May 1982

Space ShuUle

The Inside Story

You are looking through the "skin" of the space shuttle orbiter; the heart of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Transportation System for the 1980s and beyond.

This system increases the capabilities and trims the cost of conducting experiments and research in space.

It can transport a flight crew of three, four experimenters, and 29,500 kilograms of payload into earth orbit. The space shuttle permits a wide variety of orbital activities, including launching and servicing satellites, recovering and returning satellites to earth, conducting on-board scientific and technical experiments, and assembling huge space structures.

The shuttle has three main units: the orbiter

(A) in which people and cargo travel between earth and orbit; two solid rocket boosters that, together with the orbiter's three main rocket engines, launch the entire system (B); and an external fuel tank that supplies propellants to the orbiter engines. The orbiter returns to earth like an airplane and can be reused more than 100 times. The boosters parachute into the sea and also can be reused.

Many commercial, scientific, and ecological serviees are provided by un.manned spacecraft carried into orbit by the orbiter and by experiments COllducted on board the orbiter. Many of these experiments will be accomplished by the use of Spacelab (C), a c~mplete scientific laboratory that

B. Space shuttle launch with boosters

remains bolted into the orbiter payload bay. Spacecraft requiring ~hei"'O~bits than the shuttle's maximum altitude of about 1,000 kilometers or intended for interplanetary missions are sent on their way,by attached upper-stage rockets.

Among the many services and benefits anticipated from shuttle payloads are: timely and frequent global crop surveys that are fundamental to accurate crop forecasts (F); locating potential petroleum and mineral deposits; alerting officials to air, land and water pollution; location of potential 'fish concentrations; aiding ship transport by pinpointing storms, icebergs and other hazards, and by discovering. navigable passages through icefields; providing

watershed information to aid in better water resource management; inventorying timber to help maintain renewable forest resources; and providing current pictures of urban areas for land use planning. Other rewarding activities inclu(te: gathering global temperature, cloud, moisture, air pressure, wind and other data for better weather and climate forecast; placing domestic and international communications satellites into their operational orbits (D); improving observations of "near and far space to gain knowledge about the earth, solar system, and universe (G); experimenting with the manufacture of new and lower-cost pharmaceuticals, crystals for electronics, metal alloys, and other products made possible by the weightlessness of space, and transporting technicians and materials to build vast space structures (E) that may be needed for possible. future solar electric power stations or for huge communications satellites.

The frequent availability of inexpensive standard'cannisters for small self-contained payloads makes it possible' for students and individual re-' searchers to have their experiments carried on space shuttle missions.

Getting into space requires the complex equipment shown in this diagram.

Space Transportation

System

Length

System: 56.14 m.

Orbiter 37.24 m.

Height

System: 23.34 m.

Orbiter 17.27 m.

Wingspan

Orbiter 23.79 m.

Weight

. Gross Lift-off:

1,995,840 kg.

Orbiter Landing: 84,778 kg.

Thrust

Solid-rocket Boosters (2): 12,899,200 newtons of thrust each at sea level Orbiter Main Engines (3): 1,668,000 newtons of thrust each at sea level

Operational Altitude

Orbiter: 185 km. to 1,000 km.

SPAN 2

INSAT in Orbit

by Mohammed Reyazuddin

5

Our Celestial Backyard

by Fred L. Whipple

10 Building Factories in Space

by Jerry Grey

14 Bedrock of Liberty: The First Amendment

by A.G. Noorani

18

Living To Be 100

by Margaret Shapiro

21

New Views About Aging An Interview With Dr. Robert Butler

22

Herblock Sudhir Dar Interviews Herbert Block

25

On the Lighter Side

26 Global Tremors From U.S. Interest Rates

by Stephen D. Cohen

28

Learning a Language, Learning a Culture Geeti Sen Talks With Edward C. Dimock, Jr.

32

A Living Heritage

by Jane and Michael Stern

36

Debating the Unknowable

by Lewis Thomas

41 Secretary Haig on Arms Control

42

}'ocus On ...

Editor Managing Editor

Mal Oettinger Chidananda Das Gupta

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor Editorial Assistant

Murari Saha Rocque Fernandes

Photo Editor

Avinash Pasricha

Art Director

Nand Katyal

Associate Art Director

Kan.ti Roy

Assistant Art Director

Bimanesh Roy Choudhury

Chief of Production

Awtar S. Marwaha

Circulation ~anager

P.N. Saigal

Photographic Service

ICA Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover & inside front cover-courtesy NASA. 1 top-R.K. Sharma; bottom-courtesy The Indian Express. 2-3Avinash Pasricha. 4-James Collison. 7-13-NASA. 19-2o-Craig Herndon, . The Washington Post. 21-courtesy National Institutes of Health. 28-31-Avinash Pasricha. 32-35-Jane Moseley, Bill Ferris, Frank Fourmy, Judy Peiser, Pete Ceren. Inside back cover-NASA. Back cover-Avinash Pasricha except left and center inset courtesy Department of Space, Government of India. Photo of Sadgati appearing in April 1982 issue on page 21 top left was by Nemai Ghosh.

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Front Cover: Space exploration has opened up a new world for man in more ways than one. Much that is science fiction today is about to turn into fact. New developments are enrichingvirtuaIly every field: medicine, agriculture, communications, energy .... (See also inside front and back covers and pages 2-13.)

Gandhi

Marg.

New

five ... four. .• three ... TWO ... ONE ... Blast Offl Columbia is back to earth; INSAT-lA is out in space, and the spectacular space exhibition of the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum is on the launching pad. SPAN's emphasis on space in this issue is part of America's participatiqn in the Birla exhibition, which opens in Calcutta this month and will be seen during the next year in New DeIhL Bombay, Bangalore and Madras. The American exhibit features a scale model of the spaceship Columbia, about seven meters long, complete with created, first in wood, rockets and fuel taI1ks (left, below). The model was painstakingly then in fiberglass,

by Indian craftsmen in New Delhi over a period of six months. The United States exhibit will include a moon rock, a model of INSAT-lA (which was built by Ford Aerospace), and space artifacts, ranging from wearing apparel to space food. In a nod to Indo- U . S. space ventures prior to INSAT, the exhibit includes a model of the communications satellite that the United States lent to India for the, Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE). There will also be 'a photo display which traces American adventures in space from Robert Goddard's 1926 rocket experiments through Columbia's third flight.

Our gaze is firmly fixed on tomorrow in much of this issue, but we also look at history in A.G. Noorani's article on page 14, which descri'bes how U . S. courts have nurtured freedom of speech and religion; As the author points .out, the reverence for law as the foundation 0'ÂŁ freedom is part of a heritage which the United States and Inpia share. The article seems particularly appropriate for May. In keeping with custom, President Reagan has called on Americans to celebrate May 1 as Law Day "to reflect upon our national institutions and our heritage of freedom ... to cherish our liberty."

We expect Noorani's article to be the first in a series on the fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill oLRights of the U . S. Constitution, a document that had a profound effect in shaping India's Constitution.

A living example of the unlimited exercise of freedom of the press in America is Herblock, the irrepressible Wa shington Post cartoonist who is interviewed on page 22 by Sudhir Dar of The Hindustan Times. Were it not for the free speech protection of the First Amendment, Herblock's brilliant and often stinging cartoons could get him in trouble. Many a President . of the United States has opened his morning newspaper to find himself harpooned by the wit of this American Daumier. Some of Herblock' s most eloquent works of art celebrate the First Amendment freedoms that have served him and the American people so well.

We note with sorrow the passing of the distinguished journalist Gobind B. Lal, who died in San Francisco on April 1 at the age of 92. Born in Delhi and graduated from the University of Punjab, Mr. Lal went to the University of California at Berkeley as a research fellow in 1912. He distinguished himself as a science writer for Hearst newspapers, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. He was also a devoted advocate of Indian independence, for which he worked in both countries, being presented the Padma Bhushan,in 1969 and the Tamrapatra in 1975. On Mr. Lal's 90th birthday, the distinguished psychiatrist Karl Menninger, his contemporary, said: "Mr. Gobind La1 is more than a good reporter, more than a good newspa perman, more than a genera 1 science pundit. He is a warmhearted, hopeful, spiritually minded philosopher who knows so much and pretends to know so little."

--M. P.

S

tark against the brown drabness off-the-shelf design. It has been tailored of a parched Karnataka country- specifically to India's requirem~nts, using s.ide, two giant dish-shaped satel- proved and demonstrated technology.

Professor Dhawan said: "Even though lIte control earth stations track the stars and satellites that go by. each of its components is well known Since April 10, 1982, when an Amer- -the communications transponder, the ican Delta-391O rocket launched India's radiometer and the TV transponderfirst multipurpose satellite from Cape and all have been used earlier, there's Canaveral, Florida, they have moni- been no operational satellite so far with all three services built into one satellite. tored INSA T's every move.

We were able to combine all three The first generation Indian National Satellite (INSAT-1A), parked in a services because the use of television in geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilo- rural areas is not so widely developed in meters above the equator, is the new India. So if you have a separate satellite for meteorology or telecommunications, "star" on the Indian horizon. When the costs go up. Separate, single-use fully operative, the satellite will open satellites may be worthwhile only if there up new avenues for telecommunicais full utilization of each satellite." tions, television and radio broadcasts Because. of its multipurpose, multiand weather forecasting. (A geosta~ dimensional capability, the costtionary orbit is necessary so that the effectiveness of INSAT-1 will be unsatellite always remains in the same matched, according to Dr. Pramod Kale, relationship to an earth station.)

INSA T project director. The entire cost The multipurpose telecommunicationscum-weather satellite will provide India of the INSA T project is estimated at with a greatly enhanced and much about Rs. 276 crore. The cost of the space needed capability for internal communi- segment of INSAT-1 plus the insurance is cations and mark the beginning of space Rs. 113 crore. The utilization facilities whic.h include the telecommunications, technology for practical use on a national scale, according to Professor Satish television, radio and meteorological Dhawan, secretary in the Department of ground segments will cost Rs. 163 crore.

However, by incorporating many differSpace and chairman of the Space Coment classes and types of services in a mission. single system, great economies have been "INSAT-1A," he said, "will mark the launches, ground stacompletion of one stage, which is essen- achieved-fewer tially the building of a reservoir of tech- tions and support services than would have been required for single-purpose nical personnel conducting worthwhile systems. Thus, INSAT provides a useful experiments using both space and ground segments, and the beginning of the oper- model for cost-effective future multipur¡ ational stage, which transforms tl)e ex- pose space systems.

INSAT-1 may seem to be an expensive perimental work to something which is proposition for a developing country like then used widely in the country. INSATIndia, but Professor Dhawan explained lA, in other words, will be the watershed that even though "only one of the three for domestic satellite communications." telecommunications part INSA T-lA was designed and fabri- services-the cated to Indian specifications by the Ford -has any revenue-earning capacity, the Aerospace and Communications Corpo- satellite will pay for itself within thI"ee ration at Palo Alto, California. A wholly- years. In that context the money spent on the satellite system is small." owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor INSA T is a joint venture of India's Company, Ford Aerospace is among the Department of Space, the Post and Teleworld's premier spacecraft manufacturgraph Department, the Meteorological ers. It has built more than 75 spacecraft, including "Courier," the world's first Department, All India Radio and Dooractive repeat communications satellite darshan. Therefore, it represents not only a technical innovation for costlaunched in 1960, and the three-axis effective enhancement of national telestabilized Intelsat-V, latest of the fourth communications, meteorological and generation international telecommunicamass communications capabilities, but tions satellites.

INSA T-lA is the first satellite of its also a major organizational innovakind. The spacecraft combines fixed tion that cuts across traditional boundsatellite and meteorological satellite ser- aries of government departments and vice capabilities into a single space plat- agencies.

The space segment of the INSA T-1 form; through multiple use of several system, according to Professor Jai P. ground segment facilities, substantial savings are realized. It is unique, not an Singh, program director, "consists of two

in Orbit From top (clockwise): Professor Satish Dhawan, the guiding spirit behind the INSA T program. The master control facility (M CF) at Hassan, Karnataka, which forms the major element in the ground system for the satellite's operations. Professor Jai P. Singh, INSA T's program director.

Professor Pramod Kale, project director. One of the three massive battery banks that ensure "no-break" power supply to the MCF.

spacecraft in orbit and a master control facility for their operation." The iNSAT-1 system has a primary satellite (INSA T-lA) and an in-orbit spare (INSAT-1B-to be launched next year). While INSAT-1A is parked at 74 degrees east, INSAT-lB will be parked at 94 degrees east.

The only difference between the two satellites is that the first one was launched by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) using an expendable Delta rocket, while the second, also to be launched by NASA, will be put into orbit from the space shuttle in July 1983. The cost of launching

INSAT-1A by the Delta rocket was approximately $26 million. However, the space shuttle will dramatically cut the INSAT-lB launch cost next year-to as little as $12 million.

"The reason for having two satellites at the same time," said Professor Singh, "is to increase the reliability of the space segment. In case there is a loss of part of the capacity, or total capacity, of a certain component, there will be another satellite to fall back on. Besides, we shall need a second satellite in the second half of 1983 and onward for additional telecommunications traffic."

INSAT-1 has a box-type structure with a deployed solar sail and a solar array.

The solar array is partially deployed in the transfer orbit while the solar sail is deployed only in the geostationary orbit.

The solar array's VHRR (very high resolution radiometer) must face the earth. At the same time its infrared channel requires cooling which is possible only if it has an unobstructed view of cold space. To meet both requirements, the solar array has to be put on one side, giving the satellite an asymmetrical configuration. To balance the satellite, a boom and a sail had to be added on. The five-panel, 1l.5-square-meter solar array provides the electrical power for the satellite.

Both INSA T-1A and lB are designed to have a life of seven years in orbit. The lifespan of a satellite is determined by several factors: electromechanical components in the spacecraft, the degradation of the solar array and, most important, the fuel available for north/ south and east/west station-keeping.

Satellites have small rocket motors called reaction control motor systems. In the INSA T design, reaction control is a bipropellant system that requires about 13 kilograms of fuel for every year of operation.

Within an hour after launch, the signals from INSAT-1A were picked up by the master control facility (MCF) in Hassan, Karnataka. The MCF forms the major element of the ground system employed to support INS AT-1 satellite operations.

The facility at Hassan has two satellite earth stations, each with a fully steerable 14-meter-diameter antenna and a sateilite control center, the equipment for which was provided by Ford Aerospace. All the earth station electronics at Hassan were built by the Space Applications Centre of the Indian Space Research Organization. (ISRO).

A team of technicians from India's Department of Space received training at Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto. The training courses included systems engineering, orbital mechanics, mission operations and maintenance.

The INSA T system has 31 earth stations and terminals. Five of the telecommunications earth stations are located in the main switching centers of India's communications system-Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Shillong.

Medium-sized earth stations are located in Leh, Jullundur, Lucknow, Patna, Aizawl, Bhubaneshwar, Ahmedabad, Uran, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Ernakulam, the Laccadive Islands, Port Blair, Car

Nicobar and offshore Bombay. Small earth stations are located in Srinagar, Gangtok, Itanagar, Kohima, Imphal, Agartala, Goa, Bhuj, Jodhpur and Mini- . coy. There will also be three mobile terminals that can be shipped to disaster areas and other locations when temporary communications links are necessary.

Initially, INSA T will provide direct satellite TV broadcasting service to clusters of three selected districts each in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Orissa, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, using 8,000 direct reception sets. These relatively inexpensive receivers will be installed in villages to provide educational, agricultural and health programs.

INSAT-1A will also be used for satellite radio program reception and rebroadcast.

Meteorological data from INSAT, which will include full earth pictures, will be transmitted to the Delhi earth station every 30 minutes. The Delhi facility will process, analyze and store radiometer and remote platform data and transmit processed images over telecommunication lines-including INSA T links-to forecasting offices of the Indian Meteorological Department. INS AT will give the Indian meteorologists the added ability to do sector scan of areas where there is severe weather, and see how it is progressing-something that was not possible with an orbiting satellite (see SPAN, March 1982).

INSA T spacecraft equipment includes: • Twelve national coverage telecommunications transponders to provide about 4,300 two-way telephone circuits.

Each transponder is capable of handling two TV distribution channels or 1,332 one-way telephone channels.

• Two high-power national coverage transponders, each capable of handling one direct TV broadcast channel for direct reception.

• A very high resolution radiometer for full earth images every 30 minutes.

This subsystem will be used for roundthe-clock weather observations, including cyclones over India and adjoining land and sea areas, cloud-top temperature recordings and snow-mapping.

• A channel for relaying meteorological, hydrological and oceanographic data from unattended land- and ocean-based automatic data collection and transmission platforms.

For India, INSAT-1 is a daring transition from the experimental stages of its space program-from leasing satellites of other nations to launching its own satellite, APPLE.

The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) program, which used an ATS-6 satellite lent to India by the United States, provided experience in the development, management and testing of a satellite-based instructional television system in rural areas. It also enhanced MISSION Indian capability in the design, development, manufacture and operation of ACCOMeUSHED direct reception sets.

SITE (1975-76) was followed by the India's second multipurpose comSatellite Telecommunications Experimercial satellite-INSAT-1B-will be ments Project (STEP), a joint project hoisted into geostationary orbit someusing the Franco-German Symphonie time next year by the space shuttle that satellite in 1977-79. Conceived as a completed its third flawless test orbital sequel to SITE, STEP was for telecomodyssey on March 30. munications what SITE had been for After a flight of eight days-one day television. STEP provided an opportulonger than originally plannednity to use geosynchronous satellites for Columbia made a perfect touchdown domestic telecommunications; Indian enat the White Sands Missile Range in gineers gained experience in the design, southern New Mexico. installation, and operation of various One of the mission's greatest succesearth segment facilities. The SITE exses was the smooth performance of the periment was so successful in demonstrat15-meter-Iong mechanical arm. Deing the potential of communications spite the' malfunction of a crucial wrist satellites for development of the country camera, the Canadian-built arm was that India decided on November 25, able to get a payload from the cargo 1975-when SITE was barely four bay and lift it out into space. months old-to use satellites for domesColumbia's crew also performed a tic communications. The green signal for variety of scientific experiments. the INSAT-1 system was given in 1977.

Scientists are eager to learn the "As far as APPLE is concerned," said results of the microabrasion foil exProfessor Jai P. Singh, "it is India's own periment, a British attempt to study satellite, but it is an experimental teleinterplanetary dust particles left over communications satellite.

However, from the beginnings of the solar sysAPPLE is an important step toward selftem. A thin sheet of aluminum foil reliance in building future operational with varying degrees of density is INSAT-class satellites that we will need to being studied in England by scientists, replenish the present INSA T space segwho are analyzing particles that might ment. We hope to build these here." weigh as little as a millionth of a Looking into the future, Professor millionth of a gram, using electron Dhawan said, "We at the Department of microscopes and chemical techniques.

Space are asking the user agencies-the Scientists think many of the space Post and Telegraph Department, Doorparticles came from comets, which darshan, and the Meteorological Departthey believe were formed by aggregament-to project their needs for the tions of ice and small dust grains at 1990s. We are asking them what kind of INSAT-2 system they want. We are not asking what kind of satellite they want, try," said Professor Singh. "It is a system where capability can be enhanced when but what kind of service they need."

Based on their response, "we will design the new generation satellites are brought proto-INSAT, which will not be identical. into the picture and as the previous ones to the present generation of INSA T but finish their useful life.

"INSAT-1 will take India into 1990. By may be an extension of it. We wi.ll~ear~ that time the test satellite, proto-INSAT, from proto-INSAT, and if there ~s J~stlshould have been launched and tested, fication, we may split the satellIte mto and the operational model-INSAT-2 two-one for telecommunications and -should have come into use."

TV and the other for meteorology."

As of now, India is not planning to "Since INSA T is an operational sysdevelop its own geosynchronous launch tem, we are concerned with providing capability of the class required for the reliable operation services in the coun-

great distances from the sun. They also believe that particles have not changed since the beginnings of the solar system over 4,000,000 million years ago.

One experiment with ~ more immediate impli• cations for mankind was the Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SUSIM). Using two spectrometers, the SUSIM measured the amount of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun during the 28 hours when the shuttle's payload bay faced in that direction.

Mission scientist Werner Neupert explained that there is increasing concern that man-made pollution may change the composition of the earth's upper atmosphere, allowing the sun's ultraviolet radiation to affect life on earth adversely.

While the shuttle's payload bay was facing the sun during its last full day in space, the astronauts were able to measure several solar flares with an X-ray polarimeter mounted in the payload¡ bay. A solar flare is a massive explosion of energy on the sun's surface that remains a puzzle to scientists.

Radiation from the solar flare includes X-rays, and scientists wonder whether these X-rays come from a very hot gas cloud or are the result of a beam of fast-moving electrons smashing into the sun's surface. "This experiment could give us an important clue about why such events occur in the first place and just what is happening on the sun," Neupert explained.

Only one more test flight is planned before the shuttle goes "commercial" later this year. Scientists of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are so excited about the Columbia's superb performance that they hope to see in a few years at least one landing or takeoff of the shuttle every week. proto-INSAT. As with INSAT-1, 'India hopes to use other nations' launchers in the near future. "However," said Professor Dhawan, "the Indian emphasis on self-reliance calls for acquiring launch capability sooner or later.

"So our approach is that in the next 10 years there will be a gradual transformation from experimenting with systems and the building of capabilities to the utilization of these systems. Space technology will then have become part of the lives of the people."

0

Our

Celestial Backvard Imagine the delight of an anthropologist on discovering a million-year-old television tape in full color with sound, showing a day in the life of an australopithecine family in an Olduvai cave in Tanzania. Or the rapture of a historian listening to an audio tape of a wiretap on the Borgias from one of their inner sanctums. Comparable miracles have actually happened for astronomers interested in the planets and satellites of the solar system.

For example, space-age exploration has given us a direct look and many measurements at the surface of Venus, forever obscured by clouds from external view. Similarly, we learn that a quarter of the atmosphere of Mars freezes out every winter and that the satellite 10, of the Jupiter system, is spotted with active sulfurous volcanos interspersed with a flattish sulfur landscape at -136 degrees C. Only once can a civilization first free itself from the tyranny of gravity and venture forth into space. The United States, through its National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has proceeded to explore the solar system with a thoroughness that only the most avid science-fiction buffs would have dared to predict half a century ago. The unparalleled success of the Apollo astronauts in actually landing on the moon was achieved by a level of technology also unprecedented. Whereas the prime emphasis of the Apollo program was on reliability, the unmanned space probes to and about the planets demand unbelievably precise design, engineering and construction in order to reduce weight and power requirements without much sacrifice in reliability. With an effective cost of roughly a million dollars per .45 kilo-

grams of experimental apparatus, the experimenters frugally count grams of weight and milliwatts of power.

The vast body of information that the Voyager space probe telemetered back from Saturn, nearly 1,600 million kilometers away in space, required in all some 500 watts of radioactive power-enough to operate a color television set, but not enough for a toaster.

Before Am<?rica's astronauts and the Russian Lunas brought rocks back from the moon, we could trace earth history back only about 3,500 million years, or 3.5 eons, although we knew that the age of the earth and the meteorites is nearly 4.6 eons. The highly subtle laboratory studies of the moon rocks soon told us that the moon was indeed the same age, to an accuracy of about .1 eon, or 100 million years. We were somewhat relieved to find that the moon, as well as the earth and the tiny bodies in the solar system, were all formed practically at the same time.

The moon rocks, however, filled in the time gap from the beginning until the solidification of the oldest rocks on earth.

In fact, nearly all the history on the surface of the moon occurred in this interval, when the earth and moon were completing their growth through the undignified process of being pelted by innumerable small bodies floating loose among the planets. Surprisingly, this process does not appear to have been a gradual accumulation of solid debris, but appears to have involved an unusually strong bombardment some 400 million years after our planet and the moon were mostly complete. Quite possibly, a rather large planetesimal, somewhat the size of

Right: This photograph by Pioneer 2 in 1974 shows Jupiter's Great Red Spot and the surrounding region.

An oval once four times as big as the earth's diameter, the Red Spot has probably been slowly dying out since its discovery in 1830. Far right: The Martian surface as seen by Viking 1, which landed on the Red Planet in 1976. Viking's mechanical arm dug and analyzed the Martian soil, but found no traces of life. Right, below: Pioneer spacecraft, which went into orbit around Venus in 1978, used radar to map for the first time the cloud-shrouded planet's surface. This contour map covers about 80 percent of Venus and shows the planet's topography: highlands (yellow and brown); lowlands (dark blue) and a huge rolling plain (light blue).

the moon, suffered a suicidal encounter with another such body and filled the inner solar system with sizable smaller pieces; these required 100 million years either to be swept up or to be ground to tiny pieces that were blown out of the system.

Even so, we are not entirely sure as to how the moon originated, though we do know' that the material is something like the outer mantle of the earth and that most of it was well heated to eliminate light, volatile elements, particularly water and carbon. The moon surely formed around the earth, and may have resulted when a comparable body sideswiped the earth. The debris could have formed a ring that finally coalesced into the present moon, originally much closer to the earth than it is today.

It turns out that Mercury, the innermost planet, looks very much like the moon when viewed up close. Its high mean density, 5.4 times that of water, implies that Mercury contains 60 percent or more of iron, the most abundant heavy element available to produce such a high density. Hence Mercury must represent the core of a sizable protoplanet, or a collection of pieces of planetesimals that were well heated so as to remove the lighter elements before they coalesced. Since we have no returned samples from Mercury, we cannot date the surface activities there; but all evidence indicates that Mercury, too, was badly pummeled by the great bombardment some .4 eon after it was formed. Careful comparison of moon and Mercury close-ups shows the wrinkled, prunelike effect on Mercury and more spreading and valleys on the moon. Apparently Mercury was cooling and contracting while the moon was heating and expanding during the time of the great bombardment.

Venus has been completely unveiled. The surface -in science fiction often portrayed as lush, tropical, and filled with horrifying monsters-turns out to be an arid, rocky desert with a temperature of 450 degrees C. It is much more suitable for frying or roasting monsters than for perpetuating them. (Kitchen baking temperatures rarely exceed 210 degrees C.) On the other hand, the atmospheric pressure is an unbelievable 90 times that of the earth. The air itself is 96.4 percent carbon dioxide and 3.4 percent nitrogen, with barely a trace of water. The fantasied rain and mist are largely sulfuric-acid droplets.

Sad to say, the chance that any life ever existed on the planet is nil. That our sister planet is so different from the earth is one of the major clues that will eventually lead to a detailed explanation of how the planetary system came into being.

The first indication of the high temperature on the

surface of Venus came about 1960, by radio measures at short wavelengths; the present view of its topography and surface features came from radar via NASA's Mariner Venus, in 1980. The Soviet Union's remarkably successful landing of a Venera capsule on the surface showed two rocky areas that suggest no type of liquid erosion of the surface or any extreme etching of the surface rocks. * America's Mariner Venus probes down to the surface show that considerable sunlight is scattered to the surface, as the Venera pictures indicate, and give us a temperature profile down through the atmosphere. The sulfuric-acid clouds are largely at the 48-kilometer altitude range. Now that we have the measures of atmospheric composition and pressure as a function of height, the high temperature of the surface is precisely understood. Venus is a colossal greenhouse that produces nothing green. The incoming solar heat is trapped by the opacity of carbon dioxide to infrared radiation; and the trace elements fill in the cracks of the carbon-dioxide heat trap to the satisfaction of current theoreticians.

Water has always been scarce on Venus as compared with the earth. Here we have carbon fossilized into rocks (mostly limestone), approximately in an amount equal to that in the carbon-dioxide atmosphere of Venus. The earth's water made this chemistry possible. But why did these two planets, so nearly similar in most other respects, develop s.uch different atmospheres? Whatever the reason, we can. be grateful that on the earth the water made conditions favorable for the development of life.

But it certainly would have been exciting had Venus had water, so that an extraterrestrial civilization might have developed next door. Instead, we are still looking for intelligent life millions of times farther away, in space around distant stars.

Mars, of course, once provided the greatest hope for neighborly extraterrestrial life, a hope that the extraordinary Viking Landers dashed completely. These landers were equipped by biochemists with three elaborate experiments to study the surface materials. Any living organisms in the Martian soil or atmosphere with bioprocesses at all similar to those on earth should have given positive results in the experiments. Indeed, there was activity; the results are largely explained in terms of the chemical properties of oxygen-starved sands on the highly radiated Martian deserts. But a truly negative result came from a molecular*The Soviet Venus-14, launched on November 4,1981, landed on Venus on March 5, 1982, and sent pictures back to earth for nearly two hours before succumbing to the planet's searing temperature.

_700 180 0

analysis experiment, which showed that there are no hydrocarbons in the materials at the two landing sites.

The frigid deserts of Mars contrast markedly with the overheated deserts of Venus. The air pressure on Mars is extremely low, only about .6 percent of the earth's value and less than a ten-thousandth that on Venus. The atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, with nitrogen, oxygen, and argon in roughly equal parts. Only a trace of water vapor shows, and it freezes out almost entirely during the nights and in the winter. The carbon dioxide actually migrates from pole to ,pole as the seasons change.

The Martian poles are tilted to the orbit much the same as those of the earth, the southern pole being tilted toward

the sun when Mars is closest. In southern summer .â&#x20AC;˘,enough of its carbon dioxide evaporates to increase the pressure at the Viking landing sites in the northern hemisphere by some 30 percent over the pressure in the southern winter.

Thus, the amount of atmosphere on Mars varies by nearly a third with the seasons-a unique process.

Because Mars is somewhat fattened at the equator by its 24.5-hour rotation, the sun disturbs the equatorial bulge and causes the north pole to wobble like a top around the pole of the orbit plane, with a period of about 125,000 years, compared to some 25,000 years for the earth's. But William R. Ward, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has calculated that

Space probes are reshaping mankind's concept of the universe and providing knowledge that may yield clues to how it all began. the tilt itself keeps oscillating with a period of about one million years. The extreme tilts are from 35 degrees to 15 degrees, compared with 24 degrees, the present value -much like the earth's 23.5 degrees. The polar caps on Mars are thus periodically turned much more toward the sun in summer, which should increase the total amount of evaporated carbon dioxide and melted water. This may account for the great dry riverbeds and channels the Viking orbiters have imaged so clearly. Apparently they have been caused by catastrophic flash floods, when water is suddenly released by the temperature rise. Huge, accumulated reservoirs of permafrost, mud slurry, slush, or glaciers are the possible sources.

About half the surface of Mars is covered with ancient craters that are much more subdued in appearance than those on the moon and Mercury. The water content or permafrost in the upper crust on Mars probably accounts for the major differences in the appearance of the craters. There has also been a great deal of wind erosion. The old crater-covered terrain on Mars contrasts markedly with the other half of its surface, which features the greatest volcanic mountains in the entire solar system.

The culmination of this great uplift is Nix Olympia, or Olympus Mons, which towers more than 21,000 meters above the surrounding plains-more than twice the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level. The great volcanic caldera on the summit of Olympus Mons looks like a mammoth model of a Hawaiian volcano, but the caldera alone is nearly the size of the largest Hawaiian island.

Apparently Mars, being only about a tenth the mass of the earth, could not maintain enough of an internal heat source to fire the volcanos for long or to power continental drift as the earth has done. Hence, its early internal heat sources raised one large blister on half the planet, resulting in a number of these huge volcanos, which may have been inactive for eons.

To observe geological activity on Venus is extremely difficult by present methods. So the question remains open. Most students of the subject would probably expect Venus to show some volcanic activity, but less than earth's. Only the earth shows a good, strong magnetic field, because this requires a rapidly rotating planet and a molten core. The Venusian rotation period of 243 days, determined by radar from earth and orbiters, leaves Venus with a possible molten core but too little rotation for a magnetic field. On the other hand, Mars has a very weak magnetic field but rotates with about the same period as the earth. It must therefore have a very small molten core, if any.

A meteorologist's heaven might be located near Jupiter. There one could observe details of the intricate patterns of atmospheric flow on this vast gaseous planet, which has a volume of a thousand earths. Whereas the cloud patterns on earth can easily be watched by satellites, the rest of the complex flow patterns above the ground stations require balloons or rockets for detailed delineation. On Jupiter we see everywhere the tops of moving clouds. The Voyagers' motion pictures of the planet show the Great Red Spot plowing its way through the high

clouds, with innumerable eddy currents, curling wisps, and complicated interactions beyond verbal description.

The Great Red Spot, an oval once nearly four times longer than the earth's diameter, has probably been slowly dying out since its discovery in 1830. It has no roots on any solid surface in Jupiter, and wanders about irregularly in longitude at nearly a constant latitude. As the Voyagers look down on the Great Red Spot, they see it rotating counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, which is anticyclonic for both earth and Jupiter. Thus the upper part of the Great Red Spot represents an outflow of material, in contrast to the inflow we observe in hurricanes and other low-pressure cyclonic disturbances of the earth's atmosphere.

How then had the Great Red Spot been maintained for the last 150 years? Mostly by theoretical hand waving, so far as I can see. Even as great cyclonic disturbances can last for days or weeks on the earth, so they should last much longer in the huge atmosphere of Jupiter-but not for 150 years without continuous energy somehow supplied. Careful study of Jupiter's heat balance shows that the planet generates internally and radiates away something like twice the amount of heat input from solar radiation. This energy must be carried upward through the atmosphere by convection currents, so at least we know we're dealing with an energy source capable, in principle, of maintaining such a majestic rotating storm for so long.

Were it not for up-welling currents, the clouds on Jupiter would become thoroughly mixed, and the planet would lose its magnificent color patterns to become a monotonous uniform shade. Even the source of the Great Red Spot's color is uncertain, although one possibility, recently suggested, is red phosphorous crystals formed when phosphine (PH3) is decomposed by solar radiation.

Great lightning bolts, which have been observed by the Voyagers, also may produce brightly colored organic molecules by spark discharge. The particles in Jupiter's clouds are largely ammonia, although the atmosphere is nearly 90 percent hydrogen and 10 percent helium by volume, with methane (CH4) next abundant at .07 percent. Tiny fractions of ethene (~H6)' water, acetylene (~H2)and phosphine are present, along with traces of carbon monoxide and exotic germane (GeH4).

Only tqe photosphere of the sun represents a more turbulent atmosphere in the solar system.

The greatest surprises revealed by the Voyagers were outside Jupiter-particularly the unexpected ring. It lies entirely within the satellite system; indeed, just within the newly discovered satellite XIV, which is perhaps only 40 kilometers in diameter. The ring extends down to about .8 of Jupiter's radius from the surface. It is brighter when we look generally in the solar direction; that is, brighter by forward-scattered sunlight rather than by back-scattered.

This property of the ring shows that it is made of extremely small particles and is not at all like the great rings of Saturn, which are composed mostly of particles football-sized and bigger. Thus Jupiter's ring cannot be a relic from ancient times, but must be continuously

Left: Saturn's C-ring and part of the B-ring (upper left) highlight this Voyager 2 view from a distance of 2.7 million kilometers. Voyager's cameras revealed that the discs are made up of a thousand or more distinct necklaces of ice and rock, like grooves in a gigantic phonograph record.

replenished by particles knocked off XIV by impacts of other particles, possibly from the volcanos on 10.

The great Galilean satellites, mere points of light as seen from the earth, became startling individuals as seen by the eyes of the Voyagers. The innermost, 10, slightly larger than the moon and slightly denser (3.53 times water), supported eight active volcanos when Voyager I went by. Six were still active four months later, when seen

by Voyager II (the second mission missed one volcano because it was out of sight, and another because it had died out). The motley reddish and orange colors of the satellite, reminiscent of a dermatologist's handbook of skin diseases, clearly arise from sulfur compounds. The theoretical explanation for the volcanos developed by S.J. Peale, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, together with P.M. Cassen and R.T. Reynolds, of the NASA Ames Research Center, preceded the Voyager discoveries of the volcanos by only a few weeks.

The prediction was based on the long-known fact that the three Galilean satellites-Io, Europa, and Ganymede -have their orbits synchronized by gravity to move with periods in the ratios of 1, 2 and 4, respectively. Their mutual attractions hold the satellites permanently with these same relative periods, while Jupiter's equatorial bulge adds another attractive force. Peale and his colleagues showed that Europa and Ganymede keep lo's orbit slightly eccentric. In every revolution 10 is compressed and expanded like an accordion, because it moves toward and away from Jupiter to receive a continually changing tidal distortion by Jupiter's huge gravitational field. The distortion produces frictional heating within 10, apparently sufficient over the eons to have boiled away any water that may ever have been present. Sulfur is the next element abundant enough and with an appropriate melting point to transfer the heat energy from the interior of the satellite via the volcanos. The actual loss of sulfur is relatively small, so the process can continue for eons

without seriously depleting this convenient heat-transfer material. Almost all of the old surface is covered with these sulfurous flows, whose thickness is not known; probably some silicates are mixed in with the sulfurs.

There are a few rocky mountains on 10, no more than 10 kilometers in height. Undoubtedly 10 has a very hot or molten center, the dimensions of which are not yet known.

The other three Galilean satellites are entirely different. The Voyager views of them will provide grist for theoretical papers for many years. The second, Europa, has the smoothest surface of any body known in the solar system, with the highest features rising only some 40 meters above the plains. Impact craters are extremely rare on both 10 and Europa, indicating continuous volcanic action on the former and a thin outer ice layer on the latter.

In contrast, the dark areas on Ganymede, the third Galilean satellite, are saturated with extremely shallow craters. There are also areas covered with bundles of grooved markings like superhighways, distinctive to this satellite and still unexplained.

Most probably they are some form of stress wrinkles induced in the permafrost upper layer. Ganymede is the largest cwd most massive satellite in the solar system, with more than twice the mass of the moon but with a density of only 1.93 times that of water. Thus Ganymede must be composed mostly of water and ice-completely moribund geologically; the same can be said for the outermost, Callisto, as its hemisphere away from Jupiter is completely covered with craters, the most peppered area on any satellite in the solar system.

The conspicuous fall-off in mean density of the Galilean satellites as their distance from Jupiter increases is a vital clue to their mode of origin. Several reasonable scenarios have been proposed, but no definite choice among them is yet possible.

Our ideas of Saturn's rings were revolutionized when NASA's Pioneer spacecraft first took pictures of them in 1979, looking backward in the solar direction for the first time in history. The greatly improved images produced by Voyager I in 1980 were a source of true amazement. The apparently smooth rings, when back-lighted by the sun, were transformed into narrow, circular grooves something like those in a phonograph record, and possibly a thousand in number. Theoreticians ue now busy with their brains, pens and computers to explain the situation.

Even though the science-fiction hopes for finding life elsewhere in the solar system have now become microscopic, it is clear that our magnificent space efforts have given us a completely new perspective as to the nature of our celestial backyard. We are making superb progress toward an understanding of how it all began, and why our earth has had the admirable capacity to provide us with a suitable home and place of origin.

0 About the Author: Fred L. Whipple is Phillips professor of astronomy emeritus, Harvard University, and senior scientist emeritus, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Building

Factories

in Space

With routine flights of the space shuttle, technological possibilities for the industrialization of space will become down-to-earth.

The space age was formally launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, when Sputnik I began beeping its primitive signals to an astounded world. In fact, this historic event has often been compared to the 1903 flight of the Wright brothers.

But just as the age of aviation really began in earnest in the early 19)Os with the maiden flight of the DC-3-the first transport airplane that was clearly economical-space flight left its adolescence in April of 1981 when the U.S. space shuttle successfully completed its first orbital flight test. Indeed, the shuttle has been nicknamed "the DC-3 of space." Though that is perhaps an overly generous image in view of its marginal economics, the shuttle's debut marks the most significant milestone in space flight: the advent of reusability.

As with virtually all new technologies, development of a reusable launch vehicle was inextricably tied to complex economic and political issues. The need for a space shuttle-a launcher that could routinely travel between earth and low-earth orbit to emplace, retrieve and service payloads- was foreseen by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) long before the first moon landing. But when NASA announced ambitious plans in 1969 for a shuttle-supported permanent orbiting space station to support a regular lunar ferry and enable the exploration of Mars by manned spacecraft, political reverberations almost destroyed the agency.

The specter of double-digit inflation, the escalating costs of the Vietnam war, and the urgency of social problems in rapidly deteriorating U.S. cities made multibillion-dollar space adventures appear frivolous. The only project in NASA's grand plan that survived was the reusable shuttle-but even then many budget compromises had to be made.

These constraints, together with the need to use three critical but largely unknown technologies-reusable rocket engines, a reusable thermal shell, and a computerized on-board flight-control system-required NASA to compromise on its basic goal of shuttle reusability. The orbiter was designed to be reusable for 100 flights, the main engines for 55 flights, and the solid-rocket boosters for only 10 flights. The big aluminum propellant tank, the core of the shuttle vehicle, is discarded after a single use.

Nevertheless, the shuttle does bring a whole range of new capabilities. In the past, expendable launchers imposed overwhelming constraints on the size of payloads. On the shuttle, payloads are constrained primarily in terms of length; diameter and mass are relatively unimportant. This, in turn, determines Left: Scientists are confident that by 1990 the space shuttle would be able to place a permanent manned space center in orbit. This station could be used to build factories or solar power systems in space. In this drawing, a shuttle orbiter visits a huge construction facility in space.

the number of different payloads that can be launched in a single flight.

Even more important are the shuttle's operational characteristics. For example, its maximum acceleration is much lower than that of previous expendable launchers, easing requirements for robustness. And the availability of astronauts to check out payloads prior to their deployment in space sharply reduces the need for performance-assurance equipment. The shuttle also offers flexibility in orbital altitude and inclination.

Communications have so far comprised the bulk of "space industry." A whole new spectrum of communications services -cable television, direct-broadcast satellites, global searchand-rescue capability, remote medical diagnostic services, secure business communications, personal "wrist radios," navigation aids, electronic mail, and package locators-and a host of other esoteric applications have been proclaimed as not only technically feasible but economically practical within a decade or so. And these systems don't include the enormous potential of existing NASA Landsat satellites and their successors, both U.S. and foreign, to develop whole new industries. These satellites will be able to monitor global production of key crops such as wheat, document the encroachment of crop diseases, detect unlawful sources of air or water pollution, observe and take action against desertification and plagues such as locusts; track and predict the navigation-threatening movement of ice floes; forecast floods and hurricanes; and search for oil and other valuable minerals.

But the most exciting future for space industrialization involves the use of the space environment itself-especially the application of microgravity ("zero-g") to industrial processes.

Late in 1977, when NASA began its efforts to interest commercial investors in the use of the space environment, industry's response was virtually a flat "no." Potential returns were too far off, and appropriate directions for research and development had yet to be defined. Yet NASA persisted with the aid of several aerospace companies-notably TRW, McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics, and Rockwell International -as well as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

These efforts bore fruit in 1979 with the signing of an unprecedented agreement between NASA and McDonnellDouglas Astronautics, which in turn signed an agreement with a nonaerospace "user" corporation (Ortho Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson). The aim was to evaluate prospect" for the space-based manufacture of drug feedstocks, such as vaccines, that require a delicate process called electrophoresis. Experimentation on Skylab back in the early 1970s . had indicated that yields of relatively pure materials could be much higher when molecular separation (the basis of elec-

12

trophoresis) was not complicated by gravity-induced convection and sedimentation.

A number of similar cooperative agreements are currently being negotiated. One, with a small company called Microgravity Research Associates, would fund experiments to determine whether space processing can ¡substantially improve the purity, and hence the performance; and value, of microprocessor materials. Weightlessness eliminates the need for containers in a space-based process, a major source of impurities and surface irregularities. The absence of buoyancy and thermal convection also assures uniformity.

But perhaps most important, many nonaerospace companies have begun investing in preliminary microgravity experiments. One of the leaders has been John Deere & Co., manufacturer of tractors and farm equipment. After committing several hundred thousand dollars to NASA materialsprocessing technology, Deere began to perform tests in NASA' KC-135 aircraft (with flights that offer 30 to 45 seconds of simulated micro gravity when the centrifugal force of the "outside loop" essentially cancels the gravitational force). Deere wanted to learn more about the commonly used but poorly understood process whereby molten iron solidifies into the cast iron that forms the bulk of Deere's products.

Other companies such as DuPont, Exxon, and Inco have closely followed this lead. TRW spearheaded an ad hoc Materials Processing in Space Industrial Committee consisting of ¡U.S. Steel, Owens Illinois, Beckman Instruments, 3-M, and Merck, Sharp, & Dohm.

In January 1981, a study conducted for the White House by the AIAA pinpointed several examples of space-based processing of materials that couJd be commercially rewarding by the end of the century. Although 35 product-related opportunities could lead to significant levels of space manufacturing activities, four appear especially promising: pharmaceuticals, electronic devices, "specialty" glass and glass products, and advanced alloys.

The¡ electrophoresis experiments being conducted by McDonnell-Douglas for Ortho are designed to study commercial applications and potential market share. The first such experiment is scheduled to fly on the shuttle this year. If it is successful, commercial operation could begin by 1987. Such an operation would involve from five to twenty 20-chamber automated manufacturing plants and associated support equipment, depending on demand. The initial five plants would be launched at six-month intervals from the start of 1987 to the end of 1988, with additional facilities launched as required. An average of four visits per year would be needed to collect the manufap. tured product and <fesupplythe facility with raw material, which could be done for clustered plants in a single shuttle flight.

After pharmaceuticals, the major near-term market for space manufacturing involves electronic devices. Like pharmaceuticals, electronic devices have an extremely high market value per unit of mass, manufacturing facilities are of modest size, and they can be highly automated so that total orbital mass is small even for high production rates. Moreover, production of electronic devices could be increased tenfold if the constituent materials are as homogeneous as space-based manufacture appears to promise.

The purpose of the joint endeavor between NASA and Microgravity Research Associates is to evaluate the growing of silicon, indium antimonide, gallium arsenide, and other semiconductor crystals in orbit. Such manufacture would require an unmanned 15,000-kilogram spacecraft-a "factory"-for each product, of which 5,000 kilograms would be automated processing equipment. Development of a demonstration model would

require perhaps 5QOhours of time¡from ~pacelab and a free-flying automated platform placed in orbit by the shuttle. Two or three factories could satisfy half the projected growth in the U.S. semiconductor market at an estimated cost of $400-$500 million per factory.

The other two potential near-term areas for commercial space-processing operations-the manufacture of high-quality glass for optical, laser, and communications applieations and advanced metallic alloys-are a bit farther downstream. There is considerable interest in the advanced metal alloys by Inco, Kaiser, and U. S. Steel. One particularly attractive product is a highly corrosion-resistant nickel alloy that could replace zircalloy in nuclear reactor cooling systems and offer enormous potential return on investment. However, manufacturing would require an on-orbit processing capability at least three times as massive, and taking three times as long to develop, as the corresponding facility for electronic devices.

NASA is considering future shuttle derivatives for a range of civilian as well as advanced military applications. The earliest could develop from shuttle-based experiments-particularly on Spacelab-in which NASA has given priority to extending the shuttle's power, its principal limitation in orbital stay-time and maneuverability. The goal is to use solar panels in the 25kilowatt range and increase that power gradually to perhaps 250 kilowatts, although some engineers believe that small nuclear power plants will be more cost-effective at that level.

NASA's most likely next major project, a low orbit, permanently manned space operations center (SaC), would utilize the shuttle and 25-kilowatt power modules for its construction; the shuttle would also serve as the saC's resupply vehicle. By the mid-1980s, such a center could service the commercial aspects of large platforms in geostationary orbit for communications and earth observations, as well as any space-based factories.

The 250-kilowatt power module could also begin key series of space-based experiments on the transmission to earth of electricity converted in space from solar energy, the so-called "satellite power system." If successful, such experiments could indicate the need by the 1990s for greater launch capacity.

Should space-based solar power stations or other massive space-based industry prove viable, raw materials from nonterrest rial sources could be utilized for in-space construction. For example, the energy required to attain escape velocity for a ton of minerals from the moon, where Apollo astronauts found ample supplies of titanium, silicon, iron and a number of other useful metals, is only one-twentieth that needed to lift a ton off the earth. Thus, the high initial investment in lunar mining and transportation facilities could payoff in significantly reduced transportation and environmental costs.

Space-based commercial activity represents only a smal~ fraction of what space proponents expect to be forthcoming.

The pump has only been primed. NASA's program of research on space processing is fundamental in providing a continuing source of new technology for embryonic space industries.

According to Dr. Norman Lillybeck, director of materials development at John Deere & Co., "Five or six of the [NASA] technology items we observed should gain my company three to five years on our previously expected progress."

There seems little doubt that such development will be undertaken; the only uncertainty is the rate at which commercialization will occur.

0 About the Author: Jerry Grey is public policy administrator of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and vice-president of the International Astronautical Federation. Books authored by him include The facts of Flight and The Race for Electric Power.

13

~

[ht firA Amenbmtut

~

Ctlngrtss shall make no law rt)p.tdin~an utablishmntt of religion. or pt'ohibitin~ the fnt exercise fhertof; or abrib§ing fhe jretbom of speedt, or of the press; or the right of the people ptacmbly to autlnblt, anb to

. .•.~.

pefition the qoytrnmtnt for a rtbrts$ Of grieyances . ~

Few provisions of the United States Constitution have had as strong an impact on India's constitutional culture as the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments. Foremost among them is the First Amendment which embodies the guarantee of those human rights which constitute the essence of freedom: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In one of its early decisions the Supreme Court of India said that the guarantee of free speech in the Indian Constitution "is based on Amendment I of the Constitution of the United States."

The two constitutions have common roots in English constitutional history.

The first of the great judgments on the First Amendment was delivered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1919.

Charles T. Schenck the General Secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, and some others were convicted under the Espionage. Act of 1917/18 for printing and distributing leaflets opposing the war effort and in particular the draft. The leaflets were sent to young men summoned to military service urging them to -"assert· your opposition to the draft."

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld Schenck's conviction under the Espionage Act in a judgment written by Justice Holmes: We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done .... The most stringent protection of free speech would not

protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force .... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. ...

Schenck lost his case but the ruling was a boon for dissenters since the test it propounded was a liberal one. The Court, however, was under a strain. For, just a few months later, it upheld the conviction under the Espionage Act of Jacob Abrams and other Russian emigrants for throwing leaflets from the roof of a loft in which they urged that the workers produce no arms for an attempt at American intervention in the Russian Revolution. The United States was not at war with Russia, but it was argued that

such advocacy hampered the war effort against Germany. The issue was whether Abrams had the "intent" to hinder the United States in the prosecution of the war.

This time Justice Holmes was in a minority in company with another great judge, Louis D. Brandeis. Two decades later, Justice Felix Frankfurter prophesied that Justice Holmes' dissenting opinion in the Abrams case "will live so long as English prose retains its power to move." Max Lerner ranked it with Milton and John Stuart Mill: Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all oppositions. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fightingfaiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas, that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the -expressionof opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

Benjamin Gitlow, a member of the left wing of the Socialist Party, was convicted under the Criminal Anarchy Act for writing a pamphlet called The Left Wing Manifesto, which advocated nonparliamentary methods. In 1925, the Court affirmed his conviction. Once again, Holmes wrote a dissent in which Brandeis joined: It is said that this manifesto is more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.

Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it has no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian

Two who shaped the First Amendment: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., leaves the Supreme Court in 1931, on his 90th birthday, with Justice Louis D. Brandeis (ri!!,ht). dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

In 1927 the Court had to deal with a Wellesley graduate, Anita Whitney, who was a member of the Communist Labor Party. She was convicted under California's Criminal Syndicalism Act for being a member of a group that advocated use of force as a political weapon. Her lawyer died during the trial with the result that the point about the "clear and present danger" was not raised as a constitutional issue. Holmes and Brandeis concurred with the rest in sustaining the conviction but dissented from their colleagues' reasoning in an opinion written by Brandeis with which Holmes agreed. It is a veritable classic. "It embodies what may well be the most enlightening and elo-

quent statement of the First Amendment's meaning-of the essential character of the American polity, indeed-that has ever been composed," the late Alan Barth once remarked.

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against. the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured

"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law-the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.

Brandeis proceeded to discuss the impact of fear and said: Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards.

They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussions. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Only an emergency can justify repression.

Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom.

Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution.

It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it ....

Clearly, Holmes and Brandeis had failed to persuade the majority on the Court. Yet, through their dissents they were educating the country about the primacy of the First Amendment. In 1928 Holmes and Brandeis dissented again in the case of Rosika Schwimmer, a pacifist whose application for citizenship had been rejected. The Court upheld the rejection.

Holmes was a staunch antipacifist, but he regarded the refusal of citizenship as an abuse of the naturalization power in order to stifle dissent: If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. I think that we should adhere to that principle with regard to admission into, as well as to life within, this country. And, recurring to the opinion that bars this applicant's way, I would suggest that the Quakers have done their share to make the country what it is, that many

citizens agree with the applicant's belief, and that I had not supposed hitherto that we regretted our inability to expel them because they believe more than some of us do in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

Gradually, the Holmes-Brandeis philosophy made its impact. The Court resolved that there should be "more exacting judicial scrutiny" of First Amendment freedoms which became in due time a "preferred freedom."

But progress was halted in 1951 when a new majority reflecting the tensions of the times adopted the test of "grave and probable danger." The great dissenters now were Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In Dennis vs. United States the Court upheld the validity of the Smith Act and the conviction under it of 11 top leaders of the U.S. Communist Party on charges of forming a conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force. Douglas dissented vigorously. They represented no clear and present danger, "they are miserable merchants of unwanted ideas: their wares remain unsold." Black also dissented.

Six years later, in the case of Oleta Yates and other "second string communists," the Warren Court interpreted the Smith Act restrictively to apply only to advocacy of illegal action, not to expression of belief. While doing so, it explicitly restored the "clear and present danger" to the full meaning which Holmes intended for it four decades earlier.

It is not always easy to draw a line between an individual's right to free speech and the rights of other individuals or of society.

Libel, for instance, is not protected, though in the case of a public official or a public figure the Court ruled that "actual malice" must be proved; that is, the statement was made "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

Group libel can also be penalized; The Court upheld a law which made it illegal to expose citizens "of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision or obloquy."

A problem does arise when a speaker addresses a hostile audience whose feelings he willfully outrages by intemperate outbursts. The Court ruled that he can be

prevented, over dissents which held that it is the speaker, not the crowd, who deserves police protection. The limits cannot always be clearly defined.

The Court's rulings in obscenity cases illustrate the difficulty of definition. What is obscene? As Justice Harlan said, "One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric."

Justice Brennan's test was "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interests," something which goes "substantially beyond the customary limit of candor" and is "utterly without redeeming social importance."

That test made no sense to Douglas or Black, who were against any restriction.

"I have the same confidence in the ability of our people to reject noxious literature as I have in their capacity to sort out the true from the false in thee logy , economics, politics or any other field," Douglas opined.

The basic premise underlying the Court's approach is that there should be no prior restraint and no censorship.

"The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from

attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought.... " previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. " This principle lay behind the Court's refusal to restrain The New York Times from publishing the highly confidential Pentagon Papers.

"A responsible press is an undoubtedly desirable goal but press responsibility is not mandated by the Constitution, and, like many other virtues, it cannot be legislated," Chief Justice Warren Burger said in June 1974.

A candidate for election invoked a Florida statute to demand that The Miami Herald print his reply to its editorial criticizing his record. The statute was declared unconstitutional by a unanimous Court: The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitation on the size of the paper, and content, and treatment of public officials-whether fair or unfair-constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how government regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press as they have evolved to this time.

While grappling with the dilemmas of rights and limitations and the problems of definition, the Supreme Court has extended the scope of the First Amendment in modern times to protect a whole range of activities through which people express their thoughts.

It has been ruled to cover advertisements, entertainment, movies and even election expenditure. Public employees below the policy-making level cannot be sacked because of their political beliefs.

Picketing is protected as a form of expression provided it is peaceful. So is "symbolic speech." Fifteen-year-old John Tinker and his 13-year-old sister, Mary Beth, wore black armbands at their junior high school to express their opposition to the war in Vietnam. They were suspended by the principal. Justice Abe Fortas wrote for the majority censuring the action: "It can scarcely be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

The Court has allowed the pamphleteer a free hand even if he chooses to conceal his identity:

Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all .... Even the Federalist Papers, written in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under fictitious names. It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.

Nor may the government curb pamphleteering on the pretext of curbing littering on the streets. Distribution of handbills to pedestrians on a public sidewalk is perfectly permissible: "The purpose to keep streets clean and of good appearance is insufficient to justify an ordinance which prohibits a person rightfully on a public street from handing literature to one willing to receive it." It is the one who throws papers on the street who should be punished.

The Court has been equally realistic about the economics of the newspaper industry. "To refuse the second class rate to a newspaper is to make its circulation impossible and has all the effect of the order that I have supposed," namely, censorship. That was Holmes dissenting in 1921. Twenty-five years later, the Court applied his logic to strike down the Postmaster General's order revoking second class mail privileges for Esquire magazine on the ground that it contained indecent material.

The First Amendment expressly includes the right of peaceful assembly along with free speech. The Court has been zealous to protect that right, although the familiar dilemmas of liberty versus order arise in these cases as well.

"It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances.

All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, and therefore are united in the First [Amendment's] assurance. "

The guarantee of religious freedom is also embodied in the First Amendment and so is the principle of the separation of state and church. Justice Black summed up its effect tersely: "Neither a State nor the Federal Government can set up a Church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer

one religion over another." In the words of Jefferson, which he recalled, the religion clause in the Amendment was designed to erect a "wall of separation between Church and State." Justices have disagreed over its height and alignment but never as to its necessity.

The concept of religious neutrality did not prevent "the majority's right to free exercise of religion." But, "while the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of State action to deny the right of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs."

Justice Robert H. Jackson's words aptly describe the philosophy behind the sweep of the First Amendment: If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein .... The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, and place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.

One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

Certainly, the vision which inspired the framers of the Indian Constitution was strikingly similar to the American drafters' vision. That vision has been beautifully expressed by Hugo Black: Since the earliest days, philosophers have dreamed of a country where the mind and spirit of man would be free; where there would be no limits to inquiry, where man would be free to explore the unknown and to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles. Our First Amendment was a bold effort to adopt this principle.

These words remind one of Tagore's immortal lines about the India he liked to see: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free...

0 About the Author: A. G. Noorani is a practic-

ing lawyer and a constitutional law scholar who also writes about politics and international affairs for numerous Indian newspapers and magazines. He lives in Bombay.

As the United States gets healthier, its people live longer-statistics reveal that more Americans than ever before are reaching the age of 100. In the following pages geriatrics experts discuss problems of aging and research on extending the life span; and centenarians recall times past.

In percentage terms, centenarians are probably the fastest growing segment of the American population. The U.S. Census Bureau and Social Security Administration report that between 1974 and 1978, the number of centenarians in the country jumped from 8,317 to 11,992.

This is what experts on aging say about the chances of living to be 100 years old: • While the odds have improved greatly, only one American in every 20,000 will live to blowout 100 birthday candles. But the odds for reaching 95 are much better: One in 2,500 will live that long.

• There's no substitute for good genes, but you can maximize your chances of reaching 100 by staying slim, working as long as you can, minimizing stress, getting regular medical care, exercising a lot and leading a stable family life.

• Women have a better chance of living to 100: seven out of ten American centenarians are women.

• Despite Florida resident Charlie Smith's claim that he was born in 1842-making him 140-experts on aging say that the human body is built to live, at most, 120 years. Smith's claim is not given much credence because of lack of such supporting documentation as a birth certificate.

Valery Portnoy, associate professor of medicine at George Washington University, says the likelihood of a person living more than one or two decades past 100 is very small.

Portnoy, who is one of a handful of people in the United States specializing in geriatrics-the study of old age-says that in the next 20 years "we should expect an increasing number of 100-year-olds" because of greater knowledge of the aging process, more advanced methods of treating chronic diseases, improved living conditions and greater awareness of healthful lifestyles.

Ann Dieffenbach of the U.S. Institute on Aging says that currently persons who live comfortably to extreme old age are rare. One of the problems has been a "serious lack of knowledge about how to handle old people's diseases," she says. This situation is changing, she notes, but slowly. "Until recently no medical schools had geriatrics programs .•' Barbara Cahn, who coordinates all geriatrics programs for the University of Maryland, says that the problems confronting persons who live to 100 often are more severe versions of those confronted by the elderly in general.

About the Author: Washington Post.

Margaret

Shapiro

is a staff

writer for

The

"If these people are over 100 years old, they're probably very heavily pressed economically," Cahn says. "They were over 50 when the idea of pension plans came into being [in the 1930s] so they never had a chance to become part of one."

Cahn also says that extreme loneliness plagues persons living to advanced old age. "They have no social supports, no spouse or siblings or friends and they've probably lost their children." Impaired mobility, a problem for many senior citizens, Cahn says, often adds to centenarians' isolation.

Statistically, centenarians have an' increased chance of "multiple chronic illness," according to Cahn. "It may not be critical, but it plagues them all the time."

The illnesses generally involve seeing and hearing, two functions taken for granted for 90 years of a centenarian's life, Cahn says. Incontinence or digestive trouble can be even more debilitating. In any case, life becomes more trying with no prospects for change. This dead-end feeling can be the most serious illness of all, leading to a depressed state that could ultimately be fatal.

"For the most part, these people have to be copers just to have made it that far. But if a depression sets in," Cahn warns, "they become less effective as human beings, and a downward, often quickly downward, cycle can begin."

The most common illness connected in the public mind with advanced old age is senility, and Portnoy, like many other gerontologists, visibly bristles at the use of the word.

"Someone who forgets in middle age is called absentminded; someone who forgets in old age is senile. It's absurd," Portnoy says, adding that for a person aged 100 "it is normal to have a slow memory, slow actions, but this does not n~cessarily mean a decrease in intelligence that senility implies. It's a disease that often affects older people ... but there's no evidence that it is a necessary part of aging.

"There's no doubt we're losing brain cells, some 5,000 million each decade after 40. But each person has 100 thousand million and there's no question that the brain has enough capacity to pick up the slack. We're losing cells in the heart and in the kidney too, but we don't even notice.

"The question becomes," Portnoy adds, "how do we stimulate those remaining cells to become resistant to disease, stress, emotional grief? With fewer cells at work there is less resistance." As a result, any sort of stress can be potentially fatal.

The point, according to Portnoy, is to have a less stressful environment but to continue living a productive life full of positive, not negative, stimulation.

Larrah Hyde vividly remembers when Oklahoma was admitted to the United States in 1907. She did not learn the date from a history textbook. Hyde was already 28 when Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory merged to become the 46th state.

Though she's a few years past her 100th birthday ("I'm kind of

proud of myself for that one"), Hyde's still-sharp memory easily takes her back to the Southwest from her present home in Maryland.

"I've had a very interesting life," she says matter-of-factly in the midst of stories about coveredwagon travel, hard benches in oneroom schools, the difficult Dust Bowl years and the Depression of the 1930s.

When she was six months old,

Hyde and her family moved from Texas, where she was born, to northern Missouri in a covered wagon. "A covered wagon's all right if you have to, though it's awful slow-going," says Hyde.

Hyde went to school until she was 17, quite a feat for the times, she says: "A hundred years ago, women weren't people. There were only a few things they could do to take care of themselves and I rebelled."

There was a lot of living to do before Larrah Hyde was going to settle down to marriage and children. At various times she was a bookkeeper, a stenographer and an assistant to a judge. When the first Oklahoma state payroll was drawn up, her name was on it. From a starting salary of $25 a month, Hyde was moving up in the world.

Working for Oklahoma's first commission to regulate corporate activity, Larrah met Tom Hyde.

He was a good friend and one day he popped "the question." Fifteen hours and a good steak dinner later, they were married.

Their one son was born not too long after, and the Hydes settled down to domestic life, first in Oklahoma City, then Tulsa. "Tulsa was a wide-open town, when they discovered oil there."

Life got rough when the dust storms hit, along with the Depression, in the early 1930s. Oklahoma farmers had to leave their parched land to look for other work, in the midst of hunger and poverty. The Hydes made it through the Depression years relatively unscathed: Tom held a state job and Larrah rented out the extra rooms in their home.

When Tom died in 1962, Larrah was in her mid-80s. After a few years of solitude it seemed a good time to return to her family. Her one son had long before left Oklahoma, and Hyde figured that she wouldn't mind spending 'her remaining years with him, his wife and their two children.

Now, four great-grandchildren later, she says life has treated her pretty well. "I can't see any more," she says, rhythmically caressing one of two large cats that keep her company, '.'and I get dizzy. But otherwise I'm fine."

Hyde, who was an avid reader, says she misses books and her favorite hobby, gardening. "I just think a lot to keep myself busy," she says, amused by her own response. "Right now, I'm digging out what happened to me all my 19 life."

William (Mac) Pinckney, according to his daughter Elizabeth Johnson, is a walking history book. It's not surprising, since his anecdotes run back 116 years to slavery and sharecropping in Croom, Maryland.

Pinckney and scores of relatives -after 17 children, no one has been able to keep track of the number of grandchildren or greatgrandchildren-have lived in the

Washington, D. c., area since he moved there 90 years ago.

At his 116th birthday party, Pinckney told visitors that the life of a slave had been "a horror story," full of beatings and humiliations. But Pinckney, who suffers from leukemia and a kidney ailment, says religion has kept him from being bitter. Strong faith, Pinckney believes, also has allowed him to live such a long life.

At 100 years old, Zachariah Demetrieu Blackistone gave up golf.

At 106, he began to feel that apartment life, with a roommate, might be pressing his luck. "I was getting a little shaky on my feet," Blackistone says, explaining his move to a retirement and nursing home. It may also explain why he gave up jogging, a lifetime passion.

Pressing his soft, almost wrinkleless palm into that of his listener, Blackistone says, "I live on love."

Without much cajoling, though, he'll admit that imperial crab and oysters-tastes developed while growing up on the Maryland coast -may have contributed to his longevity.

Although Blackistone is confined to a wheelchair, on special occa-

sions-such as his birthday or his almost monthly visit to Blackistone, Incorporated, Florists, which he founded-he gets a chance to socialize.

Blackistone was one of nine children, all of whom, he says, lived to at least 70. He came to Washington, D.C., from a farm when he was about 17 years old.

One day in 1893, he wheeled his first flower cart onto a street corner and the commercial venture has been expanding ever since. The company is now one of the largest florists in Washington.

Aside from a seafood diet and love, why does Blackistone think he's lived so long? "People who live a long time, they all work hard," he says.

Living past 100, you may think, requires good doctors, good food and good genes. Not at all, says Annie Rabb, who should know.

She's 106. "I have just been happy all the time, didn't let anything go to my heart," she says with a blissful smile and a satisfied look.

"Of course, I couldn't do it all by myself, I have to have the Lord's help."

While her memory, she concedes, is not all that good any more, Rabb does remember vividly the Sunday school her mother ran almost 100 years ago in Columbia, South Carolina.

According to her 74-year-old daughter, Aria R. Albany, with whom she lives, Rabb received an elementary school education in

Columbia, where her father worked as the manager of a grocery store. She got married at 16, had eight children, only two of whom are still living, and in 1924, moved to Washington, near her daughter's present home.

For a long time, Rabb worked in other persons' homes doing "double day"-taking care of their kids, laundry, cooking, housework and then coming home and doing the same for her own family. But, she says, she always liked that kind of work.

Since responsibility for family chores has moved to another generation, Rabb takes it easy now.

An occasional dinner in a restaurant and weekly church attendance 0' are her main diversions.

NEW VIEWS ABOUT AGING Dr. Robert N. Butler (right), director of the U.S. Institute on Aging, discusses the latest research' on extending the human life span. Dr. Butler is the author of Why Survive? Being Old in America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1976.

Q: Dr. Butler, can medical science extend the human life span to 100 years?

A: There is no inherent reason why not.

Most gerontologists feel the natural or inherent genetic limit for human beings is about 110 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth is 73 if you classify men and women together. We have dramatically increased life expectancy since the turn of the century, when men expected to live to 46 and women to 48, but we still have 37 years to add before expectancy matches the maximum life span.

Much of our research is directed at understanding the basic physiology of the aging process. Under way at our institute, for example, is a comprehensive longitudinal study of 1,200 people from the late teenage years to persons in their 90s and older. We are looking at body functions, emotional well-being, lifestyle. This is one step toward finding ways to .extend life to its natural limit. So far, we haven't found any biologic reason not to live to 110.

Q: Has research produced any anti-aging drugs that might increase a person's life span?

A: A lot of attention is being given to the steroid dehydroepiandrosteroneD HEAwhich is associated in animal experiments with a slowdown of aging. DHEA is the most common steroid in the body, so common that some scientists refer to it as the body's "junk hormone." We don't know its true function, but there appears to be a decline of DHEA levels with age.

We also find a decline of DHEA levels in women who have breast cancer. And from animal experiments, we know that DHEA can prevent breast tumors and control weight gain.

The steroid also seemed to lower cholesterol levels. No adverse side effects were. noted in this testing, and a study is under way to see if this steroid actually extends the life span.

Q: Do biological and chronological age differ?

A: Very much so. We all know people age 65 who seem 45 years old. There's no single factor that explains this apparent difference between biological and chronological age, but we've devised an assessment of a person's biological age based on different functions.

This profile evaluates 24 functions, such as

vision, hearing, heart function and speed of reaction, to arrive at a person's biological age.

In a study of 1,086 men ages 17 t9 102, we found that people who scored high on the profile, indicating an advanced biological age, were among those in the group who died at the earliest age.

Q: Can the average person go to the doctor and learn his or her biological age?

A: Not yet.

Q: In the broad field of aging, what is the most important advance in recent years?

A: Most exciting, I think, is learning about and treating the most serious form of senility, which affects at least 1.5 million Americans.

Recently, it was discovered that the amount of a certain enzyme in the hippocampus-the memory portion of the brain-declines with age. This decline is. even more marked in patients diagnosed to have the common type of senility called senile dementia, or Alzheimer's disease. If we can find ways to introduce the chemical messenger which is a product of this substance into the brain by nutritional or other means, we may have something that would be comparable to the L-dopa treatment for Parkinson's disease. ... We're also finding that healthy cells may be able to take over the function of dead cells.

In animal studies, healthy cells around damaged ones can actually send out new axons -nerve-cell processes by which impulses travel-that connect with each other around the dead ones. That's extremely important.

Now we want to learn how to influence these re-established connections as a first step toward reversing brain damage .

Q: How near are scientists to finding antisenility medication?

A: There are a number of interesting leads.

We find, for example, that a not-verycommon disease called J akob-Creutzfeldt is the cause of one form of senility that involves degeneration of the central nervous system by a slow virus. We also find high concentrations of aluminum in the brains of senile patients, which may be related to a defect in the parathyroid gland.

The important point in all this is that we now know that senility is not one but many different diseases. Twenty-five years ago, doctors thought that senility was due primarily to the hardening of the arteries and that if you lived long enough you would become senile and there wasn't a thing you could do about it.

Q: Where does senility begin in the body?

A: Many of us feel that the central nervous system is a powerful pacemaker for the whole process of aging. Its relationship to the endocrine system-the so-called neuroendocrine axis-may indeed playa very central role in aging. Certainly the classic "slowing down" associated with age-decreasing the speed of reaction time-is due to the central nervous system, not because of degeneration of peripheral nerves.

The alleged decline with age in a variety of

intellectual functions comes later, is less prevalent than we thought and is frequently related to disease-not to the aging process per se. But in stressing the manageability of aging, I don't want to make it sound as if nothing happens with age. As years pass, all of us experience what is referred to as benign senescent memory loss, and it can happen many years before you become "old." It can be psychological-maybe you forget things you don't want to remember.

What is important is not to develop performance anxiety. If you're 19 and forget where you put your keys, you don't fret about it. At 45, you take it superseriously.

Q: What can middle-aged people do to stay healthy?

A: Physical and intellectual fitness: development of new interests, avoidance of tobacco, use of alcohol only in moderation, participation in informal social networks of people that you can turn to in later years-these are all forms of personal fitness by which you can start preparing for the later years. Of course, you have to get over the pretense that aging is not going to happen to you. People really don't like to face the fact that they're going to age. That's probably the central issue for those under 40 in preparing for old age.

Q: What is bereavement's impact on the surviving mate?

A: Bereavement is so profound in its effects that our studies suggest that we have 25,000 excess deaths among survivors within a year.

Q: What problems may arise as more people keep working after 65?

A: We need to develop a measure of average health expectancy as opposed to average life expectancy. If we're serious about moving the Social Security retirement age upward from 65 to 68-as the President's Commission on Pension Policy proposed-then we'll have to find a way to measure the biological age to be sure that individuals are healthy and able to work up through age 68.

We'll also have to enlarge the number of jobs available. It doesn't always have to be paid work. It might be as a foster grandparent or a volunteer. But we should be doing something purposeful in our lives.

Q: Are there enough specialists in gerontology and geriatrics to meet the needs of the aging population?

A: Not as many as we would like. In the past, there were few medical schools with special training in geriatrics, so most of us had to teach ourselves.

The National Institute on Aging has grown from a budget of $15.9 million in 1975 to $76 million today. We now support special research-oriented programs in geriatrics in 21 of 126 medical schools in the United States.

We are also planning to develop a teaching nursing home similar to a teaching hospital to find better and less costly ways of taking care 0 of the aged.

E Chatting with Herbert Block, Indian cartoonist Sudhir Dar discovers that the dean of American political cartoonists is a kind man who uses his devastating wit on "the side of the underdog."

There must be some mistake, I thought to myself, this can't be the place. It looked like a storeroom of some kind, a steel jungle, with racks and cabinets everywhere, like metal skyscrapers jammed in a room. And paper! Masses and masses of it-clippings, posters, pictures, newspapers, tearsheets, cartoons, magazines .... How, I wondered, can anyone be creative in a cluttered, cramped, chaotic room like this? Suddenly, I became aware of a young woman sitting in the middle of all this mess, smiling at my wide-eyed look of bewilder-

ment. "Mr. Dar?" she asked. "Please go he is, a daily tonic for millions. But for in." She gestured toward an inner, half- some, a pain in the neck. open door. Ah, so this wasn't the room after all. Now I enter the sanctum, the Q: As a professional critic, do you see yourself very differently from the way hoiy shrine ....

The first sight almost bowled me over. most others see you?

A: My own feeling is tpat we mustn't get There was an even bigger clutter. Paper, books, magazines-and presiding over it cynical. I'm always reminded of the all, sits America's High Priest of Political epigram that says: "The only beCartooning, Herblock, pride of the setting sin is cynicism." There are a lot of powerful Washington Post, author of eight things going on that shouldn't be going books, thrice winner of the pres- on. Of course, you can't keep pace with tigious Pulitzer Prize and recipient of a everything. But when people in governdozen other distinguished awards. Now ment do something wrong, you point out 72 and still a bachelor, he is the only that they shouldn't be doing it. The newspaper cartoonist in the United States political cartoon is essentially a means of (perhaps in the world) with a contract for poking fun, puncturing pomposity and offering criticism. You're on the side of life!

"Hello there," he greets me with a the underdog. But through all this, one must keep a fresh outlook, maintain a friendly wave. "Come and sit down-if you can find a place." He is almost six sense of naive idealism. Not cynicism. I feet tall, greyer than when I saw him last, like cartooning, I like giving my own 10 years ago. As we talk-he's curious opinion. I usually put some fun into my about India- I scan his face searching for work, but I still feel that the political hidden evidence of the pungent, cutting, cartoon should have a view to express, scathing bite he packs in his work. I that it should have some purpose beyond remember that, some years ago, certain the chuckle. So what I'm talking about people in power called him "a demented here is the cartoon as an opinion man." Instead, I see a kindly soul, a medium. My work in The Washington Post is a signed expression of personal warm smile, a gentle sensitivity.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon, his dead- opinion. In this respect, it's like a column line was approaching, but he had agreed or a signed article-as distinguished from to see me then because there was no the editorial which expresses the policy of other possible time-he was going on the paper itself. vacation the next day.

Herbert Lawrence Block was born in Q: Do you need to submit your cartoon to Chicago, Illinois, on October 13, 1909, the editor before it goes to press? the youngest of three brothers. He began A: I'm a deadline pusher and keep to draw at an early age and when only 12, fiddling with sketches till the last minwon a scholarship to the Chicago Art ute-ending with no time to spare. Then Institute. At 19 he joined the staff of The I decide on one, begin work on the actual Chicago Daily News and, at his father's ink drawing and send a Xerox copy of the suggestion, abridged his professional rough sketch to the editor's office. I don't name to "Herblock." In 1933, he switch.- sit in on editorial conferences and I don't ed to a syndicate, the Newspaper Entersee the editorials in advance. This is for prise Association, and during the Thirties . much the same reason that I don't use his cartoons lampooning issues and per- ideas sent in by readers. I like to start sonalities gained wide popularity. He from scratch, thinking about what to say, won the National Headliners' Club without having to "unthink" otheridegs Award in 1940 and his first Pulitzer Prize first. In my case, the actual work process in 1942. is more methodical than inspirational World War II was on. In 1943 Block -despite the apparent aimlessness of joined the army but after basic training, frequent strolls to the water cooler, chats spent the rest of his army duty in sunny with friends, and sharpening more pencils Florida drawing cartoons for the Infor- than necessary. The day's work begins mation and Education Division. He was a with reading the newspapers and making sergeant when discharged in 1946. While notes on possible subjects. I also flip on on terminal leave, he applied for a job the radio for late news developments. with The Washington Post, got it, and is Generally I narrow down the list of still there. "Herb" has been with the Post subjects to one or two. Next comes the business of thinking about what it is that now for 35 years-and what a magic herb

"The political cartoon is essentially a means of poking fun, puncturing pomposity and offering criticism ... it should have some purpose beyond the chuckle."

needs to be said, and then getting the comment into graphic form. This involves drawing rough sketches.

It is hard to say just when a thought turns into a cartoon.

In writing and speaking, we all use phrases that lend themselves to picturization.

It may not sound very exciting, but the basic idea, as far as I'm concerned, is the same as it ought to be with a written opinion-to try to say the right thing. Putting the thought into a picture comes second.

One of the advaIitages of working in Washington-and with people at The Washington Post-is the access to information about government.

Reporters, researchers and other staff members are available-all with special knowledge about subjects they have dealt with. They also know where to find answers to questions about who said what or exactly what happened when.

Q: What is the essential point that you aim at?

A: The test of a written or drawn commentary is whether it gets at the essential truth. A cartoon does not tell everything about a subject. It's not supposed to. No written piece tells everything, either. As far as words are concerned, there is no safety in numbers.

Q: What, in your opinion, is the comparison between the written word-written commentary-and cartoon commentary?

A: Each has a role. What a written piece can do more easily than a cartoon is to comment on a subject that requires background material. Wordy explanations are more awkward in a cartoon. A cartoon, on the other hand, can often say something that might be harder to put into words.

Q: Are there any sacred cows?

A: I don't believe there should be any sacred cows. But there's no obligation for the cartoonist to deal with a topic unless he feels that a point needs to be made.

American cartoonists have your kind of freedom?

A: Other cartoonists-as well as other papers-prefer different arrangements.

One cartoonist told me he had tried for years to get the kind of freedom I have on The Post. When he finally got it, he found the decision-making to be a burden. He went back to asking an editor to make the daily choice.

The freedom to express my own ideas in my own way works best for me. It is also consistent with The Washington Post policy expressed by Eugene Meyer, the late publisher, who said he believed in getting people who knew what they were doing and then letting them do it. One of the things that has made The Washington Post great is the fact that it does provide for differing views instead of offering a set of written and drawn opinions all bearing the stamp of a single person.

Over the years, there have been differences between the cartoons and the editorials on issues, on emphasis, and on performances of individual public figures.

Q: President Richard Nixon once said, "1 wouldn't start the morning by looking at Herb/ock."

A: Nixon used to refer to me again and again. After his inauguration, he told his colleagues, "You and your wives will now have to get used to this fellow drawing you .... " Then, I heard him mention my name on TV once. I sat up and said, "What's that?"

Q: How did you feel?

A: It was interesting.

With his secretary peeping in to remind him about his deadline, and remembering how I usually feel at deadline time, I decided it was time to leave-despite Herblock's reassuring "Not to worry." As I started finding my way out-through the paper maze-I asked if he'd been to India. "No, but gee, I'd love to," he said.

Till then-here is a sampling of his wit, selected from his book: The Herblock Gallery.

D

ONTHE LIGHTER SIDE

HI said, what makes you think th e commercwls - are too loud?" .

Global Tremors From U.S. Have high interest rates in the U.S.A. led to depression in other economies? It can be argued that they have had a healthy long-term impact on the global economy.

Public criticism of the United States' experience with high interest rates in 1981 has been relatively one-dimensional. To debate the impact of those rates solely in terms of their having discouraged potential growth and investment in the world economy is to lose sight of a number of factors.

First, it can be argued that those high interest rates had, on balance, a favorable impact on the longer-term performance of the global economy by contributing to price stabilization. And second, there is the argument that, as of late 1981, the economies of various foreign countries reacted differently.

There was no uniform reaction to the U.S. interest rates. Strong medicine to cure a major physical-or economic-ailment is seldom pleasant and effective simultaneously.

High inflation rates in many countries, including the United States, have induced economic distortions, reduced real living standards, and discouraged industry from investing in new and more efficient plant and capital equipment. High rates of inflation are not inevitable; they do not reflect a structural or irreversible malaise in capitalism. Barring shortages of critical raw materials, food and energy, restrictive macroeconomic policies can still be successful in reducing inflationary pressures.

Unfortunately, a cost must be paid in the form of temporarily diminished real rates of economic growth and in higher rates of unemployment. Arguments about the relative cost of the "cure" and alternative remedies are necessary, proper and inevitable. We can all agree on the evils of inflation. However, the existence of different philosophies and priorities precludes any unequivocal, unassailable policy solutions to this problem.

By the end of 1980, it had become obvious that U.S. monetary policy was becoming relatively restrictive, Interest rates were being allowed to rise, and efforts to control the increase in the money supply were intensified. The United States, like all other oil-importing countries, was then beginning to feel the full inflationary effect of the nearly 150 percent increase in the price of petroleum in the 1979-80 period. Other oil-importing countries, therefore, also had a domestic reason for adopting a tighter monetary policy.

But in an interdependent global economy, there was also an external reason. To the extent that other countries did not allow their interest rates to increase to the unprecedented levels then being attain'ed in the United States, they risked a major weakening in the exchange rate of their currencies. Given the rise of an integrated international market, massive and disruptive capital outflows from a low-interest-rate country may be generated as investors and speculators convert their domestic assets into higher-yielding assets abroad-in this case, in the United States and the Eurodollar markets. Interest rates, at least in Western industrial countries, had to be set partly with

American rates in mind. The inflationary effects of a currency depreciation at this time had to be minimized, especially because oil imports are paid for in dollars. Hence, the price of imported oil, as expressed in local currency terms, rises to the extent that an oil-importing country's currency depreciates relative to the dollar.

It is an oversimplification to suggest that the upward spiral in U.S. interest rates was. the deliberate effect of a governmental policy. "The Federal Reserve has neither an interest rate nor an exchange rate objective," Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, told the Congressional Joint Economic Committee in July 1981. In other words, there is no specific number that serves as an official U.S. interest rate target. This statement is fully consistent with the October 1979 decision by the independent U.S. central bank to make control of monetary aggregates (money supply and bank credit) the fulcrum of U.S. monetary policy, and to pay less attention to interest rates as the core of monetary policy.

Actions by the Federal Reserve Board to restrict the growth in the money supply can be only one of several factors charting the course of interest rates. The strength of demand for credit by the Federal Government and the private sectors, as well as inflationary expectations by creditors, also play crucial roles in determining borrowing costs in the large, complex American capital markets.

B

y mid-1981, the inflation outlook for the United States had improved considerably, and the American economy belatedly had turned sluggish. Interest rates, in theory, should have begun a quick descent. Psychological factors in the U.S. financial community, however, delayed and slowed the decline. Concerns grew that the tax cuts approved earlier in the year by Congress and a sluggish economy might together produce a much larger federal budget deficit in the 1982 and 1983 fiscal years than had been predicted. Concern about the increased federal borrowing that would be necessary to finance such an increased deficit became an important factor in the market's judgment about appropriate levels of interest rates.

The prospects for a U.S. economy with lower inflation received less attention than would normally be expected. Instead, the financial community worried about possible adverse effects on the economy of a relatively expansionary fiscal policy and a relatively restrictive monetary policy being pursued simultaneously. Nevertheless, the inevitable decline, at least temporarily, in U.S. interest rates was clearly under way by late 1981.

The only common outcome of the impact of high U.S. interest rates on the economies of other countries would appear to be the criticism concerning their negative effects on local growth rates. The actual impact overseas has varied because economic conditions vary. In some cases, high U.S. interest rates provided politicians with a scapegoat that excused them from adopting restrictive, anti-inflationary policies that were economically needed, but politically unpopular. In other cases, a more restrictive monetary policy would have been adopted even if U.S. interest rates had peaked at much lower levels. In still other cases, monetary policy never became overly restrictive. So an analysis of the global economic impact of high U.S. interest rates is best made on a country-by-country basis.

Interest Rates Japan, the second largest noncommunist ecortomy, does not appear to have suffered significantly from the effects of high U.S. interest rates. It is true that domestic conditions in the Japanese economy would probably have induced lower interest rates by late 1981 if U.S. interest rates had been lower. In addition, the growth-retarding effects of restrictive monetary policies made several of Japan's key overseas markets unusually sensitive to the competition from that country's exports. On the other hand, Japanese monetary authorities since 1980 have several times lowered the central bank's discount rate, and through the process known as "window guidance," they have encouraged increases in commercial bank lending. Consumer spending in Japan has shown a stubborn refusal to respond to stimulative policies. But there is very little data currently available to pr~ve that the sluggishness in Japan's economy is mainly attributable to relatively high domestic interest rates.

The true impact of high U.S. interest rates on West German economic policies (and therefore growth rates) is unclear. An upsurge in inflation following the oil price rise in this inflationsensitive country undoubtedly would have produced some tightening in monetary policy, the minimal level of real economic growth notwithstanding. German economic officials have taken dramatically different points of view on the relative merits of high U.S. interest rates. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lamented publicly that they would have a devastating effect on Europe's economic growth. Conversely, in June 1981, Karl Otto Pohl, president of the German central bank, stated that he would look upon lower U.S. interest rates "with mixed feelings if they promised more inflation and hence higher interest rates in the future." A joint report, issued in mid-1981 by a consortium of German economic research institutes, stated that most of Germany's economic problems, including the exchange rate weakness of the deutsche mark at that time, were mainly attributable to domestic economic problems and shortcomings, such as the relatively large budget deficit.

In the case of Great Britain, adoption of a tight monetary policy emphasizing control of the money supply preceded the tightening of U.S. interest rates. To argue that U.S. monetary policy caused the British recession would be to ignore the fact that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government immediately pursued the priority of reducing inflation upon taking office in 1979. The Bank of England engineered a significant increase in commercial bank lending rates in the early weeks of October 1981-at the very time that U.S. banks' lending rates were declining.

The election of Francois Mitterand to the presidency of France led to major changes in French economic policies, as promised by the campaign platform of the Socialist Party. One of the most important of these was an effort to stimulate economic activity and create new jobs. U.S. interest rates were not the main obstacle to adopting such measures. It was the need to minimize the inflationary effects of the October 1981 devaluation of the French franc-not high U.S. interest rates-that necessitated the imposition of temporary price controls in France.

The I~~s-developed countries (LDCs) have fa-ced a direct financial burden from high interest rates in the form of higher borrowing costs, both in the private capital markets and from

the multilateral development banks. This has added to their already considerable debt burdens. Slower economic growth in the industrialized countries has hampered the export opportunities of the LDCs. However, it cannot be denied that all LDCs have a longer-term interest in the restoration of price stability in the North. The industrialized countries provide the LDCs with the overwhelming percentage of their manufactured goods. Th~ upsurge in the prices of the North's exports merely extends the inflation problem to the South. Furthermore, inflation in the industrialized countries has been a major factor in encouraging OPEC to raise the price of oil. The effects of such price increases have been felt disproportionately by the foreignexchange-poor, nonoil LDCs.

A

ny valid criticism of U.S. policy on high interest rates must identify and defend a preferable approach. In theory, policy alternatives existed. While some of those may have been deemed preferable by foreign observers, they were not implemented. In real terms, therefore, monetary policy, not without costs, had to assume the burden for reducing inflationary pressures. It would be difficult to argue convincingly that the international economy would have been better served in the long run by a Federal Reserve Board surrender to inflationary pressures. It would have been self-defeating to start pumping money into the system as soon as the restrictive bite of tight money began, or as soon as foreign complaints became intense, or as soon as worries about the federal budget deficit emerged.

Foreign economic sentiment must be considered carefully, but it cannot be the major determinant of American domestic economic policy. One reason for arguing this is the near impossibility of pleasing everyone. In the 1960s and early 1970s, intense European criticism was directed at the U.S. easy money policy, which was said to be exporting U.S. inflation and threatening the collapse of the international monetary system through a weak dollar.

The prime rate charged by commercial banks in the United States declined in late 1981, not because the Federal Reserve Board abandoned its tight money stance, but because credit demands slackened and inflationary expectations eased. The decline, however, did not lead to automatic and equivalent rate declines in all other countries any more than the rise in U.S. interest rates led to automatic and equivalent universal rate increases. U.S. monetary policy affects foreign economic policies, but it does not control them.

The tight monetary policy pursued by the United States ha:s not been without costs in terms of lost opportunities for economic growth at home and abroad. In political and psycilOlogical terms, no country likes to be pushed to adopt painful economic measures because of external forces. But the larger question is whether the international system would have been better served by a soft American resistance to inflation, the broadest tax of all.

0

About the Author: Stephen D. Cohen, associate professor at the American University, Washington, D. c., is currently a Fulbright Fellow at the London School of Economics where he is teaching and doing research in international monetary relations. He is the author of The Making of U.S. International Economic Policy.

l~eal¡ninga Languaget!

Learning a (julture

Considered an outstanding guru of Indian studies in the United States, Edward C. Dimock, Jr., head of the South Asia Language Area Center of the University of Chicago, talks with a former pupil, Geeti Sen, about his lifelong romance with India, its literature and languages, and the study programs that transmit his enthusiasm to generations of scholars and teachers.

Geeti Sell: There are many myths about you, Dr. Dimock; one of them is that you first came to India as a Unitarian minister and stayed on to become a scholar. Is there any truth to this? .

Edward Dimock: Not really. What happened was that I became interested in the Brahmo Samaj because I had been ordained into the Unitarian ministry at one time and became interested in Indian transcendentalist thought and the relationship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Rammohun Roy. But it was never a serious research interest, nor did I come to study that. I came here to study the Bengali language and literature under Dr. Sukumar Sen of Calcutta University.

I believe your first original work was on Sri Chaitanya. It was the subject of your dissertation and led to one of your books.

Several books. As a matter of fact the research is not yet finished. I have recent-

A page from a manuscript of the Bengali classic Mukundaram's Chandimangal, which Dr. Edward Dimock has just finished translating.

ly completed a translation of Chaitanya Charitamrita which is going to be published in the Harvard Oriental series. It's a work that has taken 15 years.

You have also worked in some detail on "mangal" literature?

I have read fair amounts in that literature but only recently started serious work on it-on Mukundaram's Chandimangal. But it is an analytical study, not a translation.

You have been head of the South Asia Language Area Center for some 20 years.

Could you explain the activities of the center? What languages are taught, how are they taught? I know that you have produced a manual for Bengali. I don't know if there are manuals for other

languages as well.

Yes, there are. We regularly teach not only Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Bengali, but if indicated, we can also teach ,Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam. Among ciassical languages taught are Sanskrit and Persian. We can even teach Munda, though very few people want to learn it except from a purely linguistic point of view.

Doesn't Chicago have a sort of bias toward anthropology and linguistics?

I wouldn't say so, because Chicago is also strong in literature, history, history of the arts, religion particularly-there are a number of areas of considerable importance.

There seemed to be-when I was there-much more of an interdisciplinary

Chicago University's approach to South Asian' studies combines aspects of literature approach in Chicago than in other university centers for South Asian studies.

That's been quite a conscious policy, ever since Robert M. Hutchins became president of the university in 1929. There has been an emphasis on committees that bring together people from a variety of disciplines. The Committee on Social Thought, for example, includes not only A.K. Ramanujam from our faculty but Saul Bellow, Wendy O'Flaherty. Mircea Eliade and people from a whole variety of interests. Students enjoy the interchange that goes on among eminent people in many fields.

Does this approach really help or does it confuse the student?

It does take a particular type of student to make full use of it. If someone comes in simply for a degree in history or psychology, the interdisciplinary approach may be too much to take; but there are other kinds of students and for them this is a very rewarding experience.

I noticed that a great deal of field experience is also provided, and this is true not only of Chicago but of American education in general. For a student in a European university studying South Asian literature, for instance, the opportunity to come to India for direct experience would be very limited compared to an American student. How important is this and how is it done?

I think it is extraordinarily important.

First, much of the material required for the study is simply not available in the United States and it is necessary therefore to come to India to work with scholars in libraries here. Besides, even if a person can write a dissertation in the U.S., say on some aspect of Sanskrit, it's still important for him or her to come here and get a feel of what India is all about-something you can't get from reading books. To promote this we have the American Institute of Indian Studies, which is a consortium of 37 universities, that is, all the major ones that offer South Asian studies. It was founded by no less a person than Norman Brown in Pennsylvania in 1961, and has been growing ever since. It started out with a dozen institutions and has more than trebled that number. More than a hundred fellowships are now given out every year.

Does the program extend to Indians?

Oh yes. Due to fund limitations, it is confined to Indians working at American

universities, but they don't have to be American citizens. Anybody working in an American university is eligible.

It is a one-year program?

It doesn't have to be. Some people come out for three months to fill in blanks in their research; some come for a year or more than a year.

Does it provide any other facilities -help them to publish their research, for instance?

The publications program has only recently been formalized and we are trying to be more active in this field. So far, most of the research has been published in the usual university press channel or through commercial publishers.

But recently a beginning has been made with the book Kala Darshan.

How did the Chicago program come about?

During the mid-Fifties, a number of eminent people in the university-Milton Singer, George Babrinsky, McKim Marriot, Stephen Haye-began to realize that there was quite an assortment of individuals on the campus who were interested in South Asian studies and had field experience in them. They formed a committee on which people from history and anthropology and political science could get together for research, seminar discussions and so on, on matters of common interest. And then around 1958, the U.S. Congress realized that there was a lack of understanding of cultures other than Western ones in the United States, and began to put some money into these programs. It was primarily for the teaching of languages, although they called it a language-and-area program.

There was recognition of the fact that learning a language without learning something of the culture within which it is bred did not make much sense. On the other hand, understanding a culture without its language was equally impossible.

Anyway, these programs stressed student fellowships for people who wanted to learn the languages seriously-not only.

South Asian languages but Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and whatever. Along with student support, there were grants given to individual centers for faculty improvement, including the release of time for faculty research and field trips.

With that kind of stimulus coming on top of private foundation interest, these studies began to burgeon.

What would you say was the genesis of Indian studies in the United States?

Interest in the classics is of long standing. There has always been a chair in Sanskrit at Harvard, Pennsylvania, Chicago and so on, frequently occupied by very eminent people. But I would say that the interest in contemporary India has really developed since World War II when a number of people had an exposure to this culture, most of them being in the army stationed in India or passing through. They began to see that the relationship between the classical tradition as presented in Sanskrit texts was not really the same as the social life of the country. People in anthropology and sociology were particularly sensitive to this. They realized that to understand Indian culture in all its breadth they had to do something more than simply study Sanskrit, even though that was an important component of the understanding.

Then in the Fifties, the Rockefeller, Ford and other foundations began to get interested in India and to support American scholarship and teaching in fields that by now were stretching from Sanskrit, Pali and Persian to contemporary linguistics and anthropology.

It has grown a.lot from that point on.

The Chicago center has made a particular contribution in the anthropological area-anthropology has indeed become a vehicle for its interdisciplinary approach.

That is true. I am proud to be associated with the Chicago program, but I must hasten to say that there are many other programs of equal strength in the United States-such universities as Wisconsin, Columbia, California, Texas and two or three others have very strong programs teaching and doing research in a wide variety of fields. It is true that Chicago, perhaps due to the presence of Milton Singer, McKim Marriot from the early days, has had a particular strength in anthropology.

Have these university programs stimulated any wider interest outside their own coteries or outside the campuses?

All language area studies have what they call the Outreach Program. The feeling is that the knowledge of Asian countries is cultivated excessively in a hothouse, so to speak. The knowledge is specialized, the languages obscure, the texts of such different cultural varieties as to be almost incomprehensible without

linguistics, anthropology and cultural history, each discipline .enriching the others. interpretation. So, to disseminate some Americans somehow seemed to leave it of this information in the hope of increas- as an area of British interest-a vague ing intercultural understanding, film feeling that other people were taking care shows, shows of performing arts, less of India, as it were. On the other hand, specialized lectures and so on are held Americans were heavily involved in comregularly and the larger community is merce with China and in missionary activinvited to attend these. They have had a ity there. The paternalistic attitude tolot of success. A large number of teachers ward China was of such long standing of the high school level participate and that when the communists took over become more aware of India, for in- there, many Americans felt a deep sense stance. The Outreach Program also in- of rejection, almost like parents disownvolves occasional radio and television ed. The cultural interest in contemporary shows, interviews in newspapers, so the India dates really from World War II, as I extent of dissemination can be fairly have already said. It has largely been a wide. I remember a dance ,program given scholarly interest, not shared by the in Chicago last year by a specialist in wider public. I think the recent FilmIndia Manipuri, Chhow and Odissi, which was shows helped, and there should be more very well attended even though these and more showings of the best of Indian styles are much less known than Kathak cinema because that would give the peoor Kathakali (which attract even bigger ple a much clearer understanding of the audiences). So this kind of thing has a Indian social context. certain effect.

Coming back to your own contribution Has the interest in Indian studies grown to Indian studies, can you tell us a bit or declined in the last 15 years? more about it? Your interest in Vaishnava Between the late Fifties and the mid- literature for instance; how has it enriched Seventies it grew rapidly; since then it has you personally? been on a kind of plateau. Student My own favorite is an obscure little interest has not waned but also not book I did with Professor Pratul Gupta. increased at the same rate. Some people It is a unique manuscript called Mahahave attributed this to the lack of jobs for rashtra Purana, published by the Univergraduates, but that does not seem to be sity of Hawaii. Unfortunately it is now the sole or most serious reason. It may be out of print. The other one that has difficultfor a person who has nothing but gained some popularity is called In Praise a degree in South Asian studies to find a of Krishna with Denise Levertov. That job because, after all, interest in these was a very interesting experiment bestudies has a certain limit. Very often cause, having read her poetry, I had not people trained in a specific discipline, say thought she would be particularly sensianthropology, have also made a special tive to Vaishnava lyrics. But it turned out study of India and have done field that I was absolutely wrong. I put down research here. They give seminars on rough translations and she did the their Indian specialization besides teach- finished versions, It worked beautifully. ing their main subject. This is one of the ways in which knowledge about India Will you be doing any more translations gets disseminated. Thus the number of like these? people who combine Indian studies with I would like to but I am involved in a other disciplines would be upward of 200 lot of other things now. I will eventually. in the University of Chicago alone; but Ramanujam and I have been talking abthose who concentrate entirely on South out translating Tagore's Geetanjali, for Asian studies-language, literature, cul- instance. Then there is a book called tural history and so on-would be much Thief of Love that will be a set of translafewer, say 30 to 35. I can't say with any tions from a variety of Bengali sources. certainty what the figures in other univer- Talking about rewarding experiences, the sities are. study of Vaishnava poetry has been very rewarding for me, it is so extraordinarily What is the comparative interest in India beautiful. I can still reread some of those as against the Far East and the Middle translations and get something new out of East? them every time. There is highly interestRecently, of course, there has been an ing and philosophical way of presentation upsurge of interest in the Middle East. here that is unique to this tradition. The There had always been an interest in Vaishnava poets see a relationship beChina. Until India's independence, tween religious and aesthetic experience.

The expression of poetry is itself an expression of truth. The poet becomes transformed by the religious discipline and becomes a part of what he describes, celebrates. The signature line at the end frequently makes that very clear.

There is a very contemporary feeling to the translations you have done in In Praise of Krishna, for instance, and some of those done by Ramanujam. Did you deliberately put it in comprehensible terms or select what already had it in the poetry?

I can't speak for Ramanujam, of course, but I think one chooses the kind of material that one understands intuitively, culturally. It may be that one exercises a kind of unconscious censorship that does away with whatever is too dense to be communicated. If you are going to translate poetry as poetry, it is better, I think, to leave out difficult cultural problems requiring footnotes.

Is there a lot of translation work being done in Chicago?

Yes, quite a lot. Van Bergland was translating the Bhagavad Gita and had got halfway through it when he died. One scholar is working on the Katha Sarit Sagara. Wendy O'Flaherty has just translated some passages from the Rig-Veda.

Both classical and contemporary works are translated but not so much of the absolutely contemporary. Clint Seely, a colleague, has been working on Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghnadbadh Kavya. I have seen parts of the translation and they are marvelous-they capture a kind of courtliness in the language, the excitement of the early blank verse in Bengali. It is very rewarding all around -the translation program. And South Asian studies generally.

0

Geeti Sen is an art critic and art historian. She took her Master's degree in the history of Indian art from the University of Chicago and received her doctorate from Calcutta University.

She is currently editor of the India International Centre Quarterly.

Two of her books on In -. dian art are under print.

Drive along the highways and back roads of the American South and you can watch a culture disappear. Cafes that once served grits and biscuits now flip fast-food hamburgers. Convenience marts have replaced general stores, and media-born region less accents threaten to replace sorghum-slow drawls.

Some say that the South's grass roots culture will vanish in less than 20 years. Dedicated to preserving this endangered heritage, the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee, attempts to document every aspect of Squthern folk life, from blues singing and quilt making to cane carving and mule trading.

The center was begun in 1972 when Bill Ferris, a folklorist originally from a small town near Vicksburg, Mississippi, teamed up with Judy Peiser, a filmmaker from Memphis. Ferris, director of the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, had spent much of the 1960s photographing the folk life of white and black people in rural Mississippi. "When 1started," he recalls, "I was told by a white that it was 'past strange' for a white Mississippian like myself to record blacks in their homes."

Ferris and folklorist David Evans shot a film about Othar

Top: "A trader is a man that trades in everything. And a real trader don't never find nothing he can't use. If he can't use it, he'll find somebody who can. That's his business. And he'll kind of look after his customers and keep them coming back. I trade with people now that I traded with as a boy. A good trader helps a lot of people and he makes money for himself."

-RAY

LUM

Left and far left: "Myoid home place was a dogtrot house. We had a picket fence around the yard and over 50 hickory trees in our lot.

There was something about those trees that 1 always admired. They were stable, always the same. It was the beautiful fall trees that helped inspire me to paint. 1wanted to put all those trees on my' canvas ....

Now I've been away 30 years, and most of them have been slayed-that's what I call it. It hurt me when I first went home a few years ago and found most all those hickories gone. It doesn't look like the same place. Most of the places . that I painted are right around my home-near Paris, Mississippi. I have a whole room full of paintings of childhood memories. Sometimes I'm afraid that the stories behind my visions are going to be lost."

Above: "I been wanting to piece quilts ever since I saw my mother doing it. When I was growing up, she used to have quilting bees. It would be at night, when the women wasn't in the field. Seven or eight women would sit there, talking and working. 1 used to love to get up under the quilting frame and watch how they kept their needles working. Making quilts is my calling. There's no pattern for them. I just sit down and start sewing them up. 1 draw it off in my mind. I guess I ain't never going to stop quilting. As long as I can see, I'll still be trying to thread a needle .

It keeps my limbs from getting so stiff. And it keeps my mind together. 1wouldn't want nothing to happen to my quilts after I pass on. 1want people to keep them to remember me by. "

Turner, whose music, played on a homemade cane fife, closely resembles traditional West African music. Judy Peiser edited the film.

Emboldened by its success, Ferris and Peiser planned other films and oral history projects, all of them highlighting the culture and lore of the Mississippi Delta, that rich crescent of earth bounded by Highway 61 and the river. Their mission has been to seek out inheritors of the passing rituals of everyday life. Roaming the Delta from town to town, they record and film folk artists and craftspeople whose work, like the blues, is the product of inspiration in the face of adverse circumstances.

Not just folk art, but stories, local customs, herbal cures and other folk wisdom are recorded on film and tape. One of their most colorful subjects was mule trader Ray Lum. Born in 1891, Lum spent much of his life traveling through Delta towns, collecting and retelling stories as a natural part of his work as a trader. "You live and learn," he used to say, "then you die and forget it all."

The folklorists not only -collect information; they also disseminate it. The center's 1976 American Folklore Films and Videotapes: An Index is a reference guide to more than 1,800 available programs.

Two million people have seen the center's films.

And, whenever possible, Ferris and Peiser bring artists, storytellers and musicians out of the Delta to speak and perform. They are the best archives of all-living exhibits of a disappearing way of life.

Center-produced films and slide shows always premiere in the communities where they are made.

This is important, Judy Peiser explains, because the films "make their subjects heroes in their hometowns." At the premiere of the film Ray Lum: Mule . Trader, "everyone who ever traded with Mr. Lum or who had been outtraded by him was there. Instead of seeing him as an eccentric old man, they saw how important he was. And he could see it too."

Once confined to a small room in Peiser's apartment, the Center for Southern Folklore now occupies a house complete with darkroom, sound studio, editing facilities and burgeoning archives of over 30,000 photographs. The staff of two has grown to 20, and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donations, members plan to step up what for them is a crusade. The stakes are high, and they are working against the clock. "As the South moves from its rural economy," Ferris says, "southern storytellers, musicians and craftspeople are an increasingly endangered part of our culture. Unless we preserve their history, America will soon be cut off from an important part of its birthright."

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About the Author: Jane and Michael Stern are the authors of Amazing . America and Roadfood.

Right: "I learnt myself to make a cane fife. I was 13 years old. The more I tried, the better it come to me. And so I tried and tried and I learned it. Ain't nobody trained me or nothing. First you go out there and cut you a piece of cane.

You judge the length you want your cane-you going to make your fife a foot, or a foot and so many inches long. And your cane should be a medium size around. That cane grows from the earth so high, see, and it's jointed. You pick you out so many joints and 'cut it off. Then you take your knife and dress it down. You get you a rod of iron and put it in the fire and get it red hot, and bore you a hole in your cane. You put all them holes in there that way. You space your fingers on the cane ... to see what distances apart to make the holes.

I never use but five holes in a cane to blow it. But it's quite natural that some people that blows a cane needs more holes to blow than I do. Some takes more, some takes less. You can blow on a cane and it'll blow all day and that's all it's going to do. You got to note it with your fingers. It depends on how hard you blow it too. And if you make it right, you can tune it any way that you want."

Below: "Well, I'll tell you about making baskets, I like it all.

I like to go and get the timber, and I like bolting it and splitting it up and I like weaving it. I like laying the baskets, and I like running them up. It's hard, but it's easy. Ain't nothing at all that's hard if you ever learn a thing. It's just like when you lay the foundation of a house: If you ever get it off from the ground right, you can go to work. I learned about making brooms from the old folks too. My mama used to take us out into the fields in the fall after the frost fell.

We'd wring big arms full of sage grass and bring it inside where we'd take a knife and trim it down. Then we'd take a string to tie it up and it was ready to use. When one broom would wear out, why, we'd take the string out of that and get new sage to make another one. That caused the broom never to give out. You'd have them from one end of the year to the other. " - PECK CLARK

Right: "I remember the old Baptist churches.

There'd be an old church bell and there'd be a wooden table where they'd have all-day meetings.

And they'd have all-day singings too. Everyone would bring a lunch basket, and they'd spread the dinner out on that long wooden table. I remember going in our buggy to tQose all-day meetings, where we sang old harp work. They had three or four men that could really sing those old harp songs."

Can animals think? What makes termites such flawless architects? Is evolution just a matter of chance? Such intriguing mysteries of nature still pose a challenge to scientists. The process of solving these puzzles, says Lewis Thomas (above), promises to be an exciting intellectual exercis~.

Debating the Unknowable The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance. We live, as never before, in puzzlement about nature, the universe, and ourselves most of all. It is a new experience for the species. A century ago, after the turbulence caused by the English naturalists Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had subsided and the central idea of natural selection had been grasped and accepted, we thought we knew everything essential about evolution. In the 18th century there were no huge puzzles; human reason was all you needed in order to figure out the universe. And for most of the earlier centuries, the Church provided both the questions and the answers, neatly packaged.

Now, for the first time in human history, we are catching glimpses of our incomprehension. We can still make up stories to explain the world, as we always have, but now the stories have to be confirmed and reconfirmed

by experiment. This is the scientific method, and once started on this line we cannot turn back. We are obliged to grow up in skepticism, requiring proofs for every assertion about nature, and there is no way out except to move ahead and plug away, hoping for comprehension in the future but living in a condition of intellectual instability for the long time.

It is the admission of ignorance that leads to progress, not so much because the solving of a particular puzzle leads directly to a new piece of understanding but because the puzzle-if it interests enough scientists-leads to work. There is a similar phenomenon in entomology known as stigmergy, which means to "incite to work."

When three or four termites are collected together in a chamber they wander about aimlessly, but when more termites are added, they begin to build. It is the presence of other termites, in sufficient numbers at close quarters, that produces the work: They pick up each other's fecal

pellets and stack them in neat columns, and when the columns are precisely the right height, the termites reach across and turn the perfect arches that form the foundation of the termitarium.

No single termite knows how to do any of this, but as soon as there are enough termites gathered together they become flawless architects, sensing their distances from each other although blind, building an immensely complicated structure with its ownairconditioning and humidity control. They work their lives away in this ecosystem built by themselves.

The nearest thing to a termitarium that I can think of in human behavior is the making of language, which we do at each other all our lives, generation by keeping after generation, changing the structure by some sort of instinct.

Very little is understood about this kind of collective behavior.

It is out of fashion these days to talk of "superorganisms," but there simply aren't enough reductionist details in hand to explain away the phenomenon of termites and other social insects: Some very good guesses can be made about their chemical signaling systems, but the plain fact that they exhibit something like a collective intelligence is a mystery, or anyway an unsolved problem, that might contain important implications for social life in general. This mystery is the best introduction I can think of to biological science in college. It should be taught for its strangeness, and for the ambiguity of its meaning. It should be taught to premedical students, who need lessons early in their careers about the uncertainties in science.

College students, and for that matter high school students, should be exposed very early, perhaps at the outset, to the big arguments currently going on among scientists. Big arguments stimulate their interest, and with. luck engage their absorbed attention. Few things in life are as engrossing as a good fight between highly trained and skilled adversaries. But the young students are told very little about the major disagreements of the day; they may be taught something about the arguments between Darwinians l1nd their opponents a century ago, but they do not realize that similar disputes about other matters, many of them touching profound issues for our understanding of nature, are still going on and, indeed, are an essential feature of the scientific process.

There is, I fear, a reluctance on the part of science teachers to talk about such things, based on the belief that before students can appreciate what the arguments are about they must learn and master the "fundamentals."

I would be willing to see some experiments along this line, and I have in mind several examples of contemporary doctrinal dispute in which the drift of the argument can be readily perceived without deep or elaborate knowledge of the subject.

There is, for one, the problem of animal awareness.

One school of ethologists devoted to the study of animal behavior has it that human beings are unique in the possession of consciousness, differing from all other

creatures in being able to think things over, capitalize on past experience, and hazard informed guesses at the future. Other, "lower," animals (with possible exceptions made for chimpanzees, whales and dolphins) cannot do such things with their minds; they live from moment to moment with brains that are programmed to respond, automatically or by conditioning, to contingencies in the environment.

Behavioral psychologists believe that this automatic or conditioned response accounts for human mental activity as well, although they dislike that word "mental."

On the other side are some ethologists who seem to be more generous-minded, who see no compelling reasons to doubt that animals in general are quite capable of real thinking and do quite a lot of it-thinking that isn't as dense as human thinking, that is sparser because of the lack of language and the resultant lack of metaphors to help the thought along, but thinking nonetheless.

The point about this argument is not that one side ~r the other is in possession of a more powerful array of convincing facts; quite the opposite. There are not enough facts to sustain a genuine debate of any length; the question of animal awareness is an unsettled one.

In the circumstance, I put forward the following notion about a small beetle, the mimosa girdler, which undertakes three pieces of linked, sequential behavior: finding a mimosa tree and climbing up the trunk and out to the end of a branch; cutting a longitudinal slit and laying within it five or six eggs; and crawling back on the limb and girdling it neatly down into the cambium. The third step is an eight-to-ten-hour task of hard labor, from which the beetle gains no food for itself-only the certainty that the branch will promptly die and fall to the ground in the next brisk wind, thus enabling the larvae to hatch and grow in an abundance of dead wood. I propose, in total confidence that even though I am probably wrong nobody today can prove that I am wrong, that the beetle is not doing these three things out of blind instinct, like a little machine, but is thinking its way along, just as we would think. The difference is that we possess enormous brains, crowded all the time with an infinite number of long thoughts, while the beetle's brain is only a few strings of neurons connected in a modest network, capable therefore of only three tiny thoughts, coming into consciousness one after the other: find the right tree; get up there and lay eggs in a slit; back up and spend the day killing the branch so the eggs can hatch. End of message.

I would not go so far as to anthropomorphize the mimosa tree, for I really do not believe plants have minds, but something has to be said about the tree's role in this arrangement as a beneficiary: Mimosas grow for 25 to 30 years and then die, unless they are vigorously pruned annually, in which case they can live to be 100. The beetle is a piece of good luck for the tree, but nothing more: one example of pure chance working at its best in nature -what you might even wish to call good nature.

"I propose that. the beetle is thinking its way along, just as we would think."

This brings me to the second example of unsettlement in biology, currently being rather delicately discussed but not yet argued over, for there i~ still only one orthodoxy and almost no opposition, yet. This is the matter of chance itself, and the role played by blind chance in the arrangement of living things on the planet. It is, in the orthodox view, pure luck that evolution brought us to our present condition, and things might just as well have turned out any number of other, different ways, and might go in any unpredictable way for the future.

There is, of course, nothing chancy about natural selection itself: It is an accepted fact that selection will always favor the advantaged individuals whose genes succeed best in propagating themselves within a changing environment. But the creatures acted upon by natural selection are themselves there as the result of chance: mutations (probably of much more importance during the long period of exclusively microbial life starting nearly 4,000 million years ago and continuing until about 1,000 million years ago); the endless sorting and re-sorting of genes within chromosomes during replication; perhaps recombination of genes across species lines at one time or another; and almost certainly the carrying of genes by viruses from one creature to another.

The argument comes when one contemplates the whole¡ biosphere, the conjoined life of the earth. How could it have turned out to possess such stability and coherence, resembling as it does a sort of enormous developing embryo, with nothing but chance events to determine its emergence? Biologists Lovelock and Margulis, facing this problem, have proposed the Gaia Hypothesis, which is, in brief, that the earth is itself a form of life, "a complex entity involving the earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet." Lovelock postulates, in addition, that "the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself."

This notion is beginning to stir up a few signs of storm, and if it catches on, as I think it will, we will soon find the biological community split into fuming factions, one side saying that the evolved biosphere displays evidences of design and purpose, the other decrying such heresy. I believe that students should learn as much as they can about the argument.

In an essay in Coevolution (Spring 1981), W.F. Doolittle has recently attacked the Gaia Hypothesis, asking, among other things, " ... how does Gaia know if she is too cold or too hot, and how does she instruct the biosphere to behave accordingly?" This is not a deadly criticism in a world where we do not actuailyunderstand, in anything like real detail, how even Dr. Doolittle manages the stability and control of his own internal environmen~ including his body temperature. One thing

is certain: None' of us can instruct our body's systems to make the needed corrections beyond a very limited number of rather trivial tricks made possible through biofeedback techniques. If something goes wrong with my liver or my kidneys, I have no advice to offer out of my cortex. I rely on the system to fix itself, which it usually does with no help from me beyond crossing my fingers.

Another current battle involving the unknown is between sociobiologists and antisociobiologists, and it is a marvel for students to behold. To observe, in openmouthed astonishment, one group of highly intelligent, beautifully trained, knowledgeable, and imaginative sci"entists maintaining that all behavior, animal and human, is governed exclusively by genes, and another group of equally talented scientists asserting that all behavior is set and determined by the environment or by culture, is an educational experience that no college student should be allowed to miss. The essential lesson to be learned has nothing to do with the relative validity of the facts underlying the argument. It is the argument itself that is the education: We do not yet know enough to settle such questions.

One last example. There is an uncomfortable secret in biology, not much talked about yet, but beginning to surface. It is, in a way, linked to the observations that underlie the Gaia Hypothesis. Nature abounds in instances of cooperation and collaboration, partner~hips between species. There is a tendency of living things to join up whenever joining is possibl~: Accommodation and compromise are mor~ common results of close contact than combat and destruction.

Given the opportunity and the proper circumstances, two cells from totally different species-a mouse cell and a human cell, for example-will fuse to become a single cell, and then the two nuclei will fuse into a single nucleus, and then the hybrid cell will divide to produce generations of new cells containing the combined genomes of both species. Bacteria are indispensable partners in the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by plants. The oxygen in our atmosphere is put there, almost in its entirety, by the. photosynthetic chloroplasts in the cells of green plants, and these organelles are almost certainly the descendants of blue-green algae that joined up when the nucleated cells of higher plants came into existence. The mitochondria in all our own cells, and in all other nucleated cells, which enable us to use oxygen for energy, are the direct descendants of symbiotic bacteria.

These are becoming accepted facts, and there is no longer an agitated argument over their probable validity; but there are no satisfactory explanations for how such amiable and useful arrangements came into being in the first place. R. Axelrod and W.D. Hamilton (Science, March 27, 1981) haverecen!ly reopened tlre question of cooperation in evolution with a mathematical approach based on game theory (the Prisoner's Dilemma game), which permits the hypothesis that one creature's best

strategy for dealing repeatedly with another is to concede and cooperate rather than to defect and go it alone.

This idea can be made to fit with the mathematical justification based on kinship already accepted for explaining altruism in nature- that in a colony of social insects the sacrifice of one individual for another depends on how many of the sacrificed member's genes are matched by others and thus preserved, and that the extent of the colony's altruistic behavior can be mathematically calculated. It is, by the way, an interesting aspect of conte~orary biology that true altruism-the giving away of something without return-is incompatible with dogma, even though it goes on all over the place. Nature, in this respect, keeps breaking the rules, and needs correcting by new ways of doing arithmetic.

The social scientists are in the hardest business of all-trying to understand how humanity works. They are caught up in debates all over town; everything they touch turns out to be one of society's nerve endings, eliciting outrage and cries of pain. Wait until they begin coming close to the bone. They surely will someday, provided they can continue to attract enough bright people -fascinated by humanity, unafraid of big numbers, and skeptical of questionnaires-and provided the govern-

When the scientific method is working at its best, it succeeds in revealing the connections between things in nature that seem at first totally unrelated to each other. ment does not starve them out of business. Politicians do not like pain, not even wincing, and they have some fear of what the social scientists may be thinking about thinking for the future.

The social scientists are themselves too modest about the history of their endeavor, tending to display only the matters under scrutiny today in economics, sociology and psychology, for example-never boasting, as they might, about one of the greatest of all scientific advances in our comprehension of humanity, for which they could be claiming credit. I refer to the marvelous accomplishments of the 19th-century comparative linguists. When the scientific method is working at its best, it succeeds in revealing the connection between things in nature that seem at first totally unrelated to each other.

Long before the time when the biologists, led by Darwin and Wallace, were constructing the tree of evolution and the origin of species, the linguists were hard at work on the evolution of language. After beginning in 1786 with Sir William Jones and his inspired hunch that the remarkable similarities among Sanskrit, Greek and Latin meant, in his words, that these three languages must "have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,

no longer exists," the new science of comparative grammar took off in 1816 with, Franz Bopp's classic work "On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language in comparison with that of the Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages" -a piece of work equivalent, in its scope and in its power to explain, to the best of 19th-century biology. The common Indo-European ancestry of English, Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Latin, Baltic, Indic, Iranian, Hittite, and Anatolian tongues, and the meticulous scholarship connecting them was a tour de force for research-science at its best, and social science at that.

It is nice to know that a common language, perhaps 20,000 years ago, had a root word for the earth which turned, much later, into the technical term for the complex polymers that make up the connective tissues of the soil: humus and what are called the humic acids. There is a strangeness, though, in the emergence from the same root of words such as "human," and "humane" and "humble." It comes as something of a shock to realize that the root for words such as "miracle" and "marvel" meant, originally, "to smile," and that from the single root sa were constructed, in the descendant tongues, three cognate words, "satisfied," "satiated" and "sadness."

How is it possible for a species to show so much wisdom in its most collective of all behaviors-the making and constant changing of language-and at the same time be so habitually folly-prone in the building of nation-states?

Modern linguistics has moved into new areas of inquiry as specialized and inaccessible for most laymen (including me) as particle physics; I cannot guess where linguistics will come out, but it is surely aimed at scientific comprehension, and its problem-human language-is as crucial to the species as any other field I can think of, including molecular genetics.

But there are some risks involved in trying to do science in the humanities before its time, and useful lessons can be learned from some not-so-distant history of medicine.

A century ago it was the common practice to deal with disease by analyzing what seemed to be the underlying mechanism and applying whatever treatment popped into the doctor's head. Getting sick was a hazardous enterprise then. The driving force in medicine was the need to do something, never mind what. It occurs to me now, reading in incomprehension some of the current reductionist writings in literary criticism, especially poetry criticism, that the new schools are at risk under a similar pressure. A poem is a healthy organism, really in need of no help from science, no treatment except fresh air and exercise. I thought I'd 0 just sneak that in. ,About the Author: Lewis Thomas, Chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, is author of Lives of a Cell and Medusa and the Snail. He is the recipient of numerous honors-including the Distinguished Achievement Award of Modern Medicine-for both his writing and medical research.

Secretary Haig on Arms Control

I

an recent elaboration of the Reagan New Soviet intercontinental ballistic misAdministration's arms control policy, siles now pose "a serious and increasing U.S. Secretary of State Alexander M. threat to a large part of the U.S. landHaig said that the United States seeks based ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic to reduce the risk of war and to establish Missile] force and a new generation of a stable military balance at lower levels of Soviet intermediate-range missiles have been targeted upon Western Europe." risk and effort.

President Reagan's strategic moderni"The control and reduction of nuclear weapons, based on deterrence, is the only zation program, announced last October, effective intellectual, political and moral Secretary Haig said, is realistic and fair. response to nuclear weapons," Haig told "It is designed to ensure the maintenance the Georgetown University Center for of a secure, reliable capability to deny Strategic and International Studies. "The any adversary advantage from any form incentives for real arms control exist, and of aggression, even surprise attack." we have both the means and the duty to . A full spectrum of forces ranging from U.S. strategic bombers and missiles, apply them."

Haig said that while the Reagan Ad- through the North Atlantic Treaty Orgaministration is "sensitive to the concerns nization (NATO) nuclear systems based underlying" recent calls for a freeze on in Europe, and the conventional Amernuclear weapons, "we have had to under- ican and allied forces in Europe will play "an indispensable role in assuring the score the flaws in such an approach. credibility of a Western strategy of deter"A freeze at current levels would rence," Haig said. "Deterrence is conseperpetuate an unstable and unequal miliquently more than a military strategy. It tary balance. It would reward a decade of is the essential political bargain which unilateral Soviet buildup, and penalize binds together the Western coalition." the United States for a decade of unilaSecretary Haig rejected proposals for a teral restraint." pledge of "no first use" of nuclear It would also, as President Ronald weapons, saying it would be tantamount Reagan declared recently, "remove all Soviet incentive to engage in meaningful to making Europe safe for conventional aggression. arms control designed to cut armaments "In adopting such a stance, the United and reduce the risks of war," Haig said.

States would be limiting its commitment "Deterrence faces its true test at the time of maximum tension, even in the to Europe. But the alliance cannot funcmidst of actual conflict," the Secretary tion as a limited liability corporation," continued. "Deterrence thus does not rest Haig declared. "It can only survive as a on a static comparison of the number and partner~hip, to which all are fully committed-:"'shared benefits, shared burdens size of nuclear weapons.

"Rather, deterrence depends upon our and shared risks.

"Put simply, our vulnerability to nucapability, even after suffering a massive nuclear blow, to prevent an aggressor clear blackmail, as well as the susceptibilfrom securing a military advantage, and ity of our friends to political intimidation, prevailing in the conflict. Only if we depends upon our ability and our willingmaintain such a capability can we deter ness to cope credibly with any Soviet threat. " such a blow."

The central purpose of arms control, During the past decade, the Soviet Union has mounted a sustained buildup Haig emphasized, must be to reinforce across the full range of its nuclear forces the military balance, upon which deterwhich Haig said was "designed to under- rence depends, at reduced levels of mine the credibility'? of the West's weapons and risks.

The Secretary recalled that the United strategy of deterrence.

"Soviet modernization efforts have far States has put forward in Geneva detailed proposals designed to limit intermediateoutstripped those of the West," he said.

range nuclear weapons in Europe and to eliminate entirely the missiles of greatest concern to each side. He said the Vienna negotiations on reducing conventional force levels in Europe are "facing diplomatic atrophy" and the West must urgently consider how to revitalize the talks.

The Reagan Administration, Haig stressed, has given "highest priority" to completing preparations for negotiations with the Soviet Union on strategic arms and will present detailed proposals aimed at major reductions to verifiable, equal, agreed levels when the negotiations open.

"The prospects for progress in each of these areas of arms control depend upon support of the President's defense programs," Haig said. Denying allegations that the U.S. policy is one of building up arms in order to reduce them, he said there was little prospect that the Soviet Union will agree to equal limits at lower levels of strategic arms unless it is persuaded that the U.S. is determined to maintain equality at higher levels.

"By maintaining the military balance ::md sustaining nuclear deterrence," Haig said, "we protect the essential values of Western civilization-democratic government, personal liberty, religious freedom -and we preserve the peace. In failing to maintain deterrence, we would ultimately sacrifice our freedoms, while actually increasing the likelihood of also suffering nuclear devastation.

"In the nuclear age, the only choice consistent with survival and civilization is deterrence." The allied strategy of deterrence has kept the peace for more than 30 years and has provided the basis for arms control efforts, Haig said.

"Deterrence is not automatic. It cannot be had on the cheap. Our ability to sustain it depends upon our ability to maintain the military balance now being threatened by the Soviet buildup," Haig declared. "If we are to reinforce deterrence through arms control and arms reduction, we must convince the Soviets their efforts to undermine the deterrent effect of our forces will not succeed." 0

KEY

ACHIEVERS

GLITTERING OSCARS' BATON WIELDERS WORLD

TRADE WEEK ENERGY FAIR

Dr. Stella Kramrisch, professor and curator of Indian art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is among the recipients of the Padma Bhushan, one of India's most prestigious civil awards, in the Republic Day 1982 honors list. Dr. Kramrisch, who could not be present at the investiture ceremony on March 20 at Rashtrapati Bhavan, was the person most responsible for the spectacularly successful "Manifestations of Shiva" exhibition shown in four major American cities during the last 10 months (see SPAN, August 1981). She conceived the exhibition as a way of opening a new world to Americans "not only of a great art in its infinite variety, but one which conveys, by the impact of its forms, a religious experience. " The exhibition was the result of a dedication that has occupied Dr. Kramrisch for decades: her translation of the Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four sacred Hindu texts. "In that I really found my way to Shiva," she says. Dr. Kramrisch has spent many years in India.

I

atharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, two of Hollywood's legendary performers, won the best actress and actor Academy Awards for 1981 for their costarring appearances in On Golden .Pond, a touching ,tale of a proud and active couple becoming reconciled to old age. (The film also won Ernest Thomson an Oscar for best screenplay.)

For the venerable Fonda, 76, who was too ill to attend the glittering ceremony in Los Angeles, the moment was the climax of a 48-year film career during which the Oscar had eluded him-except for an honorary award last year for his career's work. (This year's honorary award for lifetime work went to another legen-

Stella Kramrisch has been attracted to the mystical ever since her childhood days in her native Czechoslovakia. She recalls spending hours in a small church that held the tombs of her ancestors and in a nearby Trappist monastery. She is, she says, "driven to know God." "Why are we art historians?" she asks and provides the answer: "To see the creative spirit at work.... All any religion is about-and the religion of Shiva in particular -is the realization that man is godlike."

Her scholarly reputation is matched by stories about her extraordinary intuition and even supernatural powers. One such episode was related by a former student, art dealer Dr. Paul Makler, to Parade magazine: "She was invited to be the guest of a rajah at his annual tiger hunt. She sat with the other notables on a tree platform and watched the beaters drive the animals toward the hunters.

Naturally, she used all her mental energy and prayers to protect the tigers and indeed, each animal, when coming close to the .gunmen, abruptly turned and escaped. The incident was unheard of." When this happened the next year too, the rajah didn't invite her the third year. The hunt, that year, was successful.

dary Hollywood figure, 74year-old Barbara Stanwyck.)

Accepting the slim goldcolored statuette on her father's behalf, Jane Fonda, herself a two-time Oscar winner, said: "I know that. he is watching [on television] now and I know that he is very proud and very happy." Waving the Oscar at the television

Above: In this old family photograph, Henry Fonda poses with son Peter and daughter Jane. Above, left: Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (1968), for which she won her third Oscar.

WORLD TRADE WEEK

This March the New York Philharmonic, America's oldest symphony orchestra, made history when it became the first orchestra ever to perform 10,000 concerts. The honor of conducting the 10,000th concert went to the Philharmonic's Indian-born director, Zubin Mehta, who led the orchestra and the Westminster Choir in a performance of Mahler's monumental Symphony No.2, "Resurrection."

After the performance, Mehta made a brief appearance at th~ reception to which, besjdes more than 300 top musicians, singers and dancers, the entire audience was invited. "It is the emotional experience of a lifetime to conduct this orchestra on its 10,000th concert," Mehta said. A Philharmonic spokesman, who saw Mehta as he walked offstage after the final bows, said: "He was so choked up, he literally couldn't function."

The Philharmonic Socieiy of New York gave its first concert on December 7, 1842, under conductor Ureli Corelli Hill. cameras, an excited Jane added: "Dad, me and the grandchildren are coming over with it right away."

The award to Hepburn, 74, was her fourth-the most any performer has ever won.

Chariots of Fire, a British film, was the surprise winner of the best picture award. A stirring account of two runners \vho won gold medals at the 1924 Olympics, it also won awards for its score, costuming and original script. It was pitted against four American films: Reds, nominated for 12 Oscars; On Golden Pond, candidate in 10 categories; Raidersof the LostArk, in eight categories; and Atlantic City, for five Orcars.

However, Reds won three other awards. The most im-. portant was the Oscar. for best

director, which went to Warren Beatty. A film about American radicals and the Russian Revolutirn, Reds also won the best supporting actress award for Maureen Stapleton, and cinematography honor for Vittorio ยงtoraro.

Raiders of the Lost Ark won the most Oscars with five-for art direction, editing, sound, visual effects and a special award for sound effects.

The only other movie to bag the prized statuette was Arthur: an Oscar for its theme song, and another for Sir John Gielgud, renowned British stage and screen performer, as best supporting actor.

The Hungarian-mad~ Mephisto, about a German actor who survived Nazism and suffered' in its aftermath, won as best foreign-language film.

To reaffirm the United States' commitment to a liberal world trading system, President Ronald Reagan on April 5 proclaimed the week of May 16 as World Trade Week.

Following is an excerpt from his proclamation: The United States recognizes two of its- most important responsibilities-to help restore growth and vitality to the world economy and to ensure that all countries participate fully in international development.

That is why America is committed to policies of free trade, unrestricted investment and open capital markets.

We also recognize that the international economic system can expand and improve only on a foundation of sound domestic policies in all countries. That is why this Admi-

nistration is working so diligently to promote the economic well-being of the United States.

A vital interlocking part of .our economy is our export activity. Every billion [1,000 million] dollars in. manufactured exports provides some 32,000 jobs for American workers. Exports account for almost six million U.S. jobs and generate billions of dollars in business for U.S. companies. Small wonder that this year's World Trade Week theme is "Exports Mean Jobs."

For these reasons, the United States remains firmly committed to a liberal world trading system and an active role in future world trade negotiations. In such negotiations, the United States adheres to the principle embodied in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that has served the mutual interests of all trading partners.

Technology, a monthly magazine of the Technology Information Corporation, Boulder, Colorado, recently selected an honors list of 100 key achievers around the world "without whom some important technical advances during 1981 would not have occurred."

Included in the honors list are two Indians- Veerswamy Geethaguru and Ananda M. Chakrabarty.

Veerswamy Geethaguru, a mechanical engineer at A.M.M. Murugappa Research Centre in Madras, has been cited by Technology for devising an inexpensive and easily built windmill: "Designed especially as a means of irrigatioQ for use by poor fishermen, the windmill has sails of cotton-andwool cloth and wood struts. It automatically follows the wind and is readily dismantled to avoid monsoon damage."

Dr. Chakrabarty has been honored by the magazine for his successful fight to patent a new life form that he has created-a "bug" that eats up oil. An Indian-born American scientist, Dr. Chakrabarty won a legal victory when the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Patent Office which had refused to patent the bacteria (see page 46, SPAN February 1982).

â&#x20AC;˘ III

us

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* * March 20, 1982, was an exceptionally significant day for Dr. William Trager, a renowned American parasitologist. It was his nnd birthdayand it was celebrated in a most befitting manner. At a ceremony in Bombay, India's Vice President M. Hidayatullah applied tilak on Dr. Trager's forehead amidst blowing of conches and presented to him the first R.D. Birla Triennial International Award of Rs. 5 lakh for his work in the field of malaria eradication.

Dr. Trager was the unanimous choice of the award jury of distinguished medical men and scientists, chaired by a former jurist. The jury received 20 nominations from around the world; they consulted an expert, Professor Gilles of the Department of Tropical Medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, before deciding on the winner.

Accepting the award, Dr. Trager, who is now a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, New York, credited an Indian, Dr. Wasim Siddi-

Dr. William Trager receives tht first R. D. Birla International Award from India's Vice President M. Hidayatullah at a function in Bombay.

In the background is Shriyan Prasad Jain, chairman of the Birla Trust.

que, with suggesting the strain of parasite that gave him success. Dr. Siddique worked with him as a postdoctoral fellow.

Talking about his work, Dr. Trager said that he was excited when in 1976 . he first cultivated the malarial parasite "in vitro." Trager's work involves the preparation of a pure antigen for serological tests'as well as "in vitro" testing of antimalarials. His aim is to produce a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. But Dr. Trager noted that no single method can eliminate the malarial parasite and therefore more basic research on malaria is needed.

Established in 1979, the R.D. Birla Smarak Kosh benefits medical education and research through scholarships, fellowships and training grants.

It also gives an annual national award of Rs. 1lakh to Indians working within the country. Dr. G.P. Talwar, director of the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi, has been selected for this year's national award for his work in fertility and leprosy.

Sitting Indian style-cross-Iegged-on the floor in an auditorium in Ahmedabad, an American composer wielded a baton that seemed a magic wand as he conducted a group of Indian musicians playing his composition based on Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri on Indian instruments. Though he used Indian ragas and other music forms, Joel Thome conducted the musicians as' he would for a ./ Western concert. And after¡ three weeks of rehearsals, the Indian musicians had adapted .perfectly to this alien style.

Joel Thome, who has previously staged his version of the Indian epic poem using Western instruments in the United States and France, is now in India to participate in a joint presentation of Savitri with Mrinalini Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of Performing Arts. Mrinalini Sarabhai will choreograph the dancing sequences. "It is going to be a challenge for me to devise a dancing sequence of a matching quality," she said.

THE 1982 WORLD'S FAIRs MAY-OCTOBER. 1982 KNOXVILLE. TENNESSEE

Between now and October, some 11 million people from all over the world are expected to visit Knoxville, a modest-sized (population: 200,000) American city in eastern Tennessee. The occasion: The Knoxville International Energy Exposition, which opens this month.

The Knoxville event has been designated a "category two" fair by the International Bureau of Expositions in Paris. This means that, unlike the general World Fairs in Osaka in 1970 and Brussels in 1958, the Knoxville exposition must have a theme, like the 1975 fair in Okinawa (ocean research) and the 1974 fair in Spokane, Washington (the environment) .

Knoxville has appropriately chosen energy as its theme: The city is the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A), one of the world's largest-and oldest-public utilities supplying electric power. Knoxville is also near Oak Ridge, famous for atomic energy experiments and still a hub of federal energy research.

This involvement of the region in energy-related activities, combined with the global energy crunch, convinced the exposition authorities to hold a world's fair on energy.

The fair, of course, will have all the popular trappings -major sporting events, shopping arcades, international pavilions featuring samples of cultural diversity, ceremonial pageants, fireworks and amusement parks. But what is most unusual about the Knoxville fair is a series of symposia on the energy problem that the organizers have integrated into the exposition.

Tomorrow's Adventures in Space 1. The successful launch of the space shuttle has opened up immense possibilities of turning space from a pioneering frontier into. a settled domain of human activity. In the years to come, the shuttle will ferry massive building materials and scientific instruments into earth orbit to fabricate such facilities as permanent orbiting stations, factories and solar power stations. Some of these activities are shown in the drawings here (see also pages 1H3,).

2. As resources become scarcer, scientists hope to retrieve asteroids in space which contain some major elements used on earth.

Here a retrieval structure (upper left) prepares to meet with an asteroid.

3. Using a robot arm, the shuttle retrieves a satellite. A key shuttle feature is its capability to service orbiting payloads in space or bring them back to earth for repairs.

4. In 1985 the shuttle is expected to hoist a massive remote-controlled telescope in earth orbit which, unobstructed by the atmosphere, will expand man's knowledge of the known universe enormously. In this drawing, light from a distant celestial object (upper right) strikes the telescope's mirrors and sensors. Data (broken white lines) are relayed to earth-based computers for analysis.

5. In 1985 the shuttle will also place a Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter in search of organic molecules-the building blocks of life. Here, Jupiter looms in the background as an orbiter takes a look at one of the planet's satellites.

6. A future Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) is serviced in a hangar at a space operations center in low earth orbit. Since the shuttle is designed to fly only to low earth orbit, the space-based OTV would carry cargo and personnel from low earth orbit to geostationary orbit.

7, 8, 9. The shuttle may relieve the energy crisis. Its crew could construct massive solar panels to capture sunlight, beam it to earth as microwaves which could then be converted into electricity. This drawing (7) shows maneuvering units unloading cargo for construction of solar power facility. In this sequential illustration (8), the shuttle is shown during construction of a solar .power system. With a solar collector area of 50 kilometers, this solar power conversion satellite (9) will provide 5,000 megawatts of electrical power to the ground receiving station. \

With the launch of the Indian National Satellite (INSAT-IA) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, India enters a new era in space communications.

Launched by NASA and built by Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation (below, left), the multipurpose satellite will provide tele~ communications facUities, direct television broadcasts to community receivers and meteorology forecasts. Indian scientists will command the satellite from the new Master Control Facility (bottom) via the earth station antennae (right).

See story, page 2.