again and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which confirmed the lower court's decision. But this setback only goaded Sarnoff into redoubling his efforts to disparage the mechanical system, and he drove his engineers and scientists to work nonstop for a breakthrough that would establish the merits of electronic color. One engineer called it "invention on demand."

Sarnoff offered as much as $10,000 in bonuses to the engineer who moved the project forward. It is said that he spent about $150 million before he was through.

But out of it came the system that grew into today's standard for all color television. The RCA all-electronic system provided reliable color that was compatible with the growing number of black-andwhite sets and therefore required no additional purchase by the set owner, something the Goldmark system couldn't do. "The mechanical system now belongs to the ages," chortled Sarnoff after a definitive test in 1952.

Goldmark was indeed defeated, and in retrospect it was inevitable, given the advantages of an all-electronic system and Sarnoff's unexpected fanatical drive to

magnetic tape. CBS was developing a miniature film system known as electronic video recording. RCA thought the Selectavision system would be simpler, more reliable and less expensive than the other video players.

This time RCA was wrong.

Despite its technical achievement involving the storage and retrieval of billions of pieces of information on a single disk, the company completely misread the times and the competition. By the time RCA introduced Selectavision in 1981, the Japanese had marketed their VCRs, The story of the invention of color which were selling in millions of units, even at higher prices. The key television stars a turkey that turned to the RCA failure was the expaninto a swan. RCA was originally the sion of videotape rentals, which loser, but CEO David Sarnoff's made programs available on a mass determination to beat the competition scale to the consumer. Before RCA resulted in the all-electronic system knew it, its clever system was comthat became an industry standard. pletely bypassed because of its error in assuming that lower prices, rather than appealing features, were achieve it. But before the mechanical the key to success. RCA pulled out of the system was tossed aside as television's video-player business in 1984. The folgreatest technoturkey, the indefatigable lowing year, the company was swallowed Goldmark salvaged a smaller version of up by General Electric, the company that his mechanical system to be used by as- had originally created it.

Can technoturkeys be avoided? Probtronauts in transmitting pictures from space. He also forced RCA to come to ably not, given the human penchant for CBS to license the special shadow-mask pursuing the wrong target and then stubbornly defending the error. But technotube invented by CBS that made electurkeys, as history shows, are hardly all tronic color feasible. bad. They often point the way to new Ironically, RCA fathered its own techno turkey when it produced the products, open new research paths and Selectavision laser disk, which tried to do sometimes inspire others to move an ento the VCR and other video players what tire field or a company in a new direction all-electronic compatible TV had done to that ultimately brings success. Einstein's Goldmark's color system. RCA spent 15 refrigerator concept, for instance, found a years developing the laser disk in an at- use in the nuclear breeder reactor, and Goldmark's ungainly TV was sharpened tempt to restore the leadership in consumer electronics that the company had lost after and miniaturized into a tool for teaching a failed effort to enter the computer busi- student surgeons in operating rooms and ness and Sarnoff's death in 1971. for astronauts to study phenomena in space. To err is human, certainly, but our The object of the video-player system errors may be salvaged by the law of un inwas to allow the consumer to play his own programs at will and not to depend on the tended consequences.

0 television studio. During the 1970s, the Japanese were working on the VHS and About the Author: Lee Edson is a freelance Betamax systems, the two incarnations of science and technology writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. the VCR, which played back images from

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W~IIIÂŤrn1~ ~OWÂŤrn1 I~IIIIrw ~IWrilWlJ An ardent bowler describes the lifelong romance with her favorite sport. hen I think of the fond memories I have growing up as a child because of bowling, I am glad my parents insisted that we be raised with a little bit of everything. A little ice skating, a little softball in the summer, a little embroidery on the front porch swing on the hot summer afternoons, and a little bowling in the winter, or especially on rainy days, when there was nothing else to do. I can still hear my own voice whining to my Mom, "We're bored, what can we do?" and no sooner would I say those words, off we'd go to the lanes. I guess it helps having a Dad who not only was a bowler but also loved bowling (even if it was duckpins). They are the shorter version with a much smaller, lighter ball in a much smaller lane.

He insisted on driving us, as well as all our girlfriends, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon up to the bowling alley on Route 51 in Pennsylvania.

A little background on this bowling alley. It is situated just off a four-lane highway that leads to either the city of Pittsburgh or the State of West Virginia, with very little to do in between. There is an immense parking lot full of potholes but no one really notices as they have one goal in mind-getting inside where the warmth will envelop them. I do remember, however, always vying for the closest parking space, especially when it rained. These alleys were housed under a huge slate blue metal building re-

W

plete with neon lights urging you to come in and bowl a while. A picture of a little stick man throwing a ball, graces a huge section of the building. Inside the glass double doors, the spirit and atmosphere immediately catches you.

Whether you know how to bowl or not, you are guaranteed an evening of fun.

Just inside, you will fmd a man renting shoes to people of all shapes and sizes-and all walks of life. His infinite patience to get just the right fit for the little girl who hasn't a clue as to her shoe size, or the woman who insists she's a 6 when he knows she's at least a 9. He will continue to dole out pair after pair until all are comfortable and ready to roll their first ball (mind you, a good shoe makes a good game).

To your left is the snack bar, a quiet TV propped up high with the latest sports event on, and a bleached blonde, pink-lipsticked retiree quietly filling the orders for the patrons.

French fries, burgers, chili dogs, suds and, of course, onion rings plastered with ketchup.

This is all part of the ritual of bowling. Spread out in front of you are 51 bowling lanes that run the length of the building. I am sure the 51 lanes came from the Route 51 highway that it is built on. On any given night (or day) of the week it is nearly impossible to get a lane. Even if you call in advance and try to reserve one, the laughter on the other end of the line will be self-explanatory: "Whaddya kidding lady? It's league night! Why don't ya join a league so you're sure you get ta play." As he's hanging up the phone, I can almost hear him saying to his buddy, "Hey Charley, that lady actually thought she could get a lane tonight!" This sport is so popular that leagues run year-round and families flock for their weekly "dose" of bowling.

The sound of pins crashing and wood hitting wood is a sound you must experience firsthand. Imagine 51 lanes going at the same time-balls careening down shiny golden alleys, waitresses balancing trays offrench fries and cold beer, children scurrying off to the video arcade, quarters in hand. A cacophony of noise and laughter, shrieks and yelps, strikes and spares. But beware the serious bowler. Make too much noise and he'll turn around and glare at you. He's the one wearing the leather glove on the release hand. He carries his own bag of resin (chalk dust to you rookies). He has his ball polished before and after bowling. Now don't think for a minute that he's bowling a 300, he may only hit 150 but he's dedicated.

Most people come in groups to bowl: families, girlfriends, and a bunch of guys, young couples. Bowling is a great way to go out on a first date. Mothers even approve. The couple can eat, play games, bowl and keep busy all while having great fun. It's also a wonderful way to host a children's birthday party. All of the alleys have party packages. Men get together after a grueling day at the factory to blow off a little steam, relax a bit, have a cold brew and a bite to eat before going home to the wife and kids.

It's the ones who are there all by themselves that you have to watch out for. Serious bowlers with their balls perched in various positions, some holding to the left, some to the right, some right up in front of their nose and some off their hip. Evetyone has their own style that "works for them." Personally I prefer holding the ball right up in front of my nose so that I can aim for the center arrow in hopes of that lO-pin strike. My husband, however, has his own style. We call it the bounce. He holds that ball up, aims, then bends his knees and bounces twice only to release it at a resounding speed.

Football, baseball, tennis, soccer, pool, they all involve playing a sport with a ball. Various sizes and textures; like the soft lime green tennis ball or the vivid black and white patched soccer ball.

But when I think of the size and color and weight of a darn bowling ball, you'd wonder why anyone in their right mind would pick up this sport, even just occasionally. You could get whiplash! Freshly painted manicures are ruined in the throw of just one ball, yet ladies flock to the alleys to play. All of the other sports have a reasonably sized ball but this is not the case in bowling. We have the largest, heaviest and most cumbersome ball in the field of sports!

When you think about the average weight of a person hoisting a tennis ball in the air and whacking it with a racket it just doesn't compare to lifting a 16-pound ball and hurling it down a wooden alley at a bunch of white ducks sitting helplessly waiting to be obliterated into the dark caverns of the pin-setting machine.

But, nevertheless, Americans have loved the sport of bowling

Though a relatively new sport in India, bowling is rapidly becoming a popular pastime in towns and cities across the country.

since Fred Flintstone. We will bound out the door after a hard day's work, no matter how tired we are, to our weekly league of three games a night bowling. Heck, in the dead of winter when the snow is knee-deep and the television weather reports are screaming to stay home, rest assured the dedicated bowler will push away from the dinner table, bundle up, bowling bag and shoes in hand, and head off to the nearest Brunswick lanes for a night of relaxation and fun. Getting together with your buddies or girlfriends is an evening not to be missed. No thought is given to the snow building up outside so long as you bowl a decent game. It allows you to take your mind off the day's worries.

Now, a few things about bowling for those of you who've never dared to tie on your soft-soled shoes and hoist the ball up, only to sail it backwards behind you realizing the ball you'd chosen was just a bit too heavy. The idea is to hit as many pins down as possi-

owling is, perhaps, the most popular participant sport in the world. Also calIed a "leisure sport," bowling is accepted as a competitive sport in the United States and Europe. The trend is catching on in the Asian continent, including India.

The history of bowling in India is quite recent.

Fifteen years ago, Qutab Hotel in Delhi offered the only bowling facility available in the country.

The manually-operated alley belonged to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was taken over by the hotel when USAID moved out of the building. The aUey was used by American staffers after office hours.

Since then, bowling has witnessed a phenomenal growth, especially during the past three to four years. Today there are more than 50 bowling alleys in Delhi alone, and at least 100 alleys throughout the country. Leisure Bowl, Little Paradise, 32nd Milestone, Destination Point, Futurbowl, Xanadu and Qutabowl are some popular destinations in Delhi. The emergence of towns and cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Indore and Surat, among others, on the bowling map vouch for the nationwide popularity of the sport.

The alleys are equipped with state-of-the-art synthetic tracks and computer monitors that elisplay instant scores. The ambience ranges from ethnic to chic to informal.

Bowling makes no distinctions of age or sex and this factor has contributed to the

B

widespread appeal of the sport. Enthusiasts range from five to 70. According to 14year-old Neha, a student in a Delhi school and a casual bowler, "Bowling is a family sport. I go to the nearby Leisure Bowl with my parents and friends on weekends. I feel this is the best way to get maximum enjoyment and recreation. It's worth every rupee I spend from my pocket allowance." Her friends echo the sentiment.

To cater to various age groups of participants, balls weighing six to 16 pounds are designed to meet the requirement. Each player has to step on the alley with bowling shoes, gloves and other kit. Never mind if you don't have your own kit, alleys are always willing to loan whatever you need.

"This is truly one sport that can be played by professionals as weII as amateurs and casual bowlers with the same zeal and enthusiasm," says Amit Thapar, manager (operations) of Leisure Bowl, a popular bowling spot in Delhi. "More than 400 bowlers visit our alIey on weekdays and the number doubles during weekends. We normally close at 11 in the night, but on especiaUy crowded nights, we may close at one in the night.

Even then, many people are reluctant to leave the alIey.The only way they'll leave is when we switch off the lights."

The bowling culture is still primarily an urban phenomenon, with majOlity of the players belonging to the professional class.

Not surprisingly, bowling alleys are emerging as new centers of business-cum-recreation points. In the changing scenario, more corporate houses invite their clients to the bowling alleys to strike deals. Outings for office staff are also arranged at the bowling alleys for fun and leisure. Anuj Puri, managing director of Chesterton Megh Raj, a property consultant company in Delhi and a casual bowler who visits aUeys with his colleagues, says that the game "breaks barriers

ble with just two balls per frame, with 10 frames to a game. A perfect score would be 300 given that you threw 10 strikes in a row (something that only happens once in a blue moon, and you know how often blue moons happen). But the average player may bowl anywhere between a 55 and 155. As you can see, there is quite a broad spectrum of averages.

Our ladies bowling league here in Delhi meets every Monday morning and has quite a wide variety of averages-and players-and they also fluctuate within those averages. For example, on a good Monday morning, when you've had a quiet weekend and you are well rested, you could bowl a 171. However, let's say you were the belle of the ball that weekend and dragged yourself in on Monday morning to attempt a good game. Nothing doing honey, it's gonna be low scores today. Like all sports, rest and good health is as important as a comfortable bowling ball. Concentration

which are there in office and is very enjoyable as well" He spends two hours in the evening at a bowling center which provides him tension-free leisure and recreation.

Isn't the game meant for elite? It is expensive at Rs. 125 per participant per game.

"Most of the visitors to our bowl belong to middle and upper middle class. So I don't calI it an elite sport," says Thapar. "Of course, this is a very heavy investment sport.

A four-lane alley costs more than Rs. 9 million. All the equipment has to be imported by paying a whopping 55 percent import duty. Once the government announces substantial relief on import duty and does not burden bowling aUeys with entertainment tax, but provides benefits and privileges, obviously, the bowling centers will reduce entry fees," says Leisure Bowl's Thapar.

With market expansion and more participation, the sport is Iikely to catch the attention of more Indians.

Brunswick and AMP, two U.S.-based international equipment manufacturing companies, foresee bright prospects for bowling in India. Reduction of the import duty would give bowling a shot in the arm.

Compared to Thailand, with 800 lanes and Malaysia with 2,000, India, given the size of its population and burgeoning middle class, is low on the global bowling scorecard.

Bowling, previously considered purely a recreational sport, was showcased in the Seoul 1996 Olympics and has become a competitive sport in the Commonwealth Games. "Bowling is going to be included as demonstration sport in Olympics and may even become a competitive sport in the Olympics from years 2004 onwards," says O.P. Bhatia, executive director of Sports Authority of Inelia.

Once the sport gets its due recognition, bowling should draw millions of fun-loving Indians to the clatter of the bowling lanes.

and skill are quite important to the game, unless there's a good conversation cackling behind you! Then all hell breaks loose and the averages go out the window because the gossip is better.

Bowling is a healthy sport. It takes good physical energy, a strong arm, keen eye, good balance and perhaps a sense of humor as well (we do pick on each other-aU in fun, though). After three games I can assure you I've gotten a workout but the best part of aU is the camaraderie between the girls. Whenever I'm under the weather and can't bowl on a Monday, it's a bit depressing because I know I'm going to miss a moming full of fun and laughter with the ladies, a good cup of coffee and then lunch afterward.

Monday night mixed bowling with the husbands-now that's another story!

0 About the Author: Gina W Fitzsimmons is a freelance writer based in Delhi. She has lived in Lima, Peru, and Kingston, Jamaica.

he sun is setting in a clear late-autumn sky, so I hike the 199 paces from the house up the hill to Rocky Hill Observatory. A two-day storm has scrubbed the sky clean of haze and left the fruit trees in the orchard bare, dead leaves spread in soggy puddles of russet and yellow at their feet like vendors' wares. The vineyards flanking the path are soaked, their upper leaves hammered into sheets of glistening gold, and the ones below hanging limp and stained the tea-brown of ruined suede gloves. Toward the top of the dirt path, lined up along its west side, stand three farm structures, each with sides of railroad-red clapboard and roofs of corrugated steel. The first is a barn, the second a tractor shed, and the third, pitched out over the hillside, is the observatory. Its roof is built to roll off.

Inside, I step around the cylindrical concrete column that supports the telescope one story above. Two feet thick, rooted in clay far below, the column stands at the heart of the observatory but touches it nowhere-this to prevent its picking up vibrations. Upstairs, I'm gratified to find that the telescope, safe beneath the low roof, has weathered the storm bone-dry. When I release a big red safety latch and heave my weight against the nearest aluminum stud, the roof gives a creak and starts rolling on its eight steel wheels, until it has cleared away, and suddenly I'm outdoors again, under a sky of unblemished and darkening blue. I tilt the telescope skyward and reach in through the struts of its skeleton tube to uncover the concave primary mirror, which returns a fleeting, fun-house image of my facebig, goofy jowls and receding brown hair-as if to underscore the preposterousness of my primate pretensions to learn something about the cosmos. A little muffin fan draws路 air over the mirror to

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cool it down. While waiting, I sit at the desk, switch on a small red night-vision light, and open an entry on the ruled page of the observatory log with the date, the time, and a note on conditions: "Sky cloudless. Light SW wind. Humidity 67 percent and falling."

I consult a favorite old star chart. Its vanilla pages, crossed by thin grid lines on which the stars and nebulae hang like grapes on a trellis, are dotted with inked-in notes on telescopic observations I've made over the years: the position of a small comet, glimpsed from a balcony in Hollywood, that was chugging across the sky so fast you could see it move; an inkedin dot locating a quasar, its light a billion years old, extinct and unforgiving; and lots of notes on the distances of stars and nebulae-part of a lifelong effort to comprehend our immediate neighborhood, out to just a couple of thousand light-years or so, in three dimensions. But most of the inscriptions refer to galaxies, each the home of about a hundred billion stars. I built the observatory, in 1993, mainly to search for supernovas--exploding stars-in galaxies beyond the Milky Way. While the sky darkens, I take a moment to survey the horizon, looking west. I'm standing only 100 kilometers by road from the San Francisco end of the Golden Gate Bridge, yet except for twinkling lights in a couple of distant farmhouses, the sole signs of civilization are two fans of white light, one from behind a ridge to the west-northwest-that's Santa Rosaand the other, fainter, behind a stand of giant oaks to the northeast, which comes from the Highway 12 corridor.

A few stars have now come out, and I train the telescope on three of them, marveling, as always, at the purity of their colors-red Aldebaran, sun-yellow Capella, ice-blue Vega. Centering each in turn in a

high-power eyepiece, I enter them in the telescope's computer, a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. The computer now knows what's up. For the remainder of the night it will respond, whenever it's told the designation of a given galaxy, by indicating just where to aim the telescope along its two axes--one aligned to Earth's axis of rotation, the other to Earth's equator-to bring that galaxy into view.

I aim the telescope at the Triangulum galaxy, which, at a distance of less than

Stargazers come in all shapes and sizes, from eight-yeor-olds with Dad s binoculars to astrophysicists in the world1s most sophisticoted observatories. The author, like many of us, fulls in between--on amateur who enjoys the sights and sounds of the evening as he studies the skies for the fumiliar and hopes for the unusual. l

three million light-years from Earth, is by intergalactic standards a local object, and, indeed, belongs to the cluster of galaxies that includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and is called by astronomers the Local Group. And there it is, looming large, its spiral arms tangled with glowing clouds of gas and so rangy that they spill out beyond the field of view in all directions. That's one of the satisfactions of astronomy-that all these things, unimaginably big or small or hot or cold as they may be, are really out there. Like

giant squid, and unlike, say, logical positivism, they confront the mind with the regality of the materially real, even though no human hand will ever touch them. I open a looseleaf binder full of galaxy photographs and check Triangulum's photo against what I'm seeing in the sky. If a star has exploded there, it will look like a "new"-nova-star, visible in the telescope but not to be found in the previously taken photograph. Actually, what's new is not the star but its titanic demise, set off

on a given night are longer than 10,000 to one. Trying to discover a supernova is like fishing for trout in a stream where the average angler never in a lifetime catches a trout. Even so, an occasional lucky observer has discovered more than one. The reigning champion is Robert Evans, a minister in New South Wales, Australia, who has memorized the star fields surrounding hundreds of galaxies and scans them at a sprightly pace with a telescope that he rolls out onto his driveway at night.

and was confirmed the next day as its discoverer. I managed to congratulate him, summoning a sickly smile.

Supernovas are important to galactic ecology: they cook light atoms into heavy ones and then spew these back into space; all the gold in the universe, among other elements, originated in this way. The greatest interest they hold for me, however, lies in their potential as "standard candles" for establishing the distances of remote galaxies, a matter that astronomers disagree about to the tune of something like 30 percent. Supernovas can be seen across vast distances, so if their intrinsic brightness were ascertained they could An early be used to establish the exmorning photo of a Leonid

when thermonuclear fuel at its core is exhausted, causing the star to collapse and then resound in a literally disastrous detonation. None in Triangulum this time, but I linger a moment before moving on, just to look. At this moment, I am absurdly happy. I feel like the early French balloonist who, once aloft, refused to come down.

Supernovas are conspicuous-just by looking through this modest telescope I can hope to spot one out to a distance of a hundred million light-years or so-but the odds that one will appear in a given galaxy

Evans has discovered 37 supernovas, an all-time record for a visual observer.

(Only robotic telescopes have done better.) In Texas, a few years ago, I met a man who had discovered a supernova while he was looking at galaxies and wasn't even trying to find one. He just happened to see a star that seemed as if it didn't belong there, so he checked it against an observatory photograph, and, sure enough, there had been no star there. He called the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

pansion rate-and thereby the age and perhaps the destiny-of the universe. But meteor nailing down the intrinsic taken in brightness of supernovas reHong Kong on quires that their spec~ra and November light curves be recorded and 16,1998, cataloged in enough detail to

by Yan On lay bare the exploding stars' Sheung. behavior. Professional observatories can't very well devote so much time searching against long odds, but amateurs like me can.

Also, it's a great excuse for gaping at galaxies. Nothing is quite like the sight of a galaxy-stately, self-possessed, a murk of mingled stars and gas clouds, so distant that its light is older than the human species, and so commodious as to contain, I should think, more stories than anyone, anywhere, can ever come to know.

ROCKY HlLL OBSERVATORY LOG, MARCH 23, 1994. A half-dozen eight-year-olds line up to view the moon through the 18-inch telescope. As I watch each teeter on the top of the little stepladder and peer into the eyepiece, something re-

markable happens: by the cold moonlight-a sort of spotlight, painting an ill-focused portrait of the moon on the eye, eye socket and a bit of brow and cheek--each child seems transformed into an adult. Nini, red hair and freckJes, becomes a woman in her forties, the prime of her considerable athleticism now past but her effervescent spirit unsubdued. Nion, a shy and appealing boy, is suddenly a tall and elegantly commanding adult who might be director of a foundation. Mischievous Kathryn is intent, capable, no-nonsense; in business for herself perhaps.

My son looks only a bit under my own present age. Poised and serious, he offers a vision of a time when I myself have become a memory. I am reminded that everything we see in the sky belongs to the past, and that children in their similarities to us and their differences from us embody our concept of the future. We elders fall away into the past, like leaves from trees in autumn, but the young fall from us, too, their shouts of glee and apprehension echoing back as they dive toward the depths of the future.

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first became enchanted with astronomy when I was about eight and my parents gave me a book entitled A Child's History of the World, written in 1924 by an American schoolmaster named Y.M. Hillyer. The book began with an account of the formation of the solar system, which, although it was inaccurate, got across the essential fact that the Earth has not always been herethat it came into being at a finite point in the past and that everything here, from the birds and fishes to the loamy soil underfoot, was once part of a star. I found this amazing, and still do. It meant that even the most mundane affairs are, at some level, astronomical. I started reading everything I could find about astronomy, and soon I was pestering my parents to get me a telescope. It came as an early Christmas present, in the fall of 1956, in time for an especially favorable "opposition," or close passage, of Mars, within 57 million kilometers of Earth. In the front yard of a small house in Key Biscayne, Florida, I crouched at the eyepiece and scrutinized the squiggly image, the color of a drop of blood, waiting for moments of still air when I could catch sight of Martian continents and polar caps. The future seemed pregnant with the promise of discovery.

Aspiring stargazers, like aspiring musicians, typically start learning on inferior

instruments, and my first telescope was suitably wretched-a skinny Bakelite tube mounted irresolutely on top of a spindly tripod. Nobody else could see much of anything through this telescope, and I did not have a great deal of initial success, but soon I came to cherish it as an instrument of deliverance. Through it I was introduced to the sand-colored rings of Saturn, the young, blue-white stars of Orion, the old, golden stars of the Omega Centauri cluster, and a thousand other things, all of them so outlandish as to balloon one's sense of the plausible.

Accompanied by a stargazing friend of mine named Chuck, I started observing late at night or getting up hours before dawn, and, as happens if you spend a lot of time outdoors at night, we saw some amazing things. One dark night, the whole neighborhood was suddenly bathed in something approaching sunlight, with green coconut palms waving against a blue sky, all of it shifting, the shadows clocking rapidly from north to south. Looking up, we saw a mighty fireball of a meteor, yellow with a red halo and brighter than the moon, trucking northwest and leaving behind a fading white trail flecked with gold.

Visions like this produced a sensation that I did not know how to express.

Amateur astronomy-astronomy for the love of it-is enjoying a renaissance these days, in the course of which it has, happily, begun to reunite itself with professional astronomy. Before the 20th century there was little distinction between the two. Galileo, when he first trained a telescope on the night sky, was a professional professor (that is, he got paid for teaching) but an amateur astronomer.

William Herschel, perhaps the most acute astronomical observer of all time (in 1781, he discovered the planet Uranus), was a composer and organist who spent practically every spare moment under the stars: when he was conducting the orchestra at Bath, he sometimes even rushed home during intermissions just to get a few minutes at the telescope. George Ellery Hale, who built the big telescopes at Mt. Wilson, near Los Angeles, and Palomar, near San Diego, was a professional who had started as an amateur, and he never lost touch with his roots. Ironically, it was Hale's big telescopes that split astronomy

into amateur and professional camps.

Everybody wanted to use them, but only a few people could, so access was restricted to highly trained professionals.

Exclusionary though it may have been, this emphasis on professionalism did get results. At Mt. Wilson, Harlow Shapley (from Princeton University) established that the sun is situated toward one edge of a galaxy, and Edwin Hubble (from the University of Chicago) discovered that the galaxies are being continuously separated from one another through the expansion of cosmic space, while at Palomar Allan Sandage (from Caltech)

dated the ages of the stars, and Maarten Schmidt (from the University of Leiden) found that quasars are the fiery nuclei of young galaxies whose light has taken billions of years to reach us. Top pros like these became superstars, lionized in the press as hawkeyed lookouts who relentlessly probed the mysteries of deep space.

Which they did, and quite credibly, too.

But they sacrificed a lot for such attainments, in that observing their way wasn't a whole lot of fun. To be among the chosen few, up there in the cold and the dark, riding in the observer's cage, with icy stars shining through a dome slit above and with starlight puddled below in Leonids: Routine 4a mirror the size of a hour exposure, an trout pond, was induall-sky picture that bitably romantic, but it shows Leonid was also nerve-racking. fireballs on the night Big-telescope observof November 16/17, ing was rather like 1998, taken at the making love to a European Fireball glamorous movie star: Network Station in one was alert to the Modra, Slovakia. honor of the thing, but Photo courtesy, aware that plenty of Tomas Paulech & Jura) Toth, suitors were eager to Astronomical step in if one's perforInstitute of the mance faltered.

Faculty of So it went, for about Mathematics and half a century. ProfesPhysics of the sionals observed big Comenius University, things far away; amaBratislava, Slovakia. teurs showed schoolchildren the rings of Saturn through a tripod-mounted spyglass at the state fair. Inevitably, many of the professionals came to disdain the amateurs. If the professionals happened to discover a comet or an asteroid (solar-system objects, amateur stuff), they sometimes didn't even tell anybody about it, for fear they'd besmirch their resume with something infra dig.

Then, in recent years, the amateurs began returning to prominence. Many reasons for this could be cited, principally technological advances that brought professionalgrade equipment within reach of amateurs.

But the proximate cause was an eccentric San Francisco amateur named John Dobson.

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obson is the Martin Luther of the astronomical reformation. The version of his credo most often cited by born-again amateurs was spelled out in a talk he gave a decade ago to a hard-core group of amateur telescope-makers, declaring, "To me it's not so much how big your telescope is, or how accurately your optics are figured, or how beautiful the pictures you can take with it-it's how many people in this vast world less privileged than you have had a chance through your telescope to see and understand this universe. That is the one thing that drives me!"

To the casual observer, John Dobson comes off as an aging hippie with a gaudily painted telescope that looks as if it had been run over by a truck; thousands have encountered him on the streets of San Francisco-a spare, ebullient figure who sets up a battered telescope and calls out to passersby to "Come see Jupiter!" or "Come see the moon!" and then whispers facts in their ears while they peer into the eyepiece. But astronomical sophisticates recognize his telescopes as "Dobsonians," the carbines of revolution. This man, with this instrument, changed his world.

The innovative thing about Dobsonians is that they're cheap. They employ the same simple, effective design that Isaac Newton dreamed up when he wanted to see a comet and that remains the most popular form of astronomical telescope in the world today: a tube with a parabolic mirror at the bottom, which gathers starlight, and a small, flat secondary mirror near the top. You can build a big Dobsonian as readily as you might a small traditional Newtonian reflector, or buy one for about a fifth of the cost.

You can't buy a Dobsonian from John Dobson, though. He refuses to patent the design or to profit from it. Poverty is his habit, and was the mother of his invention.

Born in China, he studied chemistry at Berkeley and in 1944 he became a monk in the Vedanta Society, part of the Rama Krishna movement, serving in monasteries in San Francisco and Sacramento.

Enchanted by astronomy since boyhood, he started making telescopes (and was

eventually banished from the monastery).

His tao of poverty meant that he had to invent ways of making them much more cheaply than they had ever been made before, and at this he proved to be something of a genius. Rather than relying on a piece of fine optical glass, Dobson salvaged discarded portholes and the bottoms of gallon jugs. For the telescope tube, he scrounged up cardboard Sonotubes, used for pouring concrete at construction sites.

Proper telescope mountings are expensive, so Dobson cut a box out of scrap plywood. He plants these telescopes on street corners and in national parks, attracting long lines of neophyte stargazers.

Aside from a few media stars like Patrick Moore and the late Carl Sagan, John Dobson has probably introduced more people to stargazing than anyone else of his time. Before Dobson, the typical amateur had a reflector with a lightgathering mirror six or eight inches in diameter. Today, the "star parties" where amateur astronomers congregate are dotted with Brobdingnagian Dobsonians, which have mirrors as much as 24, even 30, inches in diameter, their tubes towering into the darkness. The greatest risk of amateur astronomy today is that of falling from a rickety ladder high in the dark while peering through a Dobsonian.

Along with John Dobson's innovation, two technological developments that have been responsible for the return of the amateur are the Internet and the invention of the light-sensing charge-coupled device, or CCD. Home-video cameras use CCDs and, as most people notice sooner or later, sometimes to their embarrassment, those cameras can record images in light almost too dim for people to see in. Attach a CCD to a midsized Dobsonian, at a total cost of a few thousand dollars, or even less, and you have an instrument whose light-gathering power is comparable to that of the Hale telescope at Palomar in the pre-CCD era.

Communications have undergone a similar revolution. It used to be that an amateur who managed to discover a comet or a supernova would send word of the discovery in a telegram to the (Continued on page 21)

before I get to see the blimp, I meet G.P. "Pat" Henry, a former U.S. Navy pilot, Joe Hajcak, engineer and pilot, and Tom Riley, operations manager for all the Goodyear blimps. They are eager to tell me about their unique world. Did I realize that Goodyear has to decline a thousand requests annually for its blimps to appear at various events? Did I know that it takes a thousand cubic feet of helium to lift 30 kilograms of blimp?

Would I ever have guessed that the illuminated sign on Spirit weighs half a ton and has 8,200 bulbs? "But, hey, don't let us bury you with too much information," Tom Riley says finally.

"We can't help it, you know. It's called 'airship bul\.' You'll get used to it in a couple of days." he hangar is a maintenance facility with many capabilities-welding, sewing, painting, rigging, glazing and so on. "We could build a whole, new blimp right here if we had to," a young rigger tells me with pride. I believe him. There are parts of cannibalized blimps all over the place, and there are people who remember where each part came from. The most notorious of these fragments is the gondola of a blimp that came down in California after an antisubmarine patrol during World War II-without any sign of its two-man crew. It is one of blimpdom's enduring mysteries.

The L-8 had once been a Goodyear blimp; it was sold to the U.S. Navy, then repurchased after the war. The fate of its officers remains unknown.

Eventually we take a walk to see the Spirit of Akron. A phrase out of history comes back to me at this moment. When the fortyniners headed west during the California gold rush, they shouted: "We're going to see the elephant!" They meant they were on their way to see something they believed would be new, strange and wonderful. I feel the same way.

When the last door is rolled open and I step into Spirit's space in the hangar, I see something resembling a silver-gray storm cloud that has 'been pulled down from the sky and tied to the floor. On TV screens, blimps look like they're only a few inches long, so an encounter with the real thing is a shock. I feellilliputian as I walk around under the ship's six-story mass. It is humbling to be in the presence of something so much larger than life.

Blimps are hot. They have marquee names, make appearances, draw crowds. People scramble to get close to them, to touch them, to scrawl graffiti on them with lipsticks and felt-tip pens. It's true not just of Goodyear blimps but of a crowd of others as well, floating over everything from the Kentucky Derby to a frog-jumping contest. Blimps are showing up as trendy props in TV advertising, too. An actor bungee-jumps from one and scoops up a dab of salsa; a quarterback phones two blimp pilots flying over the stadium, to see if he left his truck lights on; a

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sweepstakes team arrives at a winner's front door with the big check while a blimp hangs in the sky.

Goodyear started flying the first of its airships in 1911. Over the years, it has dominated the American blimp business, but in recent years a brash new bunch has showed up emblazoned with all kinds of trademarks. What's it all about? Promotion, of course. Nothing promotes a spectacle better than a spectacle.

"Blimps bestow a certain cachet on the events they cover and on the companies they represent," says Michael Bolton, a blimp marketing man. "They make everything seem more important and more exciting by their very presence." A Goodyear pilot adds, "You've heard the saying that blimps make people smile and dogs bark. It's true. We're ambassadors of goodwill."

The bottom-line reality behind the blimp boom is not just brand-name exposure on TV. Blimp people offer the networks aerial photography at no cost. TV directors need those sparkling "beauty shots" of sports stadiums sunbathed by day and illuminated at night, and they pay for them with dutiful on-air acknowledgments.

The value of those fleeting looks, calculated at TV's extraordinary advertising rates, is what keeps blimps in the air these days-even over domed stadiums. If Goodyear gets 45 to 90 seconds of national TV exposure during a World Series game or the Super Bowl, it's worth millions. These rewards are more than enough to justify the cost of maintaining three big blimps. In addition to the Spirit of Akron, Goodyear operates the Stars & Stripes, based in Florida, and the Eagle, based in California.

A notice posted in Tom Riley's office announces that Goodyear's blimps earned the equivalent of nearly $20 million in TV exposure in 1997. That's why three new leased blimps joined the Goodyear fleet this year. Two are flying in Europe, one in South America.

Visionaries have always seen a future for airships that goes far beyond advertising, however. In South Africa, the Hamilton Airship Company has formulated plans for a luxury dirigible of near-Hindenburg proportions. It would carry 30 passengers across the Atlantic from Johannesburg to New York in 10 days at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour. In New York City, Donald Trump recently conceived a plan to ferry 160 high rollers a day to his casino in Atlantic City aboard a luxury airship. The exorbitant cost, not any lack of engineering feasibility, caused him to shelve the idea.

A company called Airship Management Services CAMS) is working with a company in Saudi Arabia to provide a blimp for surveillance during the hajj, the annual gathering of millions of Muslims in Mecca and Medina. AMS blimps have already helped with crowd management at the Los Angeles, Seoul and Atlanta Olympics-examples of what many believe will be a growing airship market: police work and border patrols.

A German company, CargoLifter AG, is planning to build a giGoodyear's the Spirit of Akron rests in its hangOl; dwarfing its surroundings. The four huge tail fins provide stability. It is the largest airship flying in the United States and the world's biggest blimp.

Right: The Spirit of Akron is reflected in wel pavement outside its hangar at Wingfoot Lake, near Akron, Ohio. The blimp is kept inflated and anchored to the yellow mast when not in use.

Far right: Aviatrix Amelia Earhart (holding flask) presides at the 1929 blimp christening. The blimp making its debut at the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio, was the Defender.

Below: Goodyear pilot John Moran and passengers cruise aloft in the Spirit of Akron at about 55 kilometers per houl:

gantic cargo-carrying airship capable of flying 130 kilometers per hour. When fully inflated, it will be longer than the Washington Monument is tall. It's aimed at the $9-billion-a-year market for transporting freight to places where planes can't land and for carrying cargo-turbines and power-generating equipment, for example-that is too bulky and heavy (up to ISO tons) for airplanes.

In the beginning, when only birds could fly, men who dreamed of breaking their earthbound shackles could not have conceived of cargo blimps and airship ferries. The Chinese claim they had a cigar-shaped envelope filled with hot air that flew in 1306. In the late 18th century, the Montgolfier brothers turned the French court upside down with excitement when they demonstrated their first hot-air balloons. One of their craft lifted the first humans aloft, over Paris, in 1783. Soon, paying passengers were being taken for rides; one such adventurer was aboard for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel in 1785. The balloon went from Dover to Calais in two hours.

But those early aeronauts were at the mercy of the winds.

Naturally they had some reservations about drifting uncontrollably across the sky, so they turned their attention to matters of steering and propulsion. Oars, propellers driven by pedal power, and flapping wings were all tried as means to direct the earliest airships. A three-horsepower steam engine was used for the first powered, man-carrying dirigible, in 1852. Eventually internal combustion engines became the power source of choice.

"Blimps," by definition, are nonrigid. "Zeppelins" are consid-

ered rigid because they have an interior frame. The word "dirigible" is used to refer to either type of airship.

Until World War I came along, airships remained novelties.

The British recognized that blimps were ideal for submarine reconnaissance because they could remain stationary and thereby enable observers on board to look deep into the water. The Germans, supplied by the airship company founded in 1898 by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, used dirigibles to attack Britain; it was history's first large-scale bombing of civilians from the air. More than a hundred "Zepps," some more than 200 meters long, were so deployed, sometimes flying higher than 7,600 meters, well above the range of the pursuit planes of the

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Navy came to an end in the early 1960s when the latter's blimp fleet was decommissioned.

Lighterthan-air advocates had lost a battle within a Navy that had come to be dominated by proponents of aircraft carriers. Blimp safety was still regarded skeptically, anyway; blimp supporters were referred to disparagingly as "Helium Heads."

hese days blimps may be hot in terms of their visibility, but they are not as numerous as TV exposure makes them seem. Only about two dozen airships are currently flying in the entire world. Three are owned by Goodyear. Three more belong to a German company, WDL, and fly only in Europe. Another German airship, the Zeppelin NT, built by the successor to the original Zeppelin company in Friedrichshafen, home of the Zeppelin Museum, made its first flight last year. Back in the United States, AMS operates the Fuji blimp, which has been flying the colors of the Japanese film firm since 1984.

The other 16 blimps constitute the world's largest proprietary fleet of airships. All have been built since 1989 by the American Blimp Corporation (ABC) in Hillsboro, Oregon. They come in two basic sizes and are leased to clients by a subsidiary of ABC, the Lightship Group in Orlando, Florida. If you have the feeling that blimps are everywhere, these are the guys to blame. Even competitors acknowledge that Lightships, as these blimps are known, have revolutionized the business. Most are relatively small, 40 meters long, and inexpensive to rent, at about $ I75,000 a month. (If you want to buy one outright, it will cost you a little less than $2 million.) They are visually arresting, especially at night, when interior illumination of the translucent envelope (by means of two 1,OOO-wattmercury vapor bulbs) creates a startling, lantern-in-the-sky effect. Lightships have a long and ever-changing client list. American Express, Mazda, Brut and even Goodyear have leased them, and current clients with long-term contracts include Budweiser, Blockbuster Video and MetLife.

The Lightship Group is now making plans to revive the blimp tourist market. It anticipates having 40 airships that will fly over such sites as the Taj Mahal, the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya and perhaps eventually the Grand Canyon.

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day. London was bombed 55 times between 1915 and 1918, and hundreds died. But some zeppelins were shot down, too, going to earth in fiery, hydrogen-fueled plunges.

Airships went on to see their brightest and darkest days in the 1920s and 1930s. The Zeppelin company returned to production in 1928 with the passenger ship Gra/Zeppelin, and its success seemed to promise a golden age. But then three giant U.S. Navy dirigibles, including the Akron and the Macon, built by Goodyear, fell victim to storms and crashes that killed 59 people. Two more deaths occurred as the result of a handling mishap in 1932. The Akron was attempting to moor at a camp in California when three crewmen, clinging to their handling lines, were suddenly borne aloft. One held on and was saved; the others fell to their deaths. Next came the spectacular Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which, thanks to film coverage and a horrified eyewitness radio report, etched in the public mind an image of tragedy that ended the era of intercontinental airship flight.

In World War II, Goodyear built more than 300 antisubmarine blimps of various sizes for the Navy. Those craft operated from more than 50 bases, patrolled thousands of miles of coastline, flew 55,900 missions and never lost one of the 89,000 merchant and troop ships they escorted. Only one blimp was lost to enemy action. In 1943, off Florida, the K-74 was shot down while making a bombing run on a surfaced German sub. Nine crewmen survived in the water until they were rescued by a destroyer. The tenth man, unable to keep pace with the others, was picked off by a shark.

The 30-year partnership between Goodyear and the

In its Oregon factory, ABC employs 45 people and has the capacity to build five new blimps a year. It concentrates on variations of its two basic models-the original small Lightship and a larger, nine-passenger version of which two are now flying (one for Sanyo, one for Budweiser). A 40-passenger model, called the Millennium, may be ready to fly around the world in the year 2000. This is a feat that was first accomplished by the Graf Zeppelin seven decades ago.

Everyone these days seems to want a ride in a blimp.

Operators are inundated with requests by phone, fax and E-mail.

Alas, the ships are so few in number, so tightly scheduled and so limited in payload that only a tiny fraction of the requests can be granted. Happily, mine is among them.

Two loud horn blasts within the Wingfoot hangar summon the ground crew. The Spirit of Akron is about to be moved out to fly-with me aboard. As the airship, attached to a rolling pyramid mast, is pulled from the hangar, it slips slowly past me, momentarily blotting out the sun. Its two engines make a soft turbine whine.

After Spirit is freed from the mast, eight crewmen hold the ship down by two nose lines while others grip a handrail around the gondola. There is a wind off the nearby lake; the men are tugging, leaning against the pull of the ropes. I move under the blimp, to the cabin door.

There's a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear. "Get aboard ...in the copilot seat." I climb in. The door clicks shut behind me. I turn forward and slip into the big right-side chair. A bewildering array of radios and instruments blink a hundred tiny lights. Pat Henry, who has been flying blimps for 38 years, nods hello over the engine noise and points to a headset to put on. A curved windshield and dual controls are in front of me. On the ground, Spirit's crew chief is holding a wind sock and giving Pat a thumbs-up: Go! The nose lines are cast off, ground crewmen dash away, Pat throttles on power.

We move forward for a few seconds, gathering speed, then rotate to what seems an extraordinary angle of climb. The nose lines, cast free, drift in the wind, two parallel white ropes pointing to earth like a dangling trapeze. We reach 1,000 feet in less than a minute and level off. Engine noise tunes down. The world and the horizon return in the windshield: lake on the right, farmland beyond, the tall buildings of Akron on the horizon.

As we fly, making small talk on the headphones, Spirit pitches mildly, nose up, nose down, all its movements gentle and slow.

The ground slips by at about 55 kilometers per hour.

We're just taking a little spin, but when Spirit goes on the road it is accompanied by a 12-meter tractor trailer, a bus and a van. A

Goodyear team typically consists of 20 people: 15 ground crew (a blimp, unlike an airplane, is unable to take off or land without its ground crew), four pilots and one public-relations person. All but the two working pilots travel in the support vehicles.

Pat's voice grumbles into my earphones. "Take it," he says, flipping a toggle switch at the top of his control column, and now I am flying the Goodyear blimpl I have been watching Pat work big forward-and-back movements on the control column-forward to lower the nose, back to lift it. It looks easy-but it isn't.

Oops, there she goes on me, nose climbing, bring 'er down, bring 'er down! I push forward on the control column but she's still climbing, going way too far. I've lost the horizon, just blue sky in the windshield. Pat must think I'm a fool, but I don't have time to look at him. Now she's going down.

It isn't just the up-and-down motion that has to be controlled; there is also some roll. "See that short rope that hangs down between the nose lines?" Pat says, pointing 15 meters ahead. "Try and keep it between the other two."

Part of my brain tries to picture what is happening: a lO-ton rubber bag, more than 60 meters long, filled with a quarter-million cubic feet of gas, is moving through the sky like a loose balloon, no wings, no big power, no speed, a "sail area" of more than half an acre to catch every gust that comes along. I thought I would be able to feel all of this through my hands on the controls, the way I can when I fly a small plane. No such luck.

When Pat takes over again he gives me a wide, sidelong smile that seems to say: See what I mean about a blimp? It's unlike any other kind of flying.

We're heading back to the barn as quickly as possible. A windstorm is predicted from the west; the first gusts are already arriving. Below are the giant hangar, the pyramid mast and several acres of grassy field. The ground crew is arrayed to receive us, IS people looking very small, the chief holding up his fluttering wind sock. Landing a blimp is tricky even without a wind. Pat is pushing Spirit's nose down to earth with engine power now. The two long mooring lines sweep around in wild arcs as eight men try to grab them, rushing back and forth like soccer players, their arms all reaching up. Then ... whoa there! ...nothing!

A wind gust off the lake has caught us, and the blimp is being pushed sideways. The ropes are sailing away and the ground crew is running after them, hands raised, fingers grasping.

Cardinal rule for the men who grab the lines to bring a blimp back to earth: if something goes wrong, let go! ever allow the ship to pick you up. Another go-around and this time we land as softly as an elevator reaching the ground floor. I hear thumps as crewmen toss ballast bags aboard to help keep us down. The gondola door clicks open. My ride on the Spirit is over.

I have been to see the elephant.

0 About the Author: Charles N. Barnard was a mere lad aboard an ocean liner in 1928 when he looked up and saw the Graf Zeppelin on its maiden transatlantic voyage.

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which, if it checked out, would mail postcards alerting paying subscribers at observatories around the world. Now observers learn of discoveries through the Internet and can have a look for themselves within hours instead of days.

If the growing number of telescopes out there may be said to have given the Earth new eyes, the Net has fashioned it a set of optic nerves. Professionals have started converting underutilized telescopes to remote operation: slaves to the Internet, these telescopes make observations of specified galaxies and nebulae on order, for anybody who wants them, and automatically E-mail back the resulting CCD images. It's becoming possible for amateurs and professionals alike to carry out extended research projects using telescopes that they have never actually visited.

It is also easier just to get lucky. In 1994, after amateur astronomers in Georgia discovered a supernova in the Whirlpool galaxy, 35 million light-years from Earth, an even earlier image of the same supernova was found in a CCD picture that two students, Heather Tartara and Melody Spence, at Oil City High School, in Pennsylvania, had taken by a 30-inch robotic telescope at Leuschner Observatory, operated by the University of California, Berkeley. The image, which Ms. Tartara said they had requested because the Whirlpool galaxy "just seemed interesting," turned out to be one of the earliest pictures ever taken of an exploding star.

ROCKY HILL OBSERVATORY LOG, JULY 26, 1996. A big fat moon extinguishes nearly all

the faint, deep-space objects, and towering Iimestone-and-charcoal caverns made of clouds are marching under it. Making a virtue of necessity, I try my hand at observing lunar features, something I've rarely done since adolescence. I mask most of the telescope mirror to make the view not intolerably bright, then set out to orient myself, using a lunar globe for reference. Having forgotten most of what little selenian cartography I ever knew, I find myself trudging back and forth between telescope and globe, as comically indeterminate as an ama-

teur actor in a dinner-theater production of Brecht's Galileo. The sorry affair comes to a close when a rising west wind blows the lunar globe off its stand and sends it rolling across the observatory floor, with me in clumsy pursuit lest it fall down the stairs. I close the observatory, grumbling to myself that the craters of the moon are, after all,just so many crash sites, an insurance adjuster's nightmare of overlapping impact craters that, were they not named for philosophers and scientists, might as well be called Bango!, Whap!, Oops!, and There Goes the Neighborhood. Like many another deep-space stargazer, I've seldom been able to sustain much enthusiasm for the moon.

A

mateur astronomers, with their new technological power and their rising status in the world, have begun doing things that until recently would not have been thought to lie within the grasp of what are, after all, hobbyists. There are amateur radio astronomers who record the screams of colliding galaxies, chronicle the ionized trails of meteors falling in the daytime, or listen for signals from alien civilizations. Some amateurs with fancy solar filters observe jets of plasma arcing off the surface of the sun. Others take photometric measurements of the cycling magnitudes of pulsating stars and eclipsing binary stars. David Levy, an amateur who observes from his backyard, in a remote suburb of Tucson, was the co-discoverer, with the professionals Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, of the comet that crashed into Jupiter in a string of hydrogen-bomb-scale impacts in July of 1994, awakening humanity to the dangers of what such a comet might do if it hit Earth. Don Parker, an anesthesiologist in Florida, takes CCD images of Mars that rival everything this side of the Hubble Space Telescope by using a 16-inch telescope mounted on a deck outside his house, in Coral Gables. Jack Newton, who built a 25-inch telescope in his house, on Vancouver Island, distributes via the Internet exquisite color images he had made of galaxies. The "great white spot" on Saturn, a rare atmospheric phenomenon that astronomers using Hubble studied with intense interest, was discovered, in September of 1990, by Stuart Wilber,

an amateur astronomer who lovingly constructs lacquered hardwood telescopes in the garage of his home.

Barbara Wilson, a mother of two who teaches astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, is said to rank among the world's most acute visual observers.

She presses the limits, tracing out dark rivers of dust that run through the disk of the Milky Way like veins in marble, and trying for dim and distant galaxies that have been photographed but that no human eye has ever glimpsed. Her stargazing pals labelled her the AINTNO Queen, the acronym standing for the Association of Invisible ebula and Things Nobody Observes. She

Persistent train Leonid image from Dutch Meteor Society, photographed by Hans Bellem.

responded by compiling a wish list of a hundred virtually impossible objects that she hopes, somehow, to see. Entries in the AlNTO 100 include footprints on the moon.

I asked her how many she had managed to discern so far. "Not a one," she replied, with a sunny smile. (Since our conversation, Barbara and others have managed to see a couple of the targets on her list.)

One dark night in West Texas, after I'd proved myself not hopelessly inept by sighting, through her 20-inch telescope and with her guidance, an obscure galaxy called Molonglo 3, situated about halfway across the universe, Barbara and I tried to observe a set of gravitational-lensing effects recently discovered by the Hubble telescope. These delicate arcs are the images of galaxies that are billions of lightyears away, whose light is distorted by the gravitational field of an intervening cluster of galaxies. Given that it had taken Hubble to discover them, we both doubted that it was even theoretically possible for the human eye to see the lenses under any circumstances, much less through a Dobsonian set up in a dusty field, but Barbara insisted that we wouldn't be sure unless we tried. And we did try, for more than an hour, using the Hubble photograph as a guide. We failed, but this didn't bother Barbara. "I've been kicked in the butt many times by such objects," she said cheerfully. "About half the time I fail."

"The universe will kick you in the butt," she added, when we met again the next day, at a picnic table on a dude ranch where an annual event known as the Texas Star Party was being held. "You can't be a know-it-all. The first time that you think you know something, the sky will knock you down to size. But it's all so beautiful.

You look at a hurricane on a map and you see its spiral structure, and you watch the spiral structure of water swirling down the drain in a bathtub, and you look up in the sky and you see these spiral formations of galaxies-all the continuity in nature, this repetition of pattern. It just makes you feel good to be alive. Every little, tiny thing is so detailed, and the closer you look the more detailed it gets. It's just a wonderful

got to talking about my plans for the observatory he offered to trade me an architectural consultation for my talk. We met ROCKYHILL OBSERVATORY LOG,3 A.M., NOVEMBER 9, 1997. As is often the case when for lunch in Santa Rosa a few weeks later you're stargazing, it's getting pretty cold. I'm and went out to the site. Miller ambled wearing long underwear, wool socks, polypro around it, idly picking up a leaf here and a sock liners, chinchilla pants, a padded flannel scrap of bark there, chewing on a twig. shirt, a down vest, an Arctic parka, and a wool Then he announced that I would have to cap, but to operate the telescope controls re- chop down the trees. quires fingerlessgloves that have long since left "Some consultation," I said. "Those my fingers numb, and when I bend over the eyetrees are more than a cenpiece my eyes tend to tear up in the chilly wind.

An ounce of brandy would be warming, but al- tury old. I don't want to cohol is said to reduce the eye's night-visionca- cut them down."

Miller smiled, poked pacity, which in observing galaxies is already severely pressed. One is using not the cones but around some more, then the rods, which are more sensitive to low light picked up a weathered but also poorer at discerning detail. More- piece of cardboard, took over, the human retina is constructed upside Bright Leonid out a pencil, and sketched down...so that the optic nerves, for some evolufireball on it. "The thing to do," tionary reason, come up on the light-gathering photographed side of the retina instead of behind it, then con- he said, "is to put it out during the verge and drop back toward the brain through a over the hillside, like meteor storm hole near the center of the retina. The brain pret- this." of 1966 by ties things up by paving over the hole with a The sketch alarmed James W concoctionof portraitureborrowed from the im- me. What had been a simYoung at mediatelysurroundingpart of the visualfield, so ple one-story structure Table in day-to-day life we don't notice that there's a would now be, at its westMountain black hole in the center of everything we see. ward end, a three-story Observatory But the trick is exposed when peering with one in Southern eye through a telescope at the night sky: dim building. But I got an orCalifornia. things disappearif you look right at them. Deep- chard ladder, put it where space observers combat this effect by employ- the telescope pier would ing averted vision, meaning that they look be, and climbed up to slightly away from the objects of their attention. have a look. Everything Avertedvision is the deepest vision. fell into place. It was perfect. hen I set out to build Rocky Hill "This is going to be Observatory, in Sonoma County, I more expensive than I'd found a nice, level patch of ground with good local "seeing," as astronomers call planned for," I grumbled, climbing down the ladder. it, which resulted from a smooth, laminar Miller smiled again. "Of course," he flow of clean Pacific air wafting in from the west. The trouble was that a pair of tall said. "What do you think architects are old oaks obscured most of the eastern sky. for?"

With the site settled, I started questionWhile I was pondering this problem, in the summer of 1992, I got a call from an ing veteran observatory builders about the architect named John Miller, inviting me specifics of design. Their advice was to address an annual conference of the mostly ecological: If you've got a good site, build on it with as little impact as posAmerican Institute of Architects.

"We don't pay an honorarium," he said, sible, so it stays good. The most concerted "but we'll give you a nice case of wine." advice came from Clyde Tombaugh, the "I don't need any wine," I replied, lookdiscoverer, in 1930, of the planet Pluto. ing out over the vineyards.

When I went to see him, in Mesilla, New Miller proved to be an amiable and in- Mexico, he took me out behind his house, telligent conversationalist, and when we hard by a trailer park, and showed me his universe we live in. To me, it's a visual world, and I just want to see."

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two telescopes, both constructed by hand and equipped with mirrors he had ground himself. Neither had any enclosure; they'd stood out there in the desert air, night and day, for years. "The polar axis on this one came off my dad's 1910 Buick," Tombaugh said, patting the nine-inch telescope. "I finished the mirror in the spring of 1928. The Smithsonian Institution wanted me to give it this telescope, but I said, 'I

can't really do that. I'm still using it.' " Tombaugh climbed up into the scaffolding of the 16-inch telescope, a steel-andglass affair that loomed up into the dark, skeletal as an equation. Tombaugh was then in his mid-eighties, a bent old man, but he swarmed over the instrument's ladders, platforms and steps with spiderlike agility, winding its gravity-driven clockwork drive and hoisting the tube into place, while I struggled after him, furiously taking notes.

"You should be at least eight feet above the ground!" he called down to me. "Up here, your feet are 16 feet above ground when you're observing the zenith. The best thing to have around a telescope is wood. Concrete is

murder. A skeleton tube is best, to avoid air currents trapped inside. If you must have a closed tube, line it with cork. All this is hand-bolted, not a weld on it. Six tons of foundations, one ton of steel. I tap-fitted the bolts--4:i.lled the holes a little too small for them, so they'd stay tight. The whole thing cost about five hundred dollars."

He then shouted, "It's a super telescope! A humdinger. With this scope, I've

seen markings on Ganymede"-a satellite of Jupiter, about the size of Earth's moon but two thousand times as far away. "To do that, you have to have some awful good seeing, and some awful good optics."

When he noticed that I'd finally caught up with him, he lowered his voice. "Very few people," he said quietly, "have seen as much on the planets as I've seen with this telescope."

In building Rocky Hill Observatory, I took the advice Clyde had given me, and the place works fine. One day soon after it was finished, I was loading shelves on the floor below the telescope deck with some old astronomy books my mother had sent

me from the house on Key Biscayne.

Among them was a faded blue looseleaf binder in which I'd kept observing notes and sketches of the moon, Mars and Jupiter that I'd made as a boy. The cover was stained from th~ floodwaters of Hurricane Betsy, but the contents were well preserved. As I was paging through it, a sheet slipped out from the back and fell to the floor. On it, ruled in hard pencil, was a drawing that I'd made, at about the age of 14, of the floor plan of an observatory. It was envisioned as a one-story structure, not canted out on a hillside, as in John Miller's innovation, but otherwise it was almost identical to the building I was standing in. All dreams, as they say, begin in childhood.

ROCKYHILL OBSERVATORY LOG, 5:30 A.M., NOVEMBER9,1997. Almost dawn now. Ilinger over the sight of the Whirlpool, a face-on spiral galaxy, floating on an ocean of brightening blue sky like a jellyfish adrift on the sea. Our local owl sounds one last hoot, then falls silent.

I call her Minerva, after Hegel's aphorism "The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk," perhaps the only line of Hegel's that has meant much to me. Taking her silence as a signal that the night has ended, I heel the telescope to its stowed position, cap the main mirror, wrap the secondary mirror in a little felt bag taken from a showy bottle of Canadian whiskey, put the cold, weighty eyepieces away, close the roof, and trudge down the hill, frost crunching under my feet. No supernovas discovered tonight, but the light from a million of them is out there, rushing toward us, and perhaps some night I will be the first to catch sight of one. A latehoming bat flits across the whitewashed sky and dives into the dark heart of a stand of oaks, bringing to mind Blake's verse "The Bat that flits at close of Eve/Has left the Brain that won't Believe."

At home, a few coals still glow in the fire. I undress and slip into bed. The last thing I see against the darkness of my closed eyelids is the Whirlpool galaxy, afloat on its blue ocean, indelible.

0 About the Author: Timothy Ferris, a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of California. Berkeley, is the author of The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report.

"We

Want to Tell India's

Story"

I

nformal, intense and with an aura of intellectualism, Michael Clark could pass for a university professor, which indeed he was before becoming executive director of the Washington-based U.S.India Business Council early last year.

A graduate in international economics and Latin American studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University, Clark has been adviser to

many foreign ambassadors in Washington, D.C., and participated in several foreign policy groups, including the Oslo negotiations on private investment in the West Bank and Gaza. Most recently he was a member of the Independent Task Force cosponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations that produced "After the Tests: U.S. Policy toward India and Pakistan," an examination of U.S.foreign policy following nuclear tests in South Asia last year. Before assuming his current position, he was co-director of the Corporate Partnership Initiative and authored the Council's Introductory Guide to Corporate Citizenship in India.

Clark was recently in New Delhi to deliver a lecture on "The Role of u.s.

Business in Reshaping U.S.-India Relations." In an interview to SPAN, he spoke at length about his perceptions on the Indian economy and the future growth dimensions of business linkages between India and the United States.

Mr. Clark, could you tell us about the U.S.-India Business Council and what are its roles and objectives?

MICHAEL CLARK: The U.S.-India Business Council is an autonomous, selffunded membership organization of some 100 major U.S. corporations with investment interests in India. It was formed in 1975 at the request of the two governments to provide a vehicle for private sector-to-private sector dialogue. Came the Emergency and the ejection of many U.S. companies, the Council went into atrophy. It existed and continued to operate but it was not until the reform process in India that it got a whole new life. There was a great deal of interest on the part of U.S. companies and the organization began to grow. In 1994 there were about 40 companies. And now despite the slowdown on the reform process and despite the events in May last year, the Council has continued to grow.

There are other organizations in Washington that deal with India. None of the others really have a secretariat-people whose full-time jobs are devoted entirely to promoting U.S.-India economic relations. That's what we do.

How does the Council help the American companies?

There are really three levels of concern and engagement that we're involved in.

Generally, I would say in the last few years the primary focus has been to support and encourage the reform process in India as a vehicle really for moving major investment in a new economy. Ours is an organization primarily of large companies, in fact, the largest of the largeFORTUNE 100 to FORTU E 500 size companies: GE, IBM, the insurance majors, Bechtel, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, among others. Most of these companies are already on the ground or already committed to getting on the ground. What we're most interested in doing is presenting U.S. company issues in a policy framework or a sector or industry level framework. And we provide probably the most important vehicle for companies, all of whom have good access to the government, to put up a broader framework.

We work jointly with other business councils, with FlCCI and ASSOCHAM. We also take on important issues jointly with cn from time to time and the IndoAmerican Chamber of Commerce. We bel.ieve that whenever we can present a perspective that is in accord with Indian industry points of view, that makes it much more attractive and a much stronger position. We think it's very important to have very frank discussions with Indian industry on issues on which we don't agree. So we're also a vehicle for having those kinds of opportunities.

But I would say what we really concentrate on more than anything else is looking at, say, a sector-insurance, power, transport infrastructure-and try to get companies together on framework issues. We're also involved at a macro level in a variety of ways. We have people in the financial services area, portfolio investors who are very keen on understanding and maintaining a dialogue with the Indian Government about macro economic issues. But when we say macro, we really mean something broader than that. One thing that we're particularly keen on becoming proactive is the ways in which investor perceptions can be improved in order to increase India's

access to capital on reasonable terms and to really separate India from the rest of Asia. Tell India's story.

You spoke about the slowdown of the reform process. How do you survey the scenario in India?

My thesis is that there's a fundamental question that India has to deal with when we talk about globalization and opening to the outside world. Now if the world were really diversified, if power structure was really much more pluralistic, I think globalization and all those things would have a different face, particularly here in India.

But because really opening the markets means creating an opening to not just U.S. companies but to U.S. rules, to U.S. expectations of how the economy should be managed, we're talking about pretty pro-

think we've reached a point where crucial decisions need to start being made that will touch on core levels of power. What we're trying to stress is that there are tremendous opportunities that lie on the other side: that India can leapfrog into the 21st century and become not just the world's biggest producer of shirts and low-end textiles, but in a very short period-lO, IS or 20 years-a major service industries provider, major high-value manufacturer and a genuine leader (as it already is in certain niches) in the world.

You mention that the time for prudence and caution is over and it is time to open the doors. But there is also a view here that the reason why India did not go the way of Southeast Asia is because it didn't go all out in opening its

level of specificity. I think that there is a basic assumption in India that foreign companies will come. The opportunities in the mature markets of the West are increasingly limited and that the pressure is such that investment will come. I think that's a fundamental mistake. There was something to it in the mid-1990s when the world was awash in a sea of cash and India was in a position to bargain hard.

But take, for example, the power sector.

If we're looking in India at a power sector market of potentially 100,000 megawatts of power by the year 2006, which is a lot in terms of where India wants to go, in the United States alone we're talking by the year 2005 of building a million megawatts of power. There is a huge demand for technical expertise and resources that will be sucking this

"We hope that India will playa larger role in the debates that are going to take place in the coming years on designing a new financial architecture for the world." found kind of questions.

These are not easy questions. They touch very much on the core of the way power is organized in India at the level of the nation and at the level of states and, ultimately, at the level of industry and the local individuals. Perhaps the most important mechanism of transformation is that when you move to private market activity, you externalize costs. And suddenly there is a transparency in everything that is required. It forces industry to come forward on what it is doing, it forces states to look at costs and who's paying what and what costs are being allocated. It means laying bare the fundamentals of the operation of the economy at the macro level.

But when you do that, the whole political economy of the country changes. And that process of transition, as we know from looking at Russia and we know from the problems of Latin America and from the different things that have happened in Southeast Asia, is an extremely complex, difficult and dangerous thing.

So the U.S. companies are all prepared to try to understand the prudence, the caution, the slowness with which the Indian Government has approached this. But I

economy. How do you respond to that?

Well, I think there is more than a little truth in that. There are a lot of lessons in the Southeast Asia crisis, some of which apply to India, and some which don't. Now most people would concede that India's policy on short-term foreign debt was extremely prudent and careful. That is well understood. And we hope that India will playa larger role in the debates that are going to take place in the coming years on designing a new financial architecture for the world.

The difficulty is that when you talk about Taiwan, Korea, even Thailand, they're still ahead of where they were, and far ahead of India, despite all the losses and the great pain that's been involved. Then you really have to compare India with China. And China doesn't have these kinds of problems. It's not a democracy and it doesn't have the same vulnerabilities.

It's now close to a decade since India launched on the reform path. After May and the resultant pressures on the economy, where do you think the thrust should lie to help move the reforms further?

Well, I think that we can move from one level of generality to a very precise

money away. I spoke to one major supplier here who said that even ifIndia was ready to go today, he couldn't take the contract for at least two years. They were sold out. And if large parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore rebound, as seems quite probable, then interest in India as a business proposition wanes. The opportunity to tap into the huge pool of available long-term finance gets tougher. The money is probably still there, but the people may not be.

That said, we think there are a growing number of people in the government who really understand the issues, who are committed to making it happen. One of our concerns actually at the moment is whether the great desire to send powerful signals that the reform process is moving might be diluted by spreading the front too much. It would be wiser to focus on two or three sectors, maybe even one, as a showcase, and get it done: finish the power projects, or drive insurance through or come up with a strong disinvestment policy. I believe that the mood here is pretty good and the opportunities are still tremendous.

D

n a chilly Monday morning in south-central Virginia, a former motel clerk and an ex-McDonald's cashier settle in at their desks. Down the hall, a recently laid-off plant manager pours coffee for a police officer who's in the midst of a career change. Just before 8 a.m., they gather to discuss the day's mission, which, as they see it, is to save the world.

Or at least the state of Connecticut.

Welcome to the Software Factory's Year 2000 remediation facility in South Boston, Virginia, a town of 7,000 that no one is likely to mistake for Silicon anything. It is here, however, that a group of computer neophytes-some of whom hadn't even heard of the Year 2000 problem until a few months before-are working to ensure that Connecticut residents don't get bitten by the Millennium Bug on January 1,2000.

Why South Boston? Why not? With less than a year to go before the change of century, companies and government agencies are working feverishly to ensure that their computer systems don't read the year 2000 as the year 1900. As the immovable deadline draws closer, however, many are facing an irresistible force-there's more programming to do than programmers to do it. Most are turning to outside vendors like the Software Factory-more than 600 have materialized across the nation over the past two years alone-for help. Which underscores the essence of the issue: The Year 2000 bug is proving so pervasive that some computers will likely not be ready.

But perhaps more disturbing is this reality: In many cases, it's too late to fix the problem correctly. Instead, programmers are reaching into a bag of tricks and pulling out ways to work around the problem-a fact that has more than a few experts worried that we'll be dealing with Year 2000 issues long after the year 2000.

The Year 2000 problem, as you've likely heard, is the unfortunate result of years of shortcuts that programmers, mostly be~

[IDU

cause of shortsightedness, used to save computer memory, which historically has been extremely expensive. It is prevalent in mainframe computer systems, many of which run on ancient (by computer standards, anyway) programming languages like Cobol, in so-called firmware (tiny chips with simple programs etched into them that, among other tasks, control many facets of manufacturing), and even in older PCs. Instead of depicting years as four digits-1998, for example-years appear in computer code as two digits: 98. The "19" is understood-even after January I, 2000, when millions of computers around the world will read "00" as "1900."

Big deal? Actually, it is. In today's society, computers control everything from defense systems to the electric grid that powers your home. So if the thought of a huge mainframe spewing out bad data prompts a yawn, consider the consequences. Your credit card bill is suddenly 99 years overdue, you owe another century's (Continued on page 35)

What Is the Problem?

January 2000 marks the halfway point of your 3D-year, $100,000 home mortgage, but your latest statement seems a bit high. Using this mortgage scenario as an example, here's how the Year 2000 bug could lead to loan miscalculations.

CURRENT SOFTWARE CURRENT YEAR PURCHASE REMAINDER UNPAID

YEAR OF LOAN (YEARS)

BALANCE

Working frantically as the Year 2000 draws near, many programmers who are using shortcuts fear the Millennium Bug may haunt us long after the clock ticks over.

CORRECTED SOFTWARE

00

2000

(-) 85

(-) 1985

- 85

15

$37,187,641

$74,019

Simple Arithmetic

themselves could be genetically engineered to produce colored fiber? Why not turn plants into chemical factories?

Plant biologists at Monsanto and a Cambridge start-up named Metabolix are separately working on a plastic grown in plants that could be ready for farmers as early as 2002. Prodigene, a two-year-old College Station, Texas, spin-off from Pioneer, is already selling industrial enzymes grown in transgenic corn and is developing other protein-based industrial products. Other labs are attempting to create plants that produce specialty oils that could serve as novel industrial ingredients for coatings and lubricants. Also on the drawing board are plant-based edible vaccines for diseases such as hepatitis and diarrhea.

"By tinkering with the control and activity of genes, you can make just about everything in plants," says David Wheat, a longtime plant biotech consultant and president of the Bostonbased Bowditch Group. "By understanding how an organism works at a molecular level, you can design new kinds of products-maybe even make products you've never seen before."

The prospects in agricultural biotech are tantalizing enough that they are helping to drive a massive restructuring of the agricultural and chemical industries that is, in some cases, blurring the lines between the two. Monsanto and DuPont, in particular, have dug deeply into the new opportunities, gobbling up seed suppliers and plant biotech start-ups. Driven largely by the potential of biotech, Monsanto unceremoniously dumped its chemicals business in 1997, embracing biology as the wave of the future. In turn, last spring DuPont reorganized, forming a life sciences group (which includes its agricultural, drugs and biotech activities) and declaring that its future growth lies in the integration of chemistry and biotechnology.

Even staid Dow Chemical, the huge chemicals maker, has professed its desire to be a leading biotech player, targeting the development of plastics and industrial chemicals. "It's a technology whose time has come," says Femand Kaufmann, Dow's vice president of new businesses and strategic development.

Kaufmann cautions, however, that it will take time for plant-grown chemicals to make a dent in the high commodity markets, which are dominated by products made from petroleum.

It will also take increased knowledge of genes and how to engineer them seamlessly into plants. As an example, take the efforts to make the plastic PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) in plants. This polyester material is naturally produced in some bacteria in a distinct pathway involving three key enzymes. To get plants to make the plastic requires inserting the genes responsible for that entire pathway and making sure that the new pathway is integrated into the plant's metabolism.

The possibility of doing this kind of genetic tinkering in plants has changed how plant biologists think, making it possible to conceive of a "perfect" plant--or at least one that makes pretty much what you want. In one notable example, scientists are genetically engineering crops to produce different types of fatty acids (the compounds that make up plant oils). Fatty acids are intriguing because oils can be more easily separated and recovered from a seed than can proteins or starch. Also, modified plant oils could be versatile chemical feedstocks, offering chemists an alternative set of sorting materials to those derived from petroleum.

That potentially huge market has attracted the attention of plant biologists around the world. Biologists at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Svalov and at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

in Canbeo'a, Australia, recently collaborated to isolate from wild plants the genes that code for the enzymes responsible for making two important types of biological compounds: epoxy fatty acid and an acetylenic fatty acid. Epoxy fatty acids made from petroleum are widely used in industrial chemistry while acetylenic fatty acids are not commercially available but could prove valuable as, an10ng other things, drying agents in paints.

In separate work, Christopher Somerville, a plant biologist at Carnegie Institution of Washington and Stanford University, has grown plants that make hydroxylated fatty acids (a type found in castor oil that already has hundreds of industrial applications), as well as ones that produce fatty acids with modified double carbon bonds. Somerville suggests that in the next couple of years biologists will engineer plants that grow designer fatty acids, with chemical groups placed at precisely specified positions along the carbon backbone. The result would be a cheap source of relatively pure chemical intermediates.

The big challenge, says Somerville, is to produce plants that have close to 90 percent of one particular type of oil. "When you can squeeze it out and get essentially one compound, that's when the big industrial applications kick in," he explains. So far, the biotech plants fall well short, yielding at best about 50 percent of the desired oil. But Somerville is encouraged by nature's performance; he points out that castor oil naturally has 90 percent of a single type of fatty acid.

These possibilities are inspiring to corporate researchers. But the reason for the excitement in corporate boardrooms is simple: bottom line arithmetic. Crops like soybeans and corn are cheap.

That means that if you can sell seeds for plants that will command a slightly higher value-say, a high-protein corn-farmers will buy them. It also means that a product grown in crops-a plastic in corn, for example--can potentially be made much cheaper than those from petrochemical sources. And that differential could become even more attractive if the price of oil rises.

It's that type of payoff that interests DuPont. In addition to using biotech to boost its agriculture business, the $45 billion-ayear company is looking to leverage the technology to revitalize its bread-and-butter activities-making polymers and chemicals.

"We're looking for things that will move the bottom line," says Patrick Ireland, a DuPont polymer scientist who heads research into plant-based production of materials. "We're not looking for small opportunities. We're looking for things that aren't accessible easily by standard chemistry."

Because this area is clearly very hot and competitive, Ireland declines to describe the specific compounds his group hopes to make in plants. Instead, he pulls out a spool of thread that has been synthesized using genetically engineered bac-

teria. It has the feel of silk-velvety soft, but tough. It mayor may not be a good target for plant-based production, says Ireland. But it's clearly the type of intriguing new material DuPont has in mind.

Some of the most promising candidates for plant-based routes are polymers that have proved too expensive to make through petroleum-based chemistry, says Robert Dorsch, director of biotechnology development in the company's central research organization. "DuPont has over the years looked at a huge number of different polymers but only makes a handful, and the real reason is the economics of getting the starting materials."

Ultimately, says Dorsch, DuPont expects plants to "provide a new palette of starting materials," enabling the company to mass-produce "a much broader range of polymers."

DNA Databases For the next few years, large-scale production of plastic will remain in the factory, not the field. Even in DuPont's most advanced research projects for plant-based materials, Ireland concedes, scientists are still "unraveling the enzymatic pathways while simultaneously developing all the polymer chemistry. No one really understands how to control and regulate plant gene expression."

But if plant genomics continues to accelerate at its current rate, it may become far easier to reach that goal. Most common crops have a large amount of DNA and about 50,000 genesroughly half the number in humans. But using fast, automated machines honed for unraveling the human genome, plant geneticists are identifying genes more quickly than botanists know how to cultivate them.

Scott Tingey, director of DuPont's genomics program, says technology has had a profound impact on the field. "A few years ago, it took two man-years to clone a plant gene," Tingey says.

"About half the time you were successful, the other half you fell on your face. Today, life is very different." Over the last two years, DuPont has created a database of DNA sequences for corn, soybeans, wheat and rice. "It eliminates the tedious gene discovery process. That's no longer the rate-limiting step in a project," explains Tingey.

Biologists anticipate completing the sequencing of Arabidopsis (a weed that is the primary genetic model for plant genetics) by 2000, as a result of an international collaboration that began in 1989. That could be crucial because all flowering plants have essentially the same set of genes.

"Within the next five years, we'll know the function of all plant genes (Conlinued on page 34)

CATALYST FOR CHANGE Controversy about the wonders vs. the pitfalls of biotechnology is the order of the day. Can science and governments provide protection along with the miracles?

D

ebate about biotechnology and genetic engineering is underway around the world, and India is fully engrossed in the discussion. In India, perhaps more than anywhere, agricultural advances that increase crop yield are welcome. Private sector companies have joined hands with multinationals to produce state-of-the-art seed for Indian farmers. The Indian Government is also engaged in developing new strains in university labs and at prestigious research institutes.

Recent protests against a "terminator seed" have tarnished the bright prospects of new seed technology in India by raising fears about its long-term effects. Dr. R.P. Sharma, director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Biotechnology Research Centre at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi, attributes the reaction to ignorance, but says the scientific community is partly to blame: "When you do science within four walls, and do not communicate to the rest Of the world, there is always a fear of the unknown.

Those who are proposIng these kinds of technologies also have the responsibility to explain it to the public in detail. It must be explained not only in scientific literature, but in simple language. What do we mean? And what do we intend to do? If scientists do not do this there is going to be misrepresentation, misinformation and misinterpretation.

And in my.opinion that's what is happening."

The Indian Government, through its various institutes, has been doing biotechnological research-developing its own hybrid seeds, for instance-for a long time. The insect-repellant Bt Cotton is just one of the many projects being researched at IARI in New Delhi. Some other areas being explored at the institute are genetic prevention of fungal and viral diseases, improvement of mustard seed to yield lower cholesterol oil and increasing the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. Dr. Sharma says, "This country has lots of potential for utilizing such technology, because it's a vast country. Transportation of fruits and vegetables from north to south, and east to west is increasing. And we know that the transportation takes days and there's a lot of transportation damage.

So if we can introduce genes which can delay ripening, then the shelf life of fruits and vegetables-sensitive vegetables like tomatoes---can increase. You can transport these things across the country with less loss. These are the immediate areas in which we have made some progress. We hope that in a few years we will be in a position to deliver the goods."

Mark Wells is national marketing manager for Monsanto, a U.S. company in the biotech business which is pursuing similar aims. It has been in the limelight recently over field trials of its insect-resistant Bollgard ™ Bt Cotton. Bollgard repels bollworms-that devastate so much growing cotton-without using pesticides.

Instead, a bacterial gene toxic to bollworms has been transferred to cotton seed. Monsanto has a tie-up with the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (MAHYCO), but their joint effort has been controversial. Wells says farmers are very interested in the new products, which are geared to benefit them as well as Monsanto and MAHYCO. But he admits, "When you

are introducing a new technology like biotechnology, that in itself comes with a whole lot of debate and polarized views.

Now there are groups around the world who are philosophically opposed to biotechnology. And that's fine. People are entitled to their points of view, and Monsanto doesn't want to suppress anybody's views. What concerns me more is when people argue from a position of misinformation, and biotechnology is very open to that." He criticizes scare tactics based on misinformation, and emphasizes the "terminator technology" is purely conceptual at this point. It has been formulated to the extent that it exists on paper, and a patent has been taken out on it by Delta Pine & Land-a company Monsanto is negotiating to buy-and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Monsanto is very careful about products they release, Wells says. Their hybrids, which are now in wide use in the U.S., Canada and several other countries, are thoroughly tested for potential allergenic effects and dozens of other things.

"These things are tested as extensively as possible given our current knowledge, and that testing is updated all the time."

The new strains are also subject to restrictions of countries where the seed is sold.

Wells continues, "Countries make riskbenefit analyses, and they say well, we've looked at the data, and there doesn't seem to be any risk relative to the benefit that this technology could bring to our agriculture." India has defined strict safety guidelines, says Dr. Sharma: "No individual scientist or organization, public or private, can undertake genetic engineering research without the approval of the BioSafety Committee."

Science and industry test all the time ...but. Opponents to genetically modified organisms question the long-term and

Department of Agriculture officials taking a look at a popular new product in the Punjab.

unknown effects that may be present even after exhaustive testing. What happens to the neighbors' crops? Will the introduction of antibiotics into crops increase the tolerance of harmful bacteria, weakening the medical arsenal against disease? How will altered seed affect the soil, birds, insects, people? Will "escapes" through pollen propagate traits from genetically engineered plants? Indiana University biologist Martha L. Crouch, in a paper posted on the Internet about the "terminator technology" says, "I am confident that some of the particular problems will be addressed by the seed industry before they implement the technology. However, I am also sure that there will be other problems no one yet foresees or imagines. There will be surprises."

It might be a matter of tradeoffs. The agro industry and governments aiming to adequately feed their people cite the growing world population, which is set to double in many countries in the next 50 years.

Proponents of biotechnology and genetic engineering say high-tech, high-yield seeds are the only way humanity can be fed 'in the next century given the shrinking

areas of cultivated land. Developments like hybrid seeds have already made a great difference, allowing farmers to be sure of good seed that increases their yields every year. Hybrids are the result of the cross between two plants with desired characteristics. The progeny is superior to the parent plants, a phenomenon known as hybrid vigor. Successive generations are variable, however, and most farmers buy new seed each year.

Hybrid seeds appear to work well in places like India, where keeping viable seed is a big problem. Much seed spoils in storage, restricting India's productivity to about 50 percent of the world's average.

Mark Wells adds: "Farmers have to plant a lot more seed. What they do plant comes up very patchy because the inviable seeds are not evenly distributed through the sample. You go out to soybean areas and you'll see it in the rows. There will be two feet with no soybeans and then 10 soybean plants within one foot and then there will be another foot with no soybeans. It's very patchy, and reduces the total yield capability of that field. Biotechnology plays a big role in upgrading seed technology." He maintains, "Peasant farmers are interested in modem agriculture, because life is pretty tough when you are

a peasant farmer in Bihar and 80 percent of the crop you grow goes to feeding your family so your disposable income and economic power is virtually zero, and if you can change that dynamic by growing hybrid tomato seeds that cost per gram a substantial sum but give you three times the yield, and change your whole economic situation, then you are probably going to do it and be happy about it."

Wells says another important factor about designer seeds is that the farmer needn't change traditional farming methods to take advantage of advances.

Whether it is hybrid seeds or Bollgard insect-resistant cotton, "it's the same seed, the same variety, it just has an extra benefit that comes with it. Now Bollgard will be a little more expensive because they are buying their insect control at the same time they are buying their seed, but it will bring enormous incremental value to them without having to fundamentally change the way they farm."

Perhaps, as Dr. Sharma says, "One cannot have a blanket recommendation or condemnation of the technology. You have to take it on a case by case basis. If there is a gene which is very useful in a plant and provides economic benefits without any harmful effects, we should encourage such technology and utilization of such genes. But wherever you have certain doubts you must formulate data to prove it is harmless. That is what the science is meant for and that's what our guidelines provide."

Unquestionably the debate about biotechnology and genetic engineering will continue. It touches everyone too nearly, not only in terms of the food we eat but how we fight and overcome serious illnesses. There are groups today in the U.S. lobbying for labeling of genetically engineered produce, so that customers know what they are getting. There will be other issues and other questions that require responsible answers gleaned from honest, exhaustive analysis. New guidelines will be created and, doubtless, laws will be enacted to accommodate the new realities these scientific breakthroughs introduce.

Biotechnology may well be the dominant issue of the next century.

D

Soil agronomists record collon plant height, nodes and fruiting sites to further their research.

at some level," predicts Stanford's Somerville. "It's a major change. We'll be in a lot better position to make rational improvements in plants."

Back at newly formed Cereon, one goal is to turn the sequencing of interesting genetic material into a routine, high-throughput production line. In particular, the company wants to accelerate the process of finding a DNA sequence responsible for a specific phenotype, or physical trait. "We are setting up systems that will allow molecular geneticists to go from a phenotype of interest to having a cloned gene, and knowing the sequence for that trait, in a very short time," says Cereon President William Timberlake. "It now takes years to get at some of these genes," Timberlake explains.

"We would like to reduce that to weeks or months."

But gathering all that gene information is only the first step.

Oliver Peoples, cofounder of Metabolix, explains: "What do you do with all the gene information from genomics? You begin to engineer pathways to optimize the flow of carbon. It's the end use of genomics-it's the ultimate jigsaw puzzle." In other words, the dream is to control the entire metabolism of a plant.

Companies intent on turning crop plants into factories are working on some preliminary steps. DuPont intends to sharpen its biology skills by making a plastic intermediate from sugar using genetically engineered microbes in a fermentation process.

The intermediate is the key ingredient in a novel polymer that could compete with nylon, and the company plans to have a small-scale production facility up and running by late 2000. It will be DuPont's first attempt at a biologically based production process, and, says Dorsch, it will guide the company's plans for

using biology to make materials.

Against one wall of Dorsch's office is a diagram mapping the metabolic pathways in a bacterium. It resembles a chemical engineering flow diagram-the kind you see everywhere at DuPont-only it's far more complex. The idea, Dorsch says, is to take advantage of the natural flows of carbon in the organism and to engineer subtle changes that allow you to siphon off a desired product. "Organisms are already tuned up to work very well. If you try to move a significant fraction of the carbon through a different pathway, you are getting toward having to completely re-engineer the beast. I don't think we're so audacious as to believe that that is something that will happen any time soon." He quickly adds, "But we might get there."

The DuPont research labs on the outskirts of Wilmington, Delaware, are sacred ground for polymer scientists and chemists. They are ground zero for modern American industrial chemistry, the place where nylon was invented. And petroleum-based chemistry has long reigned here. Now, says Ireland, biology is "revitalizing" the research. "The polymer chemists are excited about it because they see the possibilities inherent in the science. The biologists are excited because they see the opportunity to use their talents to make a lot of money for the company."

Towering distillation columns are still more common than cornfields in Wilmington. But if DuPont and its rivals are successful, the gap between the agricultural markets and the chemical industry could soon be about to close. Indeed, the gap between industrial chemistry and biology already has.

D About the Author: David Rotman is senior editor of Technology Review.

THE YEAR 2000 PROBLEM continued from page 27

Battling the Bug Money The major U.S. banks are well along.

Small banks, however, are lagging, prompting experts to warn that some of them could be bought out as a result of Year 2000. Even so, they say, your money should be safe. But if you're looking for another layer of security, keep copies of old financial statements-along with copies of credit card, investment, loan and tax records-just in case.

The Millennium Bug is such a formidable opponent that programmers are concentrating on fixing only the computers critical to a business s operation.

Here is where some key industries are at present.

Aviation Though only one-third of the FAA's critical computer systems-air traffic control, for example-had been fixed as of press time, administrator Jane Garvey, insisting the organization will be ready, recently announced plans to fly across the country shortly after midnight January I, 2000. Boeing and Airbus say their aircraft have no Year 2000 safety issues.

Defense Weapons Missiles will not fire without warning, says Army consultant Rich Hoffman. Though these and other weapons have embedded chips, Hoffman says a malfunction would disable the weapon, not deploy it. The bigger issue, he says, is the possibility of a mistaken offensive.

Recently, the Clinton Administration appointed a commission to raise awareness in the international community about this issue.

Electricity Billing systems are more at risk than operations, says Steve Rosenstock of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents America's publicly owned utilities. Even if an embedded chip detected a maintenance problem, Rosenstock says, the chances are slim that it would shut down the system.

Health Care Only 30 percent of U.S. hospitals have formal remediation plans, yet the effects of Year 2000 could be dire: Not only could medical records be lost, but IV feeders could malfunction and dialysis machines could shut down. On the positive side, pacemakers and other medical implant devices are not affected, contrary to popular belief, says leading manufacturer Medtronic.

Home Computers The Year 2000 problem could show up in two places: the intemal clock or the operating system. All Macintosh computers and operating systems are compliant, but IBM-compatible PCs built before 1996 with Pentium or older chips could face Millennium Bug issues, depending on which version of the chip you have. As far as operating systems, Windows 98 has no problems, but Windows 3.1 and older versions of Windows 95 will need software patches. Software to test and fix these older machines and systems is available on the Internet. Also, a few software programs, such as Intuit's online banking software, have Year 2000 problems.

worth of interest on your home, and Grandma gets a notice to enter kindergarten (assuming the mail is still moving). Phone lines are busy, and E-mail is down because the electricity is out.

You're under a boil-water alert, and the shelves at the local supermarket are bare. And oh yeah-the money in your bank account disappears faster than it did last time you visited Vegas.

Okay, that's a worst-case scenario. But the Year 2000 bug will likely hit some people harder than their New Year's Day hangover. Embedded chips, for example, show up in the unlikeliest of places, such as on the ocean floor (oil rigs) and in space (satel-

Social Security The Social Security Administration began its efforts seven years ago and, as such, is the government's poster child on how to fix the problem correctly. It is also working with related agencies-the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Postal Service-to ensure checks are delivered on time.

Telephone Service Though the major U.S. long-distance carriers-AT&T, Sprint and MCI-expect to be ready, their transmission systems depend on the nation's l,400 regional carriers to work properly. The Federal Communications Commission says 98 percent of U.S. coverage areas will be compliant by mid-l999. Calling international? Experts wam that some developing countries will likely not make the deadline.

Wall Street With most aspects of the securities industry reliant on computers, Year 2000 is a top priority. In July last year, the Securities Industry Association sponsored a two-week test-the first example of an industry coming together to test for the bug-involving major stock exchanges and 29 brokerage firms, among others. Results are encouraging; no major glitches were uncovered.

lites). And though only a small percentage of them are affected by the bug-less than one percent-billions are in circulation; finding the susceptible ones is not easy. A single chip could, say, bring a power plant to a halt because it detects overdue maintenance. Or, closer to home, freeze traffic lights and elevators (see illustration on page 36). Or make them work improperly. January I, 2000, is a Saturday, but some embedded chips-such as those used in some bank vaults and building systems-will think it's Monday, as it was in 1900, and operate on a weekday schedule.

Likewise, they'll go into weekend mode on Thursday, January 6.

number of federal agencies in the Washington, D.C., area during his 29-year career. "I knowingly put buggy code in," he says. "And I was It's Thursday, January 6, 2000, and quite proud of the fact that I saved two bytes the elevator in your office building of memory every time a date was used. No isn't functioning. What's up? Seems one thought these programs would still be the computer system that operates it around." But they are, and Reinke believes is off for the weekend. Here's why. history won't measure the effects in dollars.

He predicts global chaos lasting as long as six months. He's stocking up on food and water, expects to be without electricity for days, To determine when an elevator should operate, a computer runs a simple program maybe weeks, and plans to take much of his like this one. if not ready for Year 2000, money out of the bank. "January I, 2000," the system would put the elevator into he says, "will be remembered as Black weekend mode on January 6-a Saturday in Saturday." the year 1900. Similar programs operate Though Reinke's dire predictions are by no door locks, heating and air conditioning, and other building systems. means common in the information technology (IT) world, they do underscore the complexity of a fix that-at least on the surface-seems pretty basic: Just find each date field in a piece of code and expand it to four digits. The main problem is that programmers are a wacky sort, nor willingly constrained by either logic or consistency. So in a medical software program, for example, a patient's date of birth might be defined as DOB in one place and PDB in another. Or, just for fun, the programmer may have defined it as the name of his golden retriever. Finding all these dates takes Operate an enormous amount of time and testing. normally As a result, many companies are looking at alternative approaches, the most popular of which is called windowing. In fact, it's become the preferred Year 2000 methodology around the world. With windowing, instead of expanding year fields to four digits, the existing two-digit field is And if the Year 2000 problem itself wasn't challenging enough, a few related issues are complicating matters. The first is assigned two windows that define the century. Windowing works February 29, 2000. The 1900 calendar had no leap day, but the as long as the data doesn't span more than JOO years, which elimyear 2000 does. Because leap days during millennial years are inates it as a possible solution for programs that feature, for instance, dates of birth (including Social Security and IRS somewhat rare, many programmers mistakenly did not include systems). one for 2000. As a result, even Year 2000-compliant systems Freddie Mac, the multibillion-dollar mortgage buyer based in must be checked for leap day compliance.

McLean, Virginia, is relying heavily on windowing. The comIn addition, in what can only be considered a cruel joke from the patron saint of bad timing, the world could get a taste of a pany purchases more than one million mortgages each year, most having a life span of 30 years. Payment, term, interest and other Year 2000-like fiasco this year. Many old-time programmers information about each mortgage is kept on the company's vast used the number 9999 as a signal to the computer that it has computer network. In its wind owing scenario, numbers falling reached the end of a file. On September 9, 1999, dates in some code will appear as 9999; if not corrected, computers, as in- between 50 and 99 in the year field are interpreted as occurring in the 20th century, while numbers between 00 and 49 are read as structed, will quit reading the file, freezing the machine.

Likewise, systems that use so-called short Julian dates (the nu- the 21st century. So, for example, 09/01198 would be interpreted as September ], 1998, while 09/01105 would be read as merical day of the year instead of the month and the day) could September 1, 2005. fail on April 9, 1999-the 99th day of 1999.

The main advantage of windowing is that programmers do not All of this has Bob Reinke preparing for the worst. The 49year-old programmer and Year 2000 consultant has worked for a have to find and expand every date field in the code. That's be-

-.

cause each computer language has specific words reserved for date-related functions, such as "sort," "difference," or "compare." Programmers search for the keywords, then program the window over these functions. (They also ensure that the 00 in the year 2000 won't mess up date-related calculations.)

For all its benefits, however, the industry's reliance on windowing is raising a few eyebrows. "It's a Band-Aid, or maybe a tourniquet, because it constrains the useful life of the system," says Robert ~artin, head of Year 2000 efforts for Bedford, Massachusetts-based Mitre, a government-funded organization advising the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration. "Eventually, either the code will have to be expanded, the systems replaced, or the window moved forward." Freddie Mac, for its part, plans to phase out windowed systems in the early 2000s.

Windowing also raises complexities when interacting with external data. Freddie Mac received electronic information from 2,300 outside sources, all of which must be Year 2000 compliant.

At each interface, the company must check that its computers read the incoming data correctly. If, for example, a particular mortgage lender has expanded date fields to four digits, then Freddie Mac must build in a software "bridge" to strip the century indicators from that data before it enters the company's system.

Drawbacks aside, there's no denying the cost and time savings of windowing. According to Michael Censky, head of Year 2000 efforts for Freddie Mac, the company is spending $75 million to fix the bug. In addition, 10 percent of its 3,500 employees are working on the problem. How much more time and money would it take to do four-digit expansion? "I can't even guess," Censky says, adding that windowing will allow some companies to make the deadline that otherwise would not.

Rich Hoffman, a memberofthe U.S. Army Materiel Command's Year 2000 team in Alexandria, Virginia, agrees, but worries that there's a tendency to jump into windowing too quickly. The Army's preferred fix is four-digit expansion, and Hoffman's team makes every effort to employ this method. However, he adrnits windowing is sometimes unavoidable. "It buys you time," he says. "And in cases where there's limited documentation and resources, it's the best choice."

Hoffman's bigger concern is the historic shortsightedness of the IT community. "Considering that no one thought Cobol would still be around today, I wonder how we're going to follow up after 2000. It would be easy, especially with the high turnover in this industry, to let this problem come back and bite us again." According to Hoffman, the post-2000 contingency plans for the Department of Defense (DoD), of which the Army is a part, center around fixing or replacing systems that have been windowed. In the meantime, DoD plans to terminate at least 170 control, command, communications and computer systems, and replace them with equipment not infected by the Year 2000 bug.

Another sidestep approach, being employed on a lesser scale, is a 28-year time bridge. The 1972 calendar mirrors 2000's exactly. By setting computers back 28 years, programmers can ensure they operate in the same way. Often called encapsulation,

this method works as long as the actual year doesn't influence the functionality of the program, such as with key card access system that uses only day-of-week input. If the system interacts with external sources, programmers write a software bridge that subtracts 28 years from incoming data and adds 28 years to outgoing data. According to Hoffman, a time bridge will likely be used to fix Autodin, the messaging system used by the military to send classified E-mail to and from the battlefield. Years mirror each other in this 28-year window until 2100, so the problem doesn't go away forever with this approach either.

Though windowing and encapsulation are the most common alternative approaches, there are several others that squeeze century information into the existing six-digit space. One method involves making the first digit a century field (where the number 1 equals 19, 2 equals 20 and so on), the next two a year field, and the last three a Julian day-of-the-year field. The benefit of this method is that file size is not affected. The downside: Programmers still have to find all the date fields.

For vendors like the Software Factory, the IT community's reliance on alternative approaches is a boon. "The problem is not going away on January 1,2000," says Jerry Hill, co-owner of the Software Factory, whose employees all went through a month-long unpaid "boot camp" to learn Cobol before being hired. "We'll have a strong Year 2000 business into the next century."

But programmers on the front lines of the Year 2000 fix are not looking that far ahead just yet-there's still a lot of work to be done before January 1, 2000. According to Hoffman, the Army's systems are mostly fixed-but the organization will spend most of 1999 testing them. "Fixing the code is a small facet," he says. "Testing and implementation take longer than actual code renovation."

That has Martin concerned. "Even though organizations will likely address all their critical systems before the century change," he says, "they may not have time to do proper testing. So the questi0!1 becomes, Do we really know how our computers run?"

Bob Reinke is convinced we don't. "Year 2000 going to set the industry back 30 years," he says. "People are going to blame everything on computers for a long, long time." Hoffman is more optimistic, but does worry that word is not getting out to small businesses. "Walk into the local grocery store," he says, "and ask them if they've checked their inventory control systems or their credit card readers. You'll be amazed at the strange looks you'll get."

But back at the Software Factory, Jerry Hill-who himself was writing buggy code as recently as 1996-sees a silver lining.

"We've learned a tough lesson," he says. "After January 1,2000, technology no longer will be an unmanaged asset.

"When the dust settles," he continues, "Year 2000 will be remembered as technology's coming of age."

D About the Author: Science.

William G. Phillips is managing editor ojPopular

KIN

he jab of the needle is a pain, but it protects us from a multitude of microbes. Children in the United States endure as many as 14 vaccine injections by the time they're 16. Adults are immunized to ward off influenza and tetanus; travelers arm themselves against cholera, typhoid and other diseases.

Though injection is a time-honored means of delivering the goods, it has significant drawbacks. Injection equipment can quadruple the cost of a single vaccination. Fear of the needle reduces compliance with vaccination schedules in developed countries. In the developing world, reuse of syringes spreads disease, and lack of refrigeration limits the availability of vaccines. Indeed, the severity of these problems recently prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare war on unsafe injections and to urge the development of oral and nasal vaccines.

Injected vaccines reign in part because researchers understand how they work.

Introducing a vaccine underneath the skin or into the muscle provokes systemic immunity: Protective antibodies circulate in the blood. Delivering the vaccine orally triggers immunity at moist mucosal surfaces such as those that line the mouth, nose and genital tract, but the process has been far less well understood, says Robert Edelman, associate director of clinical research at the University of Maryland's Center for Vaccine Development in Baltimore. But when the AIDS epidemic struck in the early 1980s, it forced researchers to begin unraveling the intricacies of mucosal immunity.

In the last five to 10 years, researchers have learned how microbes that enter the body via mucosal surfaces can be blocked by mucosal vaccines. Armed with new

T

"A shot in the arm" may be slang for a morale boost, but few people actually look forward to getting injections-especially children. Biotechnology may soon make lifesaving vaccines easier for youngsters to take, and much cheaper, too.

EEDLES knowledge, more than a dozen vaccine technology companies are hoping to render the immunization needle needless and replace it with nasal sprays, nose drops, flavored liquids, skin patches and edible vaccine-

laced plants.

While some are sti 11testi ng products in the laboratory, others have already jumped the hurdles of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval process.

Favored to make it to market first over the next couple of years are an oral vaccine to protect children from rotaviral dialThea and a nasal spray alternative to the flu shot.

Though each new vaccine comes with a research and development price tag of $50 million to $200 million, the potential payback is enormous. The makers of the rotavirus vaccine, for example, project annual worldwide sales of up to $250 million. Another company estimates that customers could shell out several billion dollars each year for a nasal vaccine against Shigella, a diarrhea-causing bacterium. For his part, Edelman hopes user-friendly delivery systems will improve the rate of childhood immunization at a time when one million American children have not had their recommended vaccinations. "Kids have to get so many shots, it cuts down on compliance," Edelman says. "There's need for new delivery systems."

NEEDLESS m A Bouncer at the Door

The chief target of non injected vaccines is ~ ' the body's vast expanse :J of mucosal membranes.

Combined, mucous cells cover an area equal to about one and one-half tennis courts, lining the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, urinary and genital passages-even the eyelids.

Mucosal immunity is the body's front line of defense, since 90 percent of infections start at mucosal sites. Such common infections as pneumonia, sore throats, flu, diarrheal diseases, ulcers and sexually transmitted diseases all begin at mucosal surfaces.

Mucosal immunization prompts the immune system to produce two types of antibodies in different regions of the body: powerful IgA antibodies at mucosal surfaces, and IgG antibodies in

the bloodstream. contrast, injected vaccines trigger only IgG antibodies in the blood. By eliciting the IgA response, mucosal vaccines protect the body against invading pathogens before they reach and damage internal organs. The protection of an IgGinducing injected vaccine only kicks in after an infection starts.

A mucosal vaccine could take a number of different forms. Nasal sprays,

nose or eye drops, capsules, liquids and rectal or vaginal suppositories are all possible vehicles for vaccination-some clearly more practical and palatable than others. Fortunately, says David Burt, vice president of research at Montrealbased Intellivax International Inc., "the mucosal immune system is interconnected," so vaccines appl ied at a convenient mucosal site protect other areas of the body as well.

A Shot in the Nose One of the first vaccines to make it into patients' nostrils ..., will probably be FluMist, a ~ .. ~ nasal spray aimed at influenza viruses. Both children and healthy adults may soon get their annual flu "shots" from this syringe-like device with an aerosol sprayer where the needle ought to be. The device delivers a live, but weakened, influenza virus that only grows at the cooler temperatures of the nasal passages.

There, the vaccine primes the mucosal immune system to stop disease-causing flu viruses before they can take hold in the nose and upper airways.

FluMist has done well in clinical trials-it provides 93 percent protection against the flu in children, with mild side effects (runny nose or sore throat) that last a day or so. But the new vaccine might also have another-and more positiveside effect. It reduces the rate of flurelated ear infections by 98 percent.

Ear infections send American children to the pediatrician more than 31 million times each year, and most of those kids receive antibiotics; vaccinating children against influenza could make a dent in this overuse of an\ \ l\...:

tibiotics and the resulting rise of drugresistant bacteria.

Aviron, the California company that is developing FluMist, applied for FDA approval for the nasal flu shot this summer.

The company hopes to make FluMist available in time for the 1999 flu season.

Down the Hatch Another obvious route for noninjectable vaccines is.~ down the hatch. But oral :vaccines face tough obstacles. They must survive the harsh environment of the stomach and intestines. In addition, the digestive tract sees a lot of "immunological challenges from food," says Peter Nara, president of the International Society for Vaccines and director of R&D at the Maryland start-up Biological Mimetics. As a result, the lining of the tract tends to overlook immune stimuli such as vaccines. Any vaccine operating there is "working against City Hall," according to Nara.

Despite these hurdles, new vaccines against diseases as disparate as typhoid fever and stomach cancer will soon be swallowed. One of the first will most likely be RotaShield, developed to protect young children from the severe diarrhea caused by rotaviruses. Nearly one million children die yearly from rotavirus infections in developing countries, and its oral form may make RotaShield easier to distribute in those regions. In the United States, three million cases of rotaviral diarrhea account annually for 500,000 doctor visits, 100,000 hospitalizations and 100 deaths, costing the health care system $1.4 bi Ilion in direct and indirect costs.

Albert Kapikian and his colleagues began tinkering with the oral rotavirus vaccine in 1980. "We never even considered the possibility of an injected route," says

[ij l

Kapikian, head of the epidemiology section of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Making an oral vaccine for an intestinal virus "was a natural way to go."

To save the vaccine from destruction in the stomach's acidic environment, children in early studies drank milk (an acid-neutralizer) a half-hour before vaccination. In its final form, the vaccine is freeze-dried, then mixed with a small amount of a salty buffer that protects it. In the gut, the virus multiplies long enough to generate protective mucosal antibodies-the only side effect is a mild, brieffever. "The proof is in the pudding-Dr the protection-which has been excellent," says Kapikian; the vaccine reduces the incidence of severe rotaviral diarrhea by up to 90 percent. Licensed by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, RotaShield is awaiting FDA approval. The vaccine, which will be recommended for all children at two, four and six months of age, has already gained the endorsement of the Centers for Disease Control, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the WHO.

Vaccine Veggies As knowledge of the mucosal immune system . was emerging, so were the genetic engineering ~ tools that enable researchers to insert vaccine molecules into plants. The next logical step was to investigate whether food plants carrying vaccines could immunize the digestive tract.

"The tools and knowledge converged that naturally led us down this path," according to William Langridge, a molecular biologist at California's Loma Linda School of Medicine.

Langridge converted the plebeian potato into a cholera vaccine by adding genes for cholera toxin. In mice that ate the raw potatoes, the toxin bound cells in the gut and triggered the production of antibodies against cholera. To make the potatoes more appealing, Langridge boiled small cubes of his special spuds un-

til soft-surprisingly, at least halfthe vaccine remained active. Flash cooking methods, like deep fat frying, may preserve more vaccine, he suspects. (Imagine getting your vaccination from a bag of chips or a plate of fries.) Langridge's experiments have sparked interest from biotechnology companies, but it's too early in negotiations to identify them, he says.

Potatoes are a dietary staple in Peru, Bolivia and India-countries where cholera causes dehydrating diarrhea and death-so the potato is a "good target plant," Langridge says. He calculated that eating one boiled potato weekly for a month should protect against cholera.

Booster spuds may be needed if protection falls. "Food plants move us closer to achieving a low-cost, convenient, effective and safe strategy for prevention of infectious enteric (intestinal) diseases," says Langridge. When grown locally in developing countries, edible vaccines could circumvent problems of transportation and refrigeration that hamper effective vaccination programs.

While researchers from Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTl) have also experimented with potato-based vaccines, they now are turning their attention to plants more commonly eaten raw. "Potatoes were the proof-of-concept crop," says Cornell researcher Hugh Mason, "but bananas and tomatoes look more promising for human consumption."

In June last year, BTl announced a research and license agreement with Axis Genetics, a biopharmaceutical firm in Cambridge, England. Axis will back BTl's edible vaccine research for three years, in return for exclusive use of BTI technology.

Back to the Band-Aid •

Perhaps the most remarkable vaccines in early development are those that cross the skin-as injections dobut without a needle. Several groups, including the Iomai Corporation in

• ..:.: ••:.:. ~

Washington, D.C., are working on a painless way to tackle this tradiadded tional route. Iomai researchers cholera toxin to diphtheria and tetanus vaccines and rubbed it on the skin of shaved mice. The combination activates Langerhans cells in the skin, some of the mightiest of known immune cells. The mice built up blood antibodies against both diphtheria and tetanus.

The process, known as transcutaneous immunization, "could be particularly useful given the large surface area of the skin and its potent immune cells," says Gregory Glenn, scientific director of Iomai. Eventually, the immune-stimulating concoction could be incorporated into bandages or patches. Instead of leaving the doctor's office with a BandAid over a vaccination stab wound, a patient could go home wearing the vaccine itself. "It's an exciting possibility, but we have a tremendous amount to learn," remarks University of Maryland's Edelman. For example, researchers don't even know just how the vaccine crosses the skin. Studies to test the new method in humans are just starting.

Whether they come in patches, nose sprays, liquids, potatoes or tomatoes, vaccines in the next few years will come with less terror. And safer and more convenient delivery systems will reduce the number of needlestick accidents (one way that health workers get AIDS) and possibly raise the rates of immunization worldwide. Recently, the Children's Vaccine Initiative-an effort co-sponsored by the WHO, the United Nations, the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundationestimated that just a handful of the vaccines currently under development could save the lives of eight million people each year. With the right delivery systems, none of those people will feel a jab.

0 About the Author: Carol Patera is a freelance science journalist who contributes regularly to Science and Men's Health.

"Look at this, Fred. Five thousand dollars for a plastic waffle make!: What:S the world coming to?"

Drawing by Tom aas. Reprinted with permissision from the Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS, Inc. © 1998.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"Do you think the world really is going to hell, or are we just getting old?"

Drawing by P. Steiner. © 1997 from the New Yorker Collection.

All rights reserved.

Drawing by Sieron. Reprinted with permissision from the Saturday Evening Post Society, a division ofBFL and MS, Inc. © 1998.

Science offers new products and greater efficiency through biotechnology, and life-science companies are quick to evolve marketing strategies. But what are the likely ramifications as these breakthroughs begin to affect our lives? hile business leaders are still pondering all the ramifications of the Information Age, another even more profound change is occurring in the global economy.

We are in the midst of a great historic transition into the biotech century, and several dozen life-science companies are strategically positioning themselves to control much of the global bio-industrial market in the coming decades.

The 20th century was shaped largely by the spectacular breakthroughs in the fields of physics and chemistry. The 21st century, however, will belong to the biological sciences. Scientists are quickly deciphering the genetic code of life, unlocking the mystery of millions of years of biological evolution. Lord Ritchie-Calder, the British science writer, cast the biological revolution in the proper historical perspective when he observed that "just as we have manipulated plastics and metals, we are now manufacturing living materials." The new biotechnologies are already reshaping a range of fields, including agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, mining, energy,

W

bio-remediation, packaging and construction materials, pharmaceuticals, medicine, and food and drink.

The Marriage of Computers and Genes Organizing the vast amount of genetic information that exists is a daunting task, made possible only recently by the coming together of computers and gene-splicing technologies. After more than 40 years of running on parallel tracks, the information and life-science industries are beginning to fuse into a single powerful technological and economic force that is laying the foundation for the biotech century.

Using the most advanced computers and software technology, molecular biologists around the world are mapping and sequencing the genetic makeup of creatures from the lowliest bacteria to human beings, with the goal of finding new ways of harnessing and exploiting genetic information for economic purposes. By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, molecular biologists hope to have downloaded and cataloged the genomes of tens of thousands of living organisms-a vast library containing the evolutionary "blueprints" of many of the microorganisms, plants and animals that populate the Earth.

The ability to isolate, identify and manipulate genes is making the gene pool available, for the first time, as the primary raw resource for future economic activity.

With the new-found ability to identify, store and manipulate the very chemical

blueprints of living organjsms, we assume a new role in the natural scheme of things.

For the first time in history, we become the engineers of life itself. We begin to reprogram the genetic codes of living beings to suit our own cultural and economic needs and desires. We take on the task of creating a second Genesis, this time a synthetic one geared to the requisites of efficiency and productivity.

Gold-Mining

Microbes

"Bioinformatics" and "genomics research" are fast changing the commercial landscape. Titans in the computer industry like Bill Gates and Wall Street insiders like Michael Milken are pouring funds into these two new fields, in hopes of advancing the marital partnership of information and life sciences. Gates sums up the new collaborative efforts, saying, "Biological information is probably the most interesting information we are deciphering and trying to decide to change. It's all a question of how, not if."

Hundreds of new bioengineering firms are setting the pace for the biotechillcal revolution, while dozens of leading transnational corporations are also pouring funds into biotechillcal research. Among them: DuPont, Novartis, Upjohn, Monsanto, Eli Lilly, Rohm and Haas and Dow Chemjcal.

In nearly every life-science field, development guidelines are being laid out, longrange retooling of equipment is being hurried along and new personnel are being

Deciphering the genetic code of livestock could help researchers reduce the total number of animals neededfor studies. At the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska a technician reads DNA sequences.

hired, all in a mad rush to introduce the life sciences into the economy, readying civilization to taste the first fruits of the biotechnological age.

In the mining industry, researchers are developing new microorganisms that can replace the miner and his machine in the extraction of ores. For example, scientists are now using microbial agents to degrade the minerals in which gold is trapped prior to chemical extraction, to increase the recovery rate of the gold. In the future, the mining industry is expected to turn increasingly to bioleaching with microorgnisms as a more economical way to utilize lowgrade ores and mineral spoils that might ordinarily be discarded.

Energy companies are beginning to experiment with renewable resources as a substitute for coal, oil and natural gas.

Scientists recently developed a strain of E. coli bacteria that can consume agricultural residues, yard trimmings, municipal solid waste and paper sludge, converting it to ethanol.

Scientists in the chemical industry are talking about replacing petroleum, which for years has been the primary raw material for the production of plastics, with renewable resources produced by microorganisms and plants. A British firm, ICI, has developed strains of bacteria capable of producing plastics with a range of properties, including variant degrees of elasticity.

The plastic is 100 percent biodegradable and can be used in much the same way as petrochemical-based plastic resins.

Researchers are experimenting with even more exotic ways of creating new fibers and packaging materials. The U.S. Army is inserting artificial genes into bacteria that are similar to the ones used by orb-weaving spiders to make silk. The spiders' silk is among the strongest natural fibers known to exist. Scientists hope to grow the silk-gene-producing bacteria in industrial vats and harvest it for use in products ranging from aircraft parts to bulletproof vests.

Biotechnology is also being looked at as a key tool in environmental cleanup.

Bio-remediation is the use of living organisms-primarily microorganisms-to remove or render harmless dangerous pol-

lutants and hazardous wastes. A new generation of genetically engineered organisms is being developed to convert toxic materials into benign substances. One biotech company, the Institute for Genomic Research, has successfully sequenced a microbe that can absorb large amounts of radioactivity.

Company scientists hope to use the genes

that code for the "uranium-gobbling pathway" to fashion new biological means of cleaning up radioactive dump sites.

Forestry companies have also turned to the new science in hopes of finding genes that can be inserted into trees to make them faster-growing, resistant to disease, and better able to withstand heat, cold and

drought. Scientists at Calgene recently isolated a gene for the enzyme that controls the formation of cellulose in plants. They hope to enhance the enzyme to create trees with more cellulose in their walls, making a more efficient tree for harvesting in the pulp and paper-making industry.

In agriculture, scientists are busy at work engineering new food crops that can take in nitrogen directly from the air, rather than having to rely on the more costly petrochemical-based fertilizers presently in use. Scientists are also experimenting with plants with genes that confer resistance to herbicides, help ward off viruses and pests, and can adapt a plant to salty or dry terrains, all in an effort to upgrade and speed the flow of agricultural products to market.

From Farms to IIPharms" The many changes taking place in agriculture are being accompanied by revolutionary changes in the field of animal husbandry. At the University of Adelaide in Australia,'scientists have developed a novel breed of genetically engineered pigs that are brought to market seven weeks earlier than normal pigs. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization has produced genetically engineered sheep that grow 30 percent faster than normal ones and are transplanting genes into sheep to make their wool grow faster.

Much of the cutting -edge research in animal husbandry is occurring in the new field of "pharming." Researchers are transforming herds and flocks into bio-factories to produce pharmaceutical products, medicines and nutrients. In April 1996, Genzyme Transgenics announced the birth of Grace, a transgenic goat carrying a gene that produces BR-96, a monoclonal antibody being developed and tested by Bristol-Meyers Squibb to deliver conjugated anti-cancer drugs. By the time Grace is one year old, she is expected to produce more than a kilogram of the experimental anti-cancer drug. Companies like Genzyme hope to produce drugs at half the cost by using transgenic "pharm" animals as chemical factories in the coining years. The company's CEO makes the point that Genzyme's new $10 million facility, which

makes drugs for Gaucher's disease, could be replaced in the near future with a herd of just 12 goats.

The new pharming technology moved a step closer to commercial reality on February 22, 1997, when Ian Wilmut, a Scottish embryologist, announced the cloning of the first mammal in history-a sheep named Dolly. Wilmut replaced the DNA in a normal sheep egg with the DNA from the mammary gland of an adult sheep. He tricked the egg into growing and inserted it into the womb of another sheep.

It is now possible to mass-produce identical copies of a mammal, each indistinguishable from the original.

Animal clones will also be used to harvest organs for human transplants. Being able to mass-produce exact replicas of animals will assure the kind of bio-industrial quality control that will be necessary to make transplants a major commercial business. Biotech companies like Nextran and Alexion are inserting human genes into animal embryos to make their organs more compatible with the human genome and less likely to be rejected. With more than 100,000 Americans dying each year because a human organ was either unavailable or not available in time, the commercial market for transplants is likely to be hefty. Salomon Brothers estimates that more than 450,000 people worldwide will take advantage of xenotransplants by the year 2010. The market value of the new-organ industry is likely to exceed $6 billion by then.

Millions of people already use genetically engineered drugs to treat heart disease, cancer, AIDS and strokes. In 1995, researchers tested more than 284 new gene-spliced medicines, an increase of 20 percent above the previous year. Many conventional drugs have been replaced altogether with the new gene-spliced substitutes. Genetically engineered human insulin has virtually eliminated the use of naturally derived insulin from cows and pigs for more than 3.4 million Americans suffering from diabetes. Erythropoietin, produced by Amgen, is used by nearly 200,000 people who are on kidney dialysis each year. This gene-spliced product stimulates the growth of red blood cells, reducing the need for

risky blood transfusions. Genentech's tissue plasminogen activator dissolves blood clots. Avonex and Betaseron, the beta interferons, are used as therapies for multiple sclerosis. Pulmozyme is used to treat lung congestion in cystic-fibrosis patients.

Another cluster of biotech companies has been concentrating its efforts in the new field of tissue engineering and the fabrication of human organs. Hospitals are now using artificial skin, cultured and grown in the laboratory, to treat serious bum victims. Doctors at Harvard University have already grown a live human bladder in a laboratory jar. Researchers around the country are also experimenting with the creation of fabricated lungs, hearts, livers, breasts and pancreases in the laboratory, made of human cells.

Nowhere are the changes in molecular biology having a greater impact than in the fields of genetic screening and gene therapy. The Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government-sponsored program designed to map and sequence the entire human genome by the year 2002, is redefining our notions of illness and our approaches to health care. Scientists hope to isolate and identify the genes responsible for the more than 4,000 genetic diseases that afflict human beings. They also hope to gain a better understanding of how genes function, turn "on" and "off," and interact with their environment to cause disease.

The mapping and sequencing of the human genome is being accompanied by the first gene-therapy trials on human patients. Over the past six years, scientists have inserted foreign genes into hundreds of patients in an attempt to correct a number of genetic disorders. Although a recent National Institutes of Health report criticized the protocols, saying none had yet proven effective, scientists hope that increasing knowledge will make gene therapy a commonplace occurrence in the coming biotech century. Gene therapy has already been used in attempts to treat ADA deficiency, cancer and Parkinson's disease.

Who Owns the Gene Pool?

Global life-science companies are quickly maneuvering to exert their influ-

~Q!A[lingHands to Fig or thousands of infants dying every year due to diarrhea in developing countries, there is a ray of hope. In India alone, an estimated one-fourth of the diarrheal deaths occur due to a severe form, described as rotaviral infection or rotaviral diarrhea in medical terms. These deaths will soon become preventable, with the likely availability of a new vaccine developed as a part of an Indo-U.S. collaborative program.

The development of a set of rotaviral vaccines is perhaps the most exciting and visible component of the lO-year-long Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program, or VAP.This is one of the longest-running bilateral programs in the field of science and technology, which has brought results that will have an impact on people of both the countries. The program-an offshoot of the famous Rajiv Gandhi-Reagan initiative on science cooperation in mid-I 980s-eompleted a decade last year, unmindful of the occasional troughs in bilateral relations. In fact, now it has got a new lease of life for another five years.

The VAP began as a focused program for development of vaccines and immunodiagnostics by bringing together scientists of both the countries. It was based on the premise that infectious diseases are a major health problem in India and vaccines should be developed to fight them. And to develop vaccines, it was necessary to understand the basic biology of the microbes and epidemiology of diseases. So the collaborative efforts covered both basic and applied research. Initially the list of diseases identified was limited to acute respiratory diseases, pneumococcal pneumonia, hemophilus influenza, diarrhea due to rotaviruses, V cholera or E. coli; hepatitis, polio, shigellosis and typhoid fever. As the program progressed, the VAP portfolio was expanded to include canine rabies, HIV/AIDS, leishmaniasis and malaria as well. In all, two dozen projects were implemented in the first 10 years.

"The program has addressed several national and international issues, with specif-

F

ic reference to disease burden, and developing simple and rapid diagnostic test methods and vaccines. It has played an important role in developing technologies for improvement of health-care system of the country," says Dr. Manju Sharma, secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), which is the nodal agency for implementation of VAP from the Indian side.

The program has resulted in concrete gains-two candidate vaccines for rotaviral diarrhea, two diagnostic assays for hepatitis C, besides several other promising leads in relation to other diseases. More important than the products is the body of knowledge that has been created as a result of exchange of scientists and creation of useful infrastructure in several of the Indian institutions participating in the program. Over 225 Indian scientists visited various American labs engaged in development of vaccines and immunodiagnostics.

"Training, transfer of technology, sharing of information, development of infrastructure-these are all permanent gains which will be useful in other projects as well," says Dr. VK. Vinayak, adviser (medical) in the DBT. He points out that over 80 scientific papers were published since the inception of VAP, indicating the high level of basic research done.

Two Indian groups-at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AllMS), New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), A biotechnology laboratory at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, where collaborative studies on tuberculosis are underway.

Bangalore-were already engaged in studies on rotaviral strains, when VAP stepped in and gave further impetus to their work. The focus then shifted to development of candidate vaccines. The IISc group, along with a group from the Stanford University School of Medicine, isolated rotaviruses from asymptomatically infected newbom Indian children and characterized them. Similarly, the AllMS group, working with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, isolated and characterized rotaviral strains from newborns.

The two strains were then adapted for growth using tissue culture technjques at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institute of Health (NlH). After toxicology tests, U.S. Food and Drug Admjnistration (FDA) clearance was

/

-= ~

ht Disease obtained for limited trials of the vaccine. The first phase clinical trials have been conducted among adults, since infants can't be given any new vaccine unless it has been tested in adults. The results of this trial have shown the vaccine is safe. The second and third phase trials will now be conducted in India and the U.S. simultaneously. Regulatory approvals are awaited from the Drug Controller of India for clinical trials in India.

The vaccine will have beneficial impact in India as well as the United States. "Although the problem is far less severe in the U.S. [about 150 deaths occur due to rotaviral diarrhea annually], they are finding it cost-effective. The costs of hospitalization are so high that it may be cheaper to immunize all newborns with this vaccine," says Dr. M.K. Bhan, the Indian collaborator from AIIMS. On the other hand, the problem is very serious in India, where one in every three kids admitted for dehydration suffers from rotaviral infection. About 25 percent of the deaths relating to diarrhea occur because of this, accounting for over 200,000 deaths every year.

"The vaccine will drastically reduce the proportion of infant deaths. Of course, the number will depend on coverage of immunization and availability of the vaccine.

Secondly, it will reduce the burden of admission for hospitalization and make available beds for other cases," says Dr. Bhan. And for the poor families, it could result in a great economic benefit.

But the availability of vaccine to poor people will depend on the costs, which at present seem to be high. The DBT is trying to involve Indian and American companies for commercial production of the vaccine. It has already organized one commercial colloquium in Bangalore for the purpose. The inclusion of the vaccine in the national immunization program will also depend on cost. "International community will have to find ways to make it available cheaply. As a public health program, it can't be used right now. A global initiative is needed to路 make it available at affordable price," feels Dr. Bhan.

Yet another milestone in YAP is development of two diagnostic assays (PCR and peptide ELISA) for hepatitis C, utilizing the Indian isolate of hepatitis C virus. In this project Dr. C.M. Habibullah's group from the as mania Medical College, Hyderabad, collaborated with Dr. Aleem Siddiqui from the University of Colorado Health Science Center. "The work is significant as a lot of genetic variation has been observed in the hepatitis C strain unique to India," observes Dr. Vinayak. These variations necessitate development of specifically tailored diagnostic tests, and eventually vaccines. DBT is scouting for commercial partners for hepatitis diagnostic kits as well, and hopes to commercialize in about a year's time.

A number of projects are underway in the field of tuberculosis, a leading cause of death among infectious diseases. Even in developed countries, TB seems to be staging a comeback, along with the AIDS epidemic, due to emergence of drug-resistant strains. The series of VAP projects on tuberculosis focus on identifying antigens for their potential use as vaccines and new diagnostic approaches.

The group of Dr. Jaya S. Tyagi at AIIMS and Dr. Shankar Adhya at the National Cancer Institute is investigating genes which may be associated with increased tuberculosis virulence and have already applied for a U.S. patent for a specific gene associated with virulence of the organism. Similarly, Dr. R. Madhubala at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has identified a chromosome in leishmaniasis that has a relation with its drug resistance activity. Currently there is no vaccine for leishmaniasis or kala-azar, and drugs are not effective. The studies at JNU and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute are aimed at developing effective diagnostics as well as vaccines.

The program has had an elaborate management and monitoring mechanism, with a Joint Working Group as the apex body.

The group is currently co-chaired by Dr. Frederick Robbins (professor emeritus and Nobel Laureate, Case Western Reserve

University) and Dr. N.K. Ganguli (director general, Indian Council of Medical Research). The nodal agencies for implementation are the Indian Department of Biotechnology and the U.S. Public Health Services (USPHS). In the first five-year phase, USPHS and USAID provided a funding of over $5.7 million, while in the next five years all training and equipment costs were borne by USPHS alone.

Initially, the program attracted public attention for the wrong reasons-fears were expressed in press reports about the use of local population by Americans to conduct trials of vaccines and drugs developed in the U.S. These reports were countered by the Indian Government, and the opposition died down with time. "The program has been a success because it is an open project based on muhlal respect and cooperation," recalls Dr. Vinayak. But one issue for which the project has not been able to find a solution is that of intellectual property management, mainly because of differing patent laws in the two countries. Some informal guidelines have been evolved to deal with patents and the subject is largely left to researchers involved in the project concerned.

The YAP has now been extended for another five years, up to 2002. This phase will be different from the first two phases, as the focus now will be on development of a product-be it candidate vaccines, immunomodulators, edible vaccines or delivery systems. The diseases to be tackled will be tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, respiratory problems and some opportunistic infections.

"In the current phase, the program has identified new areas like HIV, edible vaccines and DNA-based vaccines and would further potentiate developing technologies for the need of both the countries. It will also finalize an institutional support on long-term basis and commercialize the products developed," says Dr. Manju Sharma.

Among the American funders, USAID's contribution will be supplemented by Starr Foundation which is making a grant of $2 million for the third phase. With its successful run for a decade and now an extension for another five years, VAP has clearly emerged as a model bilateral program in science and technology.

D About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker based in Delhi.

ence over the new genetic commerce.

Typical of the trend is the bold decision by Monsanto Corporation, long a world leader in chemical products, to sell off its entire chemical division in 1997 and anchor its R&D and marketing in biotech-based technologies and products.

The consolidation of the life-science industry by global commercial enterprises rivals the consolidations, mergers and acquisitions going on in the other great technology arena of the 21st century: computers, telecommunications, entertainment and information services. The concentration of power is already impressive. The top 10 agrochemical companies control 81 percent of the $29 billion global agrochemical market. Ten life-science companies control 37 percent of the $15 billion-per-year seed market, and the world's 10 major pharmaceutical companies control 47 percent of the $197 billion pharmaceutical market.

Several of the largest life-science companies are extending their commercial activities to virtually every bio-industrial field.

For example, Novartis, a giant new global firm resulting from the $27 billion merger of two Swiss companies (the pharmaceutical company Sandoz and the agrochemical company Ciba-Geigy), is now the world's largest agrochemical company, the secondlargest seed company, the second-largest pharn1aceutical company and the fourthlargest veterinary-medicine company.

At the heart of any public discussion around this new genetic commerce is the issue of patenting the genetic blueprints of millions of years of evolution. In the years ahead, the planet's shrinking gene pool is going to become a source of increasing monetary value. Multinational corporations are already scouting the continents, hoping to locate microbes, plants, animals and humans with rare genetic traits that might have future market potential. Once they have located the desired traits, biotech companies modify them and then seek patent protection for their new "inventions."

Corporate efforts to enclose and commodify the gene pool are meeting with strong resistance from a growing number of nongovernmental organizations that are beginning to demand an equitable sharing

Corporate efforts to enclose and commodify the gene pool are meeting with strong resistance from a growing number of nongovernmental organizations. of the fruits of the biotech revolution.

While the technological expertise needed to manipulate the new "green gold" resides in scientific laboratories and corporate boardrooms in the Northern hemisphere, most of the genetic resources that are essential to fuel the new revolution lie in the tropical ecosystems of the South.

Southern countries claim that the Northern companies' "inventions" are really the accumulated indigenous knowledge of native peoples and cultures. The life-science companies, on the other hand, argue that patent protection is essential if they are to risk financial resources and years of R&D bringing new and useful products to market.

The patent issue is likely to become a question of increasing public concern in the years immediately ahead as a result of the Human Genome Project's stunning breakthroughs. It is expected that within 10 years, nearly all 100,000 genes that make up the genetic blueprints of the human race will have been identified and become the intellectual property of transnational lifescience companies.

Genetic Discrimination?

The biotech century promises a cornucopia of genetically engineered plants and animals to feed a hungry world, genetically derived sources of energy and fiber to propel commerce and build a "renewable" society, wonder drugs and genetic therapies. But with every step we take into this brave new world, we will be haunted by the nagging question, "At what cost?" In discussions with senior managers in countries around the world, I hear a number of questions being raised about how best to integrate genetic information and tech-

niques into business practices.

What, for instance, are the implications of using genetic profiles to screen applicants for jobs and for making decisions on promotions and assignments? Geneticscreening tests are already available for many of the most common genetic diseases, and researchers expect that within less than a decade, an individual will be able to test for thousands of genetic diseases. Scientists are also researching the more complex polygenic disordersinvolving clusters of genes-that affect mood, behavior and personality. A revolutionary new technology, DNA chips, will allow doctors to provide a detailed readout of genetic predispositions-a kind of crystal-ball assessment of one's future emotional, mental and physical health.

Some chemical companies are interested in screening workers to assess their genetic sensitivity to highly toxic work environments. Worried over the high cost of health-insurance coverage, disability-compensation claims and absenteeism, companies are interested in weeding out workers who may be more susceptible to illness.

Employers who invest heavily in long-term education and on-site training want to know if prospective employees--especially those destined for advancement of the executive track-will be free of potentially debilitating diseases over the lifetime of their work contracts.

Institutions whose employees require a high level of emotional stability, like defense-contracting firms, airlines and police departments, will no doubt be interested in genetic tests to detect predispositions for alcoholism, depression and mood and behavioral disorders. They might well contend that the public is ill-served if an air-traffic controller, pilot, police officer or safety engineer suffers from emotional illness-or might in the future. Similarly, the isolation of genetic traits and r,redispositions that condition personality, like thrillseeking and extroversion, might be useful to companies employing test pilots and travel guides or salespeople and lobbyists.

While sophisticated genetic-screening tests are likely to give HR managers a more complete picture of prospective employees and may even provide clues to future per-

formance, there is growing concern over the potential discriminatory use of such information in the hands of employers.

A 1996 survey of genetic discrimination in the United States conducted by Harvard Medical School's Department of Neurobiology and Division of Medical Ethics chronicled a growing number of employee-discrimination cases. Even so, an extensive survey of 400 employers conducted by the Northwestern Life Insurance Company in 1989 reported that IS percent of the companies surveyed planned to conduct routine genetic-screening tests of their prospective employees and dependents before the year 2000.

Hiring based on genotypes runs the risk of creating a new group of dispossessed workers in the coming biotech century.

With so much genetic information becoming available on every human being-from simple single-gene disorders to complex polygenic mood and behavior traits-it's likely that some employers will use the genetic data to select and sort out prospective employees and make more "informed decisions" about hiring and promotions.

With health and disability-compensation costs mounting each year, U.S. employers will feel increasingly pressured, by their own bottom lines, to genotype workers for jobs, in hopes of cutting costs and increasing profit margins.

Marketing managers have also expressed interest in using the wealth of genetic data that will soon be available on millions of individuals to create long-term consumer profiles. Some marketing executives I've spoken with believe that genetic information will provide the kind of intimate information on an individual's physical predispositions that will be invaluable in creating targeted one-to-one marketing campaigns. In the pharmaceutical, health-care, sports and physical fitness, and food and drink industries, marketing executives are looking to the prospect of customizing their marketing efforts to match the specific genetic traits and dispositions of each consumer.

Knowledge of an individual's current and projected health can provide the informational edge that marketers need to establish a long-term customer relationship.

Even more interesting, as knowledge about genes increases, bioengineers are gaining new insights into the functioning of more-complex characteristics, such as those associated with behavior and thought. Researchers are already linking an increasing number of mental diseases to genetic disorders. Some scientists are beginning to suggest that antisocial behavior, such as shyness, misanthropy and criminality, may be examples of malfunctioning genes. Many sociobiologists go even further, contending that virtually all human activity is, in some way, determined by our genetic makeup, and that if we wish to change our situation, we must first change our genes.

The discovery of genes linked to mood, behavior and personality could prove a bonanza to advertising and marketing specialists in their efforts to tailor goods and

Liability issues are also likely to cast a formidable shadow over genetic commerce. services to emotional needs. After all, the very basis of advertising and marketing is to draw out latent desires and transform them into consumer choices in the marketplace.

The genetic links to mood and behavior are still hotly debated within the biology field, with some arguing that genetic predispositions playa smaller role, and environment a larger role, in shaping individual personalities, and others arguing the opposite. Still, it is likely that the genetic data being amassed on mood and behavioral traits will become a valuable and muchcoveted source of information for marketing executives in the near future, raising serious questions around the issue of genetic privacy.

Looming Legal Issues Many of the CEOs I've talked to in recent months are both intrigued and troubled about their companies using this powerful new source of infOImation for business purposes. They worry over the poten-

tial abuse and misuse of genetic information. Some have told me privately that while they expect this information will inevitably be integrated into a wide range of business practices, there will likely be calls for industrywide standards governing the potential use of genetic information to protect privacy and minimize the risk of discrimination.

Liability issues are also likely to cast a formidable shadow over genetic commerce, especially in regard to the potentially adverse environmental impacts resulting from the release of genetically engineered organisms into the biosphere. The insurance industry has quietly let it be known that it would not insure the release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment against the possibility of widespread environmental damage, because the industry lacks a risk-assessment science-a predictive ecology-with which to judge the risk of any given introduction. Some observers worry over what might happen to the biotech industry if a large-scale commercial release of a genetically altered organism were to result in a serious environmental problem-for example, the introduction and spread of a new weed or pest comparable to the kudzu vine or the gypsy moth that might inflict costly damage to flora and fauna over extended eco-ranges, and for a sustained period of time.

The introduction of genetically engineered foods also raises important liability issues for CEOs in the food industry.

Critics are won'ied that the introduction of novel genes into conventional foods could trigger allergic reactions in some people.

With two percent of adults and eight percent of children having allergic responses to commonly eaten foods, consumer advocates argue that all gene-spliced foods need to be properly labeled to avoid health risks. Their concerns were heightened in 1996, when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that genetically engineered soybeans containing a gene from a Brazil nut created an allergic reaction in people who were allergic to the nuts. The journal's editorial board stated that the study confIrmed "that food allergens could indeed be transferred

from one plant to another by transgenic manipulation."

Many of the genes being transferred into the genetic code of food crops come from plants and animals that have never before been part of the human diet. WOlTiedby the findings of the study, the editors wamed their readers that "the allergenic potential of these newly introduced microbial proteins is uncertain, unpredictable and untestable."

Although the FDA said it would label any genetically engineered foods containing genes from common allergenic organisms, the agency fell well short of requiring across-the-board labeling, leaving the New England Journal of Medicine's editors to ask what protection consumers would have against novel genes in their foods. owhere will the liability issues be more hotly debated than in the health-care industry.

CEOs of HMOs (Health

Management Organization), hospitals and other primary-care providers will face a host of new challenges as genetic-screening procedures make it possible to better predict an individual's likely health problems years, even decades, into the future.

For example, should health-care providers be made responsible in cases where they did not screen for every possible genetic defect, disorder or disease at the fetal stage of development? "Wrongful birth" and "wrongful life" lawsuits have begun to appear in the United States. More than 300 such cases have made their way through the courts.

In the case of "wrongful birth" lawsuits, parents of a seriously ill or disabled child sue their physician or hospital, claiming the child should never have been born. The lawsuits charge negligence on the part of the health provider for not

advising parents of a potential health problem with their unborn, and not making available information on screening procedures that could have been performed and whose results could have been used to make an informed decision on whether or not to abort the fetus. In wrongful-birth lawsuits, the claim is brought on behalf of the child or even by the child, claiming he should never have been born.

Every technological and commercial revolution in history has come with great benefits and equally compelling risks and costs for humankind. Genetic engineering represents the ultimate tool. It extends humanity's reach over the forces of nature as no other technology in history. With genetic technology, we assume control over the hereditary blueprints of life itself.

While the benefits are likely to be significant, the environmental, social and ethical issues brought on by the new technologies are likely to be equally troublesome.

CEOs will need to prepare themselves to address both the many opportunities and the serious challenges raised by the new technologies of the biotech century. The coming together of information and life sciences is going to change our way of life as fundamentally as did the corning together of the printing press and steam power at the dawn of the industrial era. As was the case then, the vast changes taking place in today's economy will require a rethinking of many of the basic operating assumptions that govern the conduct of business.

Genetic commerce, after all, is the most intimate and powerful form of economic activity ever conceived. Manipulating the very blueprints of life-from the lowliest bacteria to human beings-for commercial ends will force each of us to put a mirror to our most deeply held views about the purpose and direction of life, making us ponder the ultimate question of the meaning of existence. For CEOs, managing the biotech century may turn out to be the ultimate challenge.

D About the Author: Jeremy Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World.

The Carver Chronicles much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver's. No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died 10 years ago, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish's word against common sense.

Lish had wlitten fiction, too: If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people's doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been-or simply moved on.

Seven years ago, Lish arranged for the sale of his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Since then, only a few Carver scholars have examined the Lish manuscripts thoroughly. When one tried to publish his conclusions, Carver's widow and literary executor, the poet Tess Gallagher, effectively blocked him with copyright cautions and pressure. I'd heard about this scholar's work (and its failure to be published) through a friend. So I decided to visit the archive myself.

What I found there, when I began looking at the manuscripts of stories like "Fat" and "Tell the Women We're Going," were pages full of editorial marks-strikeouts, additions and marginal comments in Lish's sprawling handwriting. It looked as if a temperamental seven-year-old had somehow got hold of the stories. As I was reading, one of the archivists came over. I thought she was going to reprimand me for some violation of the library rules. But that wasn't why she was there. She wanted to talk about Carver. "I started reading the folders," she said, "but then I stopped when I saw what was in there."

It's understandable that Lish's assertions have never been taken seriously. The eccentric editor is up against an American icon.

When he died at age 50 from lung cancer, Carver was considered by many to be America's most important short-story writer. His stories were beautiful and moving. At a New York City memorial service, Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of the New Yorker, said succinctly, "America has just lost the writer it could least afford to lose." Carver is no longer a writer of the moment, the way David or

P

Raymond Carver)s stories were at the center of American literary life in the 1980s. Now they are at the heart of a battle over his legacy: lfere some of them a product of collaboration? And if they were) so what?

Reprinted from The New York Tillles Magazine.

Company. Reprinted by permission.

Copyright Š )998 by the New York Times

Foster Wallace is today, but many of his stories-"Cathedral," "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" and "Errand"-are firmly established in the literary canon. A vanguard figure in the 1980s, Carver has become establishment fiction.

That doesn't capture his claim on us, though. It goes deeper than his work. Born in the rural Northwest, Carver was the child of an alcoholic sawmill worker and a waitress. He first learned to write through a correspondence course. He lived in poverty and suffered multiple bouts of alcoholism throughout his thirties. He struggled in a difficult marriage with his high-school girlfriend, Maryann Burk. Through it all he remained a generous, determined man-fiction's comeback kid. By 1980, he had quit drinking and moved in with Tess Gallagher, with whom he spent the rest of his life. "I know better than anyone a fellow is never out of the woods," he wrote to Lish in one of dozens of letters archived at the Lilly. "But right now it's aces, and I'm enjoying it."

Carver's life and work inspired faith, not skepticism.

Still, a quick look through Carver's books would suggest that what Lish claims might have some merit. There is an evident gap between the early style of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's first two major collections, and his later work in Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From. In subject matter, the stories share a great deal.

They are mostly about the working poor-unemployed salesmen, waitresses, motel managers-in the midst of disheartening lives. But the early collections, which Lish edited, are stripped to the bone. They are minimalist in style with an almost abstract feel. They drop their characters back down where they find them, inarticulate and alone, drunk at noon. The later two collections are fuller, touched by optimism, even sentimentality.

Many critics over the years have noticed this difference and explained it in terms of biography. The Carver of the early stories, it has been said, was in despair. As he grew successful, however, the writer learned about hopefulness and love, and it soaked into his fiction. This redemptive story was burnished through countless retellings by Tess Gallagher. Most critics seemed satisfied by this literal-minded explanation: happy writers write happy stories.

S

itting under the coffered ceiling of the Lilly, I began pulling out folders from the two boxes marked "Carver."

Here were the stories from his first two collections as well as from Cathedral in versions from manuscript to printer's galleys. I had previously seen some manuscripts in the Carver holdings at Ohio State University (OSU), an archive to which Gallagher has said she will ultimately give the Carver papers in her possession. The manuscripts at OSU are clean, almost without editing marks, as if they'd gone straight from author to typesetter. Where there are multiple drafts of a manuscript, the procession is unremarkable: the annotations in Carver's tiny handwriting drive the story confidently from draft to draft until the story achieves its finished form.

The Lilly manuscripts are different. There are countless cuts and additions to the pages; entire paragraphs have been added.

Lish's black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original

text. In the case of Carver's 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Lish cut about half the original words and rewrote 10 of the 13 endings. "Carol, story ends here," he would note for the benefit of his typist.

In "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," for example, Lish cut 70 percent of the original words. With a longer story, "A Small, Good Thing," in which a couple anxiously wait for their child to come out of a coma, Lish cut the text by a third, eliminating most of the description-and all of the introspection. He retitled it "The Bath," altering the story's redemptive tone to one of Beckettian despair. In Lish's version, you no longer know if the child lives or dies.

Lish was constantly on guard against what he saw as Carver's creeping sentimentality. In the original manuscripts, Carver's characters talk about their feelings. They talk about regrets. When they do bad things, they cry. When Lish got hold of Carver, they stopped crying. They stopped feeling. Lish loved deadpan last lines, and he freely wrote them in: 'The women, they weren't there when I left, and they wouldn't be there when I got back" (" ight School"). Other times, he cut away whole sections to leave a sentence from inside the story as the end: "There were dogs and there were dogs. Some dogs you just couldn't do anything with" ("Jerry and Molly and Sam"). On occasion, Carver reversed his changes, but in most cases Lish's handwriting became part of Carver's next draft, which became the published story.

"Fat" was one of the first stories Carver gave Lish to edit. It became the lead story in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? In "Fat," a restaurant waitress recounts to her friend Rita a large meal she served to a ravenous but melancholy obese man. The waitress's lover, Rudy, the restaurant cook, feels jeal~)Us. When they get home, he insists on having sex with her, but her mind remains with her experiences in the restaurant: the fat man has touched her in some way, made her feel dissatisfied with her life.

This was how Carver wrote it, more as an anecdote than a story.

It proved excellent material for Lish's talents. Some of what Lish does is technical: he moves the story into the present tense, for example. And he eliminates the waitress's self-reflectiveness, so we seem more involved than she does in what she is feeling.

(Critics would later declare such touches to be trademark techniques of Carver.) Most important, Lish picks up the "long, thick, creamy fingers" Carver gives the fat man, and finds in this the story's core-the connection between longing and sexuality.

"My God, Rita, those were fingers," the waitress tells her girlfriend, who herself has "dainty fingers." At the end, when Rudy gets into bed with her, she observes, "Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all." These lines-and several others-were written by Lish. In Lish's hands, fatness becomes sexual potency, fullness, presence. He finds the resonance Carver missed.

If "Fat" was a successful-if unusually extensive-edit, Lish's efforts on another story, "Tell the Women We're Going," seemed closer to a wholesale rewrite. Written by Carver in the late 1960s or early '70s, the story was unusual for him, one of the few in which the violence implicit in his characters becomes explicit. The story first made an appearance as "Friendship" in Sou 'wester, a small literary magazine. By the time it appeared in the What We

Talk About collection, Lish had retitled it-and cut it by 40 percent. The story is set near the town in which Carver grew up, Yakima, Washington. Bill and his tougher friend Jerry take a break from their wives at a barbecue and drive off looking for action. They find two teenage girls bicycling along the road and try to get their attention. Things go awry. After a tense pursuit full of strange pleas and laughs, Jerry rapes and kills Sharon-a scene that Bill, who has dropped behind, arrives in time to witness. He cries out, asserting in that moment the horror that the reader feels, too.

What's noteworthy about the story is the way Carver makes a boring afternoon build to murder.

Lish didn't care about this. He was after more abstract effects. He made cuts on every page. Bill becomes just a passive companion to Jerry. The pursuit is eliminated: the violence now comes out of nowhere and is almost hallucinogenic. "[Bill] never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock," Lish wrote in. "Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill's." The story ends right there. One wonders how Carver must have felt when he saw that.

As I thumbed through various manuscripts at the Lilly, my face was flushed. I wanted Carver to win, whatever that might mean. He had shown writers the value of measuring your words. He had come along in the early 1970s when the first "postmodern" novelists, writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme, dominated the literary scene.

Their cerebral stories were admirable, but they were hard to love. Carver broke up their racket.

My favorite story had always been the sly "They're Not Your Husband." An unemployed salesman, Earl, goes to the restaurant where his wife, Doreen, is a waitress, and without identifying himself tries to goad the male customers into checking her out. He needs the validation. I particularly loved a description of Doreen's thighs as she bends over to scoop ice cream: "rumpled and gray and a little hairy, [with] veins that spread in a berserk display." The story also has a wonderful ending: "Then she put the unfinished chocolate sundae in front of [Earl] and went to total up his check." Lish didn't edit this story much, I discovered, but it turned out he had written the first sentence and rewritten the second. In Carver's version, the thighs are barely mentioned. In his original ending, Doreen just reaches for a coffeepot.

Overall, Lish's editorial changes generally struck me as for the better. Some of the cuts were brilliant, like the expert cropping of a picture. His

additions gave the stories new dimensions, bringing out moments that I was sure Carver must have loved to see. Other changes, like those in "Tell the Women We're Going," struck me as bullying and competitive. Lish was redirecting Carver's vision in the service of his own fictional goals. The act felt parasitic. Lish's techniques also grew tired more quickly than did Carver's. After a while, the endless "I say," "he says" tags Lish placed on so much of the dialogue felt gimmicky. In all cases, however, I had one sustained reaction: For better or worse, Lish was in there.

B

ack in New York I contacted Lish. Much has changed for "Captain Fiction," as the once-dapper Lish was nicknamed during his Esquire heyday. Now 64, he is a widower, living alone in a spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He shuffles around in his socks, his long white hair and loose clothes making him look like a vanquished sorcerer.

We sat across from each other at his kitchen table and I asked him what had happened. "I don't like talking about the Carver period," he said, "because of my sustained sense of his betrayal and because it seems bad form to discuss this." I was aware that he had been a radio actor before becoming an editor. Was he playing his reluctance up for me? "This puts me in an absolutely impossible light," he continued. "I can only be despised for my participation."

Lish already has plenty of enemies: By the 1990s, his aggressive editing, controversial private fiction seminars and taste for publicity had cost him many friends. "I said no to the people to whom one doesn't say no," he said. In 1994, after a decade in which the writers he was championing found fewer and fewer readers, Knopf fired him. He now writes fiction full time. His latest is titled Self-Imitation of Myself. Reading his stories is like looking at the gears of a clock that's missing a face.

Lish's "sustained sense of betrayal" was, of course, also a strong motivator toward conversation. He was still embittered, he said, by the biting ingratitude of "this mediocrity" he had plucked from obscurity. When Lish is excited, his psoriasis acts up; he pulled a cooking spoon from his shelf and began scratching his back. And he began to tell me his version of the story.

In 1969 he persuaded Esquire to hire him as fiction editor. He promised to find new voices, to clear out the cobwebs. It was quite a leap for a part-time literary editor from Palo Alto, California. The pressure was on to produce.

Outside in the backyard, one of the dogs began to bark.

The leaves of the aspen that leaned past the window ticked against the glass. The afternoon sun was like a presence in this room, the spacious light of ease and generosity. We could have been anywhere, somewhere enchanted. We raised our glasses again and grinned at each other like children who had agreed on something forbidden.

-What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

A portion of one of Carver s first published stories, "Fat," which was heavily edited by Gordon Lish. Initially, Carver was grateful.

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Carver was gaining confidence from his success and writing more ambitiously. And he was finding out the that uay vlhen he '1s.t ~10rJ(~2. world wasn't so harsh. He had friends now, acolytes even. He separated from Maryann and became involved with Tess Gallagher. He bought a boat and celebrated it in a poem in which he As I c@ne out of the kitchen, ~~, Harso/-¥elf""'b>(PIf M?'"'8~ imagined it filled with his friends. live told you about ~lV-~)-G-l-eOO~~.,.;!mtHI" .lho ~ His editor's confidence was also growing.

Lish thought of himself as Carver's chase)~ Rudyr.£he sa-ifto me, \-Iho's your fat friend? rets ventriloquist. "I could not believe no one had stumbled on what was going on," he says. A collision was inevitable.

Initially, Carver had been grateful for Lish's help-or perhaps just compliant or cowed. Carver was in a bad place in his life, beset by drink and poverty. Lish was his way to a readerOne of his friends was Carver, who was editing educational materials in an office across the street from where Lish had ship. Nevertheless, Carver's unease was evident from the beginworked. They were drinking pals, Carver tall, handsome and de- ning. These letters are in the Lish archives. Responding to an edit liberate, Lish short and wiry. Lish was the more worldly and ag- in December 1969, Carver wrote: "Everything considered, it's a is gressive. Maryann Burk-Carver recalls them walking down a better story now than when I first mailed it your way-which Palo Alto street with Lish asking every woman they passed to the important thing. I'm sure." He echoed these sentiments in January 1971. "Took all of yr changes and added a few things sleep with him; he was trying to prove to Carver that you only here and there," he wrote, taking pains to add that he was "not had to ask to get what you wanted from life. At this point Carver had a small reputation, but he was not a name. "He was not bothered" by the extent of Lish's edit. Carver had a role in keepknown, not known at all, to the persons I would be deli vering sto- ing the romance going, too. "You've made a single-handed imries to for approval," Lish remembers. pression on American letters," he wrote Lish in September 1977.

Lish contacted Carver, who quickly sent off several stories to "And, of course, you know, old bean, just what influence you've him. Lish reworked and returned them, using as his model the exercised on my life." He even offered to pay the charges for any disorienting, unemotive stories of James Purdy, the author of work Lish sends out to be retyped.

Why Can't They Tell You Why? The stories-"Fat," "Neighbors" After Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? they began work on a and "Are You a Doctor?"-wound up as Carver's first national second collection, which Lish would ultimately title What We magazine publications. Lish had a genius for beating the drums Talk About When We Talk About Love. (Carver had called it for his writers. He was friends with important writers like "Beginners.") Lish was editing more heavily now. He treated Cynthia Ozick and Harold Brodkey. Critics quickly took notice Carver as ifhe barely had a vote. Meanwhile, Carver was becomof the "new" voice in fiction Lish was championing, of its radical ing a known literary figure. In 1978 he won a Guggenheim compression (many stories were but a few pages long) and stark Fellowship. The next year he became a professor of English at silences. Much was made of Carver's name-although Lish was Syracuse University. the one doing the carving.

Carver began to object to Lish's editing, but he wasn't sure what In 1976 Carver collected his stories in Will You Please Be to object to. He wrote a five-page letter in July 1980 telling Lish Quiet, Please? including a version of the title story that Lish had that he could not allow him to publish What We Talk About as Lish cut. In the New York Times Book Review, the novelist Geoffrey had edited it. He wrote, "Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no Wolff, who would later become a friend of Carver's, hailed the one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your stories, describing them as "carefully shaped" and "shorn of or- versions are better than some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get namentation," marked by "spells of quiet and tensed appreheninto this and go with it." But he feared being caught. "Tess has seen sion." In fact, Wolff wrote, Carver's prose "carries his mark all of these and gone over them closely. Donald Hall has seen everywhere: I would like to believe that having read the stories I many of the new ones ...and Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey could identify him on the evidence of a paragraph." The collecWolff, too, some of them ....How can I explain to these fellows tion was nominated for a National Book Award. when I see them, as I will see them, what happened?" He begged to

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be let out of his contract or at least to delay publication: "Please, Gordon, for God's sake help me in this and try to understand ....I've got to pull out of this one. Please hear me. I've been up all night thinking on this ....I'1l say it again, if I have any standing or reputation or cedibility [sic] in the world, I owe it to you. I owe you this more-or-less pretty interesting life I have [but] I can't take the risk as to what might happen to me." In the same letter, he wrote imploringly, "[M]y very sanity is on the line here ....! feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story."

Lish does not recall being moved. "My sense of it was that there was a letter and that I just went ahead." He knew what was best for Carver--even if Carver didn't see it that way. In the end, What We Talk About was published much as Lish wanted.

The book received front-page reviews. Critics praised its minimalist style and announced a new school of fiction. Even so, Carver continued to press for stylistic control over his work. He insisted that if Lish wanted to edit his next collection, he would have to keep his hands off. "I can't undergo [that] kind of surgical amputation and transplantation," he wrote Lish in August 1982.

"Please help me with this book as a good editor, the best...not as my ghost," he pleaded two months later.

Lish reluctantly complied. "So be it," he wrote in December 1982 after giving the manuscript to "Cathedral" only a light edit-although he wrote some acerbic criticisms in the margins. Even then, Carver feared a sneak attack. "I don't need to tell you that it's critical for me that there not be any messing around with titles or text," he warned Lish. Publicly, Carver also began to make a break. He made a point of telling interviewers that he controlled every aspect of his stories, invoking the adage that he knew a story was finished when he went through it once and put the commas in, then went through again and took the commas out.

Lish was angered by Carver's rebellion. He began asking his friends whether he should make his "surrogate work" public. They advised him to keep quiet. Don DeLillo, for example, warned him against taking Carver on. "I appreciate, and am in sympathy with, everything you say in your letter," he wrote to Lish. "But the fact is: there is no exposing Carver ....Even if people knew, from Carver himself, that you are largely responsible for his best work, they would immediately forget it. It is too much to absorb. Too complicated.

Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at best. People wouldn't think less of Carver for having had to lean so heavily on an editor; they'd resent Lish for complicating the reading of the stories.

"In the meantime," he ended, "take good care of your archives."

Once Carver ended his professional relationship with Lish, he never looked back. He didn't need to. Cathedral was his most celebrated work yet. Famous writers wanted to meet him; Saul Bellow wrote him an appreciative note. The collection was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Proudly, Carver wrote a letter to Lish in which he noted that the title story "went straight from the typewriter into the mail."

Indeed, many writers and critics see Carver's later work-stories like "Blackbird Pie" and "Errand"-as his best efforts, his final brilliant flowering. Seen in this light, the Lish period, though responsible for bringing him to national attention, was an apprenticeship to be transcended. Some of Carver's friends certainly saw it that way. The poet Donald Hall read a manuscript copy of "The Bath" before Lish cut it. He asked Carver's permission to publish the original version under its original title, "A Small, Good Thing," in Ploughshares magazine. In this more expansive, uplifting form, the story won a 1983 O. Henry Award. "I was hearthurt at what had happened to that story," Hall remembers. "I've wondered in my head why Lish did what he did.

Was it unconscious jealousy?"

T

hat is one way to explain the Lish-Carver

relationship. The story is complicated by, of all people, Tess Gallagher. The poet, who now lives in Port Angeles, Washington, is generally seen as the heroine of the Carver saga.

And with reason. When she met Carver in 1977, he was just turning a corner in his life, trying to control his drinking. She was ready for the job of keeping him sober. "God has given you to me to take care of," she told him. Gallagher made a home for him in which to work. She taught him to say no to Lish and ultimately to free himself from him, winning the long tug of war for Carver's soul. She encouraged him to publish Where I'm Calling From, a selection of seven new and 30 old stories, in the form he wanted posterity to read. (Carver never explained, however, that he was, in some cases, reversing Lish's edits.)

So Gallagher helped Carver to find his true

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, "To begin with, they're very tall." I was looking around the room for clues. "They reach way up.

Up and up. Toward the sky."

The young man entered the room carrying a silver ice bucket with the champagne in it and a silver tray with three cut-crystal glasses. He found a place on the table for the bucket and glasses, all the while craning his neck, trying to see into the other room, where someone panted ferociously for breath. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound, and the young man lowered his chin into his collar and turned away as the ratchety breathing worsened.

voice. Weirdly, though, many of her pronouncements also have the effect of claiming a piece of Carver's work. Although she declined several requests to be interviewed for this article, Gallagher has described in detail her contribution to two of Carver's greatest stories, "Cathedral" and "Errand." Unlike Lish's claims, they cannot be checked against original drafts, because most of Carver's late manuscripts remain in her hands.

Besides, the collaboration she describes would be so intimate that no traces were likely to remain.

But in the 1992 PBS documentary To Write and Keep Kind and in a series of unpublished interviews, Gallagher emphasized that she had given Carver the original idea for "Cathedral"-or, more accurately, that he had stolen it from her. The story focuses on the discomfort that a husband feels when his wife brings a blind friend into their home.

Tess herself had a blind acquaintance whom she talked about with Carver; she said she was planning to write a story about him when Carver "scooped" her. In addition, Gallagher claimed that she had written or helped shape several key lines. She spoke of the story as a joint effort.

Then there's "Errand," Carver's last published story. It tells of Anton Chekhov's early death; the work has a special status among Carver readers because Carver identified with Chekhov and because, although Carver said he did not know he had cancer when he wrote it, it limns his own death. The end of "Errand" takes place in a Badenweiler hotel room in 1904. The point of view of the story gracefully shifts from Chekhov, this man ofletters dying of tuberculosis, to a young waiter worrying about a cork that has fallen to the floor in the room. The widow is lost in grief, and he is preoccupied with the cork.

The ending is classically Chekovian in its attention to the waiter and his worries, and it fuses elegantly Carver's death, his life and his work.

As Gallagher explained in To Write and Keep Kind, Carver had trouble envisioning the end of the tale: "Ray had written many, many drafts and didn't know how to get out of this story." So she came to his aid. "I was empathizing with his waiter character," she said to the camera, "and I said, that waiter is going to be looking down and you know what he's going to see? He's going to see that cork that popped out of the champagne. I think the ending is involved with his response to that cork, and that he's going to bend down to get that and we're going to know something from that gesture, that action."

Collaboration between a literary husband and wife is not unusual. Nor is theft: F. Scott Fitzgerald lifted pages from the diaries of his wife, Zelda, for

the sanitarium sections of Tender Is the Night. Such entanglements still arouse discomfort. In an interview, Gallagher said that she had always kept their collaboration private, because "people's ideas about authorship are perhaps a bit fixed and unimaginative when it comes to what really happens when two writers live together." This had emerged as a theme of hers. Her next book is to be called Soul Barnacles: On the Literature of a Relationship, Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver.

P

erhaps Gallagher and Lish did make their marks on Carver's fiction. But who needs them? Carver is enough. That's how Carver's friends-Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Mona Simpson-feel.

"I have absolute confidence that Ray wrote everything in his stories according to my understanding of how writers write what they write," Ford said. He said he feared that any discussion of the archives would "inadvertently diminish Ray." Simpson expressed a lack of surprise. "I think people already assume an editor helps to make the work better. Who would want one who didn't?" Wolff said it reminded him what a good idea it is to destroy your drafts.

I mentioned the competing, and in some cases overlapping, claims of collaboration to Dick Day, Carver's college writing teacher at Humboldt State University. He thought his own influence was negligible. "I know any time I read a sentence by Carver that it's Carver's," he said. "Ray's voice was his own and it's authentic." A top editor at Knopf finds the very idea of co-authorship noxious. "I never met an author so many people claimed a piece of," he says.

How far can one take the question of influence, anyway? When I spoke with Maryann Carver about her ex-husband's work, she cited her impact on the story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" In the story, a husband and wife have an altercation over a past affair. When I pressed for details, she said it would be "crude" to get specific. Then she showed me where her tooth had entered her lip.

DeLillo had pointed out in his letter to Lish how central the idea of authenticity is to our literary culture. We have the text on the printed page. Why complicate our enjoyment of the stories by focusing on how they came to be written? To ask is to transgress. Besides, that writers take the help that is offered is not news. Chekhov, Carver's idol, used to pay friends 10 kopecks for an anecdote and 20 for a plot. Carver came out of the 1970s workshop tradition, in which you showed a story around and took the suggestions you found useful. What's so strange about a smart writer taking smart advice? "I

edit my writers a lot or a little," says Gary Fisketjon, the editor at large at Knopf who worked with Carver after Lish. "Either way, it's their story."

Academics familiar with the Lish papers see the question of collaboration as more complex. "If you exalt the individual writer as the romantic figure who brings out these things from the depths of his soul," says Carol Polsgrove, a professor at Indiana University who has written about the archives, "then, yes, the awareness of Lish's role diminishes Carver's work somewhat.

But if you look at writing and publishing as a social act, which I think it is, the stories are the stories that they are." Her view is becoming more widespread: a new form of literary analysis, "genetic criticism," focuses on the evolution of literary manuscripts from drafts to published form, taking into account the inevitable impact of editors and publishers.

Brian Evenson, a professor of English at Oklahoma State University, is the scholar whose findings Gallagher fought to keep unpublished. (The essay had been under consideration for an upcoming anthology, Critical Essays on Raymond Carvel; when Gallagher got wind of the submission and issued the publisher a copyright warning.) In Evenson's eyes, "You really have to say that Lish is almost as responsible as Carver for the stories he worked on." He feels the work really has to be admitted to be a "collaboration"-almost like a musical with book and music by different artists. All the characters, the settings and the plots are Carver's. Carver country conceived of as a physical place with a given population is still Carver country. But the minimalist tone, for good or ill, was Lish's. He was more avant-garde than Carver, whose real voice was closer to his plain-spoken poetry. That's how he wrote before he met Lish, and that's how he wrote after.

"It's no wonder Carver grew angry when critics called him a minimalist," Evenson says. "That was Lish."

W

at does one make of literature that is the product of collaboration? Some historical perspective is in order. Consider Ezra Pound's revising of The Wasteland in 1922. Pound did for T.S. Eliot something of what Lish did for Carver. He made liberal cuts to the poem, shortening it by half and eliminating the strong element of parody. (The original title had been "He Do the Police in Different Voices.")

Pound found a voice-not necessarily the voice Eliot intendedand honed it brilliantly. He helped make him a modernist cause celebre. Eliot acknowledged the debt obliquely, praising Pound as il miglior fabbro ("the greater craftsman") in his dedication.

When Eliot outgrew Pound, he moved on. Scholars learned of the extent of this collaboration only with the discovery of the original manuscripts in 1968. This has not hurt Eliot's reputation.

Seen in the larger context of his career, the fact that his masterpiece did not read quite like anything else he wrote did not lessen his stature or importance. Somehow it has come to seem natural.

Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, did not come in for such gentle handling. Wolfe was a brilliant writer, but there was a lot about writing a novel he never understood. He dumped the 330,OOO-word manuscript of his first novel, Look Homeward,

Angel, on the desk of his editor, Maxwell Perkins; in long sessions, Perkins cut, revised and made suggestions (always with Wolfe's consent). Wolfe decided to publicize the situation, much to the embarrassment of Perkins, who thought the editing process should be private. By Wolfe's second book, Perkins was mixing and matching batches of manuscripts, connecting the dots with Wolfe as he went along. After Wolfe died in 1938, Edward Aswell, an editor at Harper & Brothers, went even further. He created two more books out of the million words Wolfe left behind, creating composite characters and sometimes adding his own words. As these revelations have become known in the past two decades, Wolfe's reputation has dimmed considerably. "We have been threatened with scholarly publication of Wolfe's original manuscripts, and doubtless the threats will be fulfilled," wrote the critic Harold Bloom in 1987, "but the originals are most unlikely to revive Wolfe's almost-dead reputation."

Between these two examples sits Carver. To be sure, some of the early stories were so transformed by Lish that they should be considered the product of two minds. But what about the later stories Gallagher claims to have influenced? It's hard to say. That Carver's relationship with Gallagher was consensual rather than antagonistic matters, but what's most compelling is that the stories from Cathedralfeel as if they came from him. They share a common voice, a brightness. If Gallagher helped him, so much the better. To paraphrase Mona Simpson, who would want a wife who didn't? Of course, one day, Gallagher may reveal a deeper level of collaboration. It's one thing to guide the pen; another to hold it. If that day comes, I suspect I will stmt to feel about Carver the way I do about Wolfe: namely, that he was a writer who never left a clear record of his talents. DeLillo is right: this is a culture in which we want a single name on the front of the book.

But why place so high a price on purity? The stories are what they are, regardless. Perhaps that's why Carver was not inclined to talk openly about the editing process. He was a private man and nonconfrontational. "Ray once said to me, 'Who needs trouble?' " remembers Tobias Wolff. "He wanted everything to be peaceful." When interviewers asked Carver about his relationship with "Captain Fiction," he always acknowledged Lish as a friend, a talented editor, a man who had been there for him at a crucial time. But he carefully avoided talking about the backand-forth of their editing relationship, why it had ended or what it might reveal for those interested in his work.

In 1982, however, he came close. He was in a discussion with students at the University of Akron and, in response to a student's question, he began talking about the editor-writer relationship.

He ticked off all the famous examples of heavy editing: F. Scott Fitzgerald's cutting of Hemingway's Sun Also Rises, Perkins and Wolfe, Pound and Eliot. Carver quoted Pound's explanation of the process: "It's immensely important that great poems be written, but it makes not a jot of difference who writes them."

Then he paused. "That's it. That's it exactly," he said.

D About the Author: Review.

D. T. Max is a contributing

editor at the Paris

The Poetry of Tess Gallagher

espite failed marriages, alarming rate of divorces and frustrating experiences of single parenthood, most Americans adhere to and celebrate values dear to family life and home. Contemporary American poets have dwelt considerably on the paralyzing effects of family breakdown, most being guided by an animating passion to resist and reject those forces which rupture the fabric of family life. In a recent poem "Ardor," published in the New Yorker, Donald Hall dwells on the emptiness created by the sudden death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon on April 22, 1995, from leukemia. In the poem, Hall describes spending his hypnagogic moments uncertainly, trying to bear the blow of her absence:

D

"unable to love or work, to stay at home or travel, to die or Live.

Hours are slow and weeks rapid in their vacancy Each day lapses as I recite my complaints. Lust is grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way" This is no sentimental celebration of the husband-wife relationship. This is, in essence, the honest articulation of the love that cements bodies, hearts and souls. A similar sense of loss pervades the poetry of Tess Gallagher, who lost her husband, Raymond Carver, called "the American Chekhov," on August 2, 1988. A haunting human voice, sustaining the precious sense of human scale on a homebound vision make Gallagher one of the front-ranking

American poets today, whose obsession, as she states in recent poems, "has been with how memory works or doesn't work in the creating of 'what matters' in our lives." Rightly, perhaps, academic and critic, James K. Robinson discovers in Gallagher's poetry "a strong voice, passionate, elegant, painstaking."

Born on July 21, 1943, in Port Angeles, Washington, Tess Gallagher represents a personality that is deeply American and engenders a self that has inscribed within it the tenets of what Terri, in Carver's short-story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" represents "the kick-me-so-I'll-know-youlove-me" school; a self that has mastered the art of endurance. In addition to shared aesthetics as creative writers, Carver and Gallagher, in their glass-sharp accuracy of observation and presentation of things as they are, shared the wisdom of governing hope with humility-the hope to survive and endure, to taste what Carver calls life's "pure gravy."

Educated at the University of Wasrnngton, winner of numerous prestigious awards, Gallagher married twice before she lived with and finally married Raymond Carver. The essence of these relationsrnps animate her poetry. Grounded in the clutter and wash of her private experiences, speaking in an authentic and intimate voice with clear-cut autobiographical tones, Gallagher's poetry has drawn critical acclaim both for extracting parables from the dramatized, obsessive self and for perpetuating what reviewer Hayden Carruth calls "a delicacy of perception" and for sustaining a narrative ease and felicity rare in American poetry today.

If Stepping Outside ushered in a promising creative career for Gallagher because of its rich tapestry of images, its refreshingly laconic juxtaposition of moments of joy and grief, and a queer amalgamation of both to signify an authenticity in terms of experimental reality, Instructions to the Double registers an epiphanic revelation of human relationships, celebrating the ardor of family life. Many of the poems in this volume throw light on the conflicting values of the family, and on themes of departure and return. Valerie Trueblood noted in the American Poetry Review that "the buried excitement of family life produces the strongest poems in the book."

Gallagher met Raymond Carver at a writers' conference in Dallas in November 1977, about a year after the publication of Instructions to the Double. Nine months later they met again in El Paso where the latter was a visiting distinguished writer at the University of Texas. The Chekhovian courtship led them to become housemates. Living together first in El Paso and Tucson, then in Syracuse, New York, and finally in her hometown Port Angeles, Gallagher and Carver became each other's first readers.

The togetherness resulted in Gallagher's sharing of her passions for poetry, the precision of language and the prose of Carver.

In Carver too, this union resulted in a spurt of creativity. In an open-hearted acknowledgment of his gratitude to Gallagher, Carver told an interviewer in 1986, "This second life had been very full, very rewarding. And for that I'll be eternally grateful."

Not only in poems like "For Tess" (1985) and "The Gift" (1986) but also in his stories like "Cathedral" (1981) and "A Small Good Thing" (1982), Carver marks his gratitude to Gallagher. Carver's collection Cathedral (1983) and his later works retain major influences of Chekhov and Gallagher. In a biographical essay on Carver, William L. Stull writes: "Although it took less percipient reviewers several more years to recognize the fact, Carver's journeyman days were over, as was his long revisionary interlude.

With Cathedral, he declared his independence as a master. In the five years that remained to him, the only 'outside' influences on his work were Gallagher and Chekhov."

Gallagher was really responsible for the change in Carver's attitude and vision toward life and reality, and people around him.

Reviewing "Cathedral" on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, Irving Howe rightly emphasizes the changes that have gone into the making of the American Chekhov. Howe writes: "'Cathedral' shows a gifted writer struggling toward a larger scope of reference to a finer touch of nuance." Gallagher's claim for credit for the idea that is central to "Cathedral" cannot be brushed away, but should be respected. In a tribute to Carver, published in Granta in 1988, Gallagher captures the signifying contours of her relationship:

"I'm in mourning and celebration for the artist and the man, and also for that special entity which was our particular relationship which allowed such a beautiful alchemy in our lives, a kind of luminous reciprocity. We helped, nurtured and protected each other, and what's more, in the Rilkian sense, we guarded and respected each other's solitude.

"Ray gave me encouragement to write stories and I gave him encouragement to write his stories and poems through which he worked out his spiritual equanimity, for he was, I think: at his death, one of those rare, purified beings for whom, as Tolstoy says, the only response is love."

Gallagher responded to this love in a number of poems such as "I save your coat. But you lose it later," "Skylights," "The Hug," "Each Bird Walking" and "Bonfire," in which she is reminded of a violin when the dying Carver is thrown into her arms: "Even then I didn't forget you, violin who threw yourself into my arms, violin asking not to be broken one more time.

It wasn't for music you came to me, but for daring-mine and yours."

The publication of Under Stars did not draw much critical acclaim. It is a product of Gallagher's travels in Northern Ireland in which she burrows into the cultural matrix of Ireland while exploring the significance of human relationships. Successive volumes such as Willingly and Amplitude: New and Selected Poems ardently reflect Gallagher's home-bound vision and the alchemy of human relationships.

Moon Crossing Bridge, a collection of 60 poems, not only records the painful experience oflosing her husband, tangentially whirling back to the moments of togetherness, but also suggests

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the possibility of a survival with hope, for this survival alone can bring for her the hidden, rich, wondrous nuances of life and of eclectic relationships, human to the core. Gallagher's warm and respectful tribute to Carver is remarkable: "With my body's nearest silk 1cover you in the dream-homage, attended and revive by attending, 1know very little of what to do

without you."

These poems unravel the feelings of sharing death and the sweet memories of valentines that both Gallagher and Carver gave each other. Through the Zen imagery of cherry blossoms and curved bridges, Gallagher translates her personal troubles into assurances of survival which must be reached in order to realize fully the fathomless depth and verve of this amazing life-spirit. Gallagher herself says, "My work is very human-spirit centered."

In these "human-spirit centered" poems one endearingly discovers the passion to celebrate human relationships-intimate, gratifying and illuminating. "The Hug" is a celebration of the healing power of love, the illuminating experience of togetherness in the act of hugging: "I put my head into his chest and snuggle in. I lean to him. I lean my blood and wishes into him. He stands for it. This is his and he's starting to give it back so well 1know he's getting it. This hug."

The hug, for Gallagher, is the manifestation of love that is intimate, passionate and fulfilling. It is nothing but the "masterpiece of connection," an instrument of human connection as it were.

A week after Raymond Carver's death, Gallagher, accompanied by a friend, went to the graveside overlooking the strait of Juan de Fuca, that inspired Carver in his last days. The friend, remembering a line from Rilke, said it aloud: "And he was everywhere, like the evening hour." The last poem in Carver's latest

volume is "Late Fragments" which reveals the totality and completeness of his gratitude to Gallagher: And did you get what You wanted from this life, even so?

1did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on earth.

What Gallagher really wanted is reflected in her poem "Meeting Beyond Meeting" from Moon Crossing Bridge.

Perhaps, she wanted love from him, and togetherness, even in Carver's absence: "I could still believe tl1edoor will open and you will be standing there, a little surprised I'm not with anyone yet. ''Now the light's extinguished and we know every curve and dip and scar must claim each other like hands picking orchids in the dark. We can tell only by the fragrance how much needs crushing ...."

The pollens of this "fragrance" get strewn along Gallagher's latest volume, Owl-Spirit Dwelling.

As one traverses through the elegant woods of Gallagher's poems and short stories, and Carver's short stories and poems, one is bound to be bemused by the fragrance of a relationship that defies contamination and corruption, without failing to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary, without failing to celebrate the quintessential distillation of blood's unusurped dimension. 0 About the Author: Niranjan Mohanty, who teaches English at Berhampur University in Orissa, participated in the International Writing Program at University of Iowa in 1994. He is the author of three volumes of poetry: Silencing the Words, Oh! This Bloody Game and

Prayers to Lord Jagannatha.

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SPAN

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audience SPAN brings articles from the best U. S. magazines to your doorstep. The New

Yorker, Fortune, Wired, Harper's, The Atlantic MontWy, Rolling Stone are but a few of the leading magazines featured in SPAN. Not only that.

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