February 1995

Killer rvlicrobes

Mission Accomplished "We have made extraordinary strides and lard the groundwork for the future."

-u.S. Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown

Robert Frank's Photography Living to150 Growing Indo-U.S. Security Ties Henry Kissinger's

Diplomacy

Making the Rounds

During his five-day visit to India last month, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown met with senior government and business leaders in New Delhi, Bombay, and Bangalore. Brown established an easy rapport with his Indian hosts, setting the mood for an eminently successful round of talks and negotiations (seepage 43). The photographs on this page show Secretary Brown with Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao (right) and (clockwise from above) Air India and Indian Airlines Chairman Russi Mody; Commerce Minister Pranab Mukherjee; Finance Minister Manmohan Singh; Indian Ambassador Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Power Minister N.KP. Salve; Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Deve Gowda and Deputy Chief Minister i.H. Patel; Communications Minister Sukh Ram; and Maharashtra Chief Minister Sharad Pawar.

American philosopher and writer George Santayana (1863-1952) once said, "Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject." After seeing the photographs of Robert Frank on our pages this month, I think you will agree that here is art that is interested in its subject. Many Americans at first did not appreciate the stark, gritty images that Frank captured with his lens. His two-year project in the 1950s to document the culture of America-a book titled The Americans-elicited mostly negative reaction when it first came out. But today critics have a much greater respect for the Swiss-born photographer and have praised the retrospective exhibit of his work that is now on tour.

Someone else who had a hard time with the critics-as well as with the claustrophobic working conditions of his environment-was minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. He did what many of us dream of doing from time to timehe picked up and moved to the other end of the world, figuratively speaking. In Judd's case, from the concrete jungle of New York City to the wide open plains of West Texas. Judd died a year ago, but his legacy-spare, clean, minimalist sculpture-is on display in the town of Marfa, which writer Robert Draper calls "modern art's most unlikely outpost." If you're unlikely ever to visit Marfa, Laura Wilson's photographs this month will give you an idea of what Judd did and why Marfa so appealed to him.

Ojai, a small artists' colony in California only slightly less off the beaten track than Marfa, is home to Beatrice Wood, famous for her exquisite pottery and clay sculptures. Helen Dudar profiles this remarkable centenarian who became swept up in the French and American avantgarde movements of the early 1900s, dabbled in acting, traveled to India on several occasions, and became a follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

"Indeed," writes Dudar, "she appears to have met half the seminal figures of her day."

It seems that U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown likewise met half the seminal figures ofIndia on their trips here last month-only the latest in what has become a steady stream of official visitors in the rush spurred by last May's meeting between Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and President Bill Clinton. We present the speech that Perry delivered at the United Service Institution in New Delhi in which he spelled out the American interest in closer security ties with India. In addition, we have abridged the transcript of the "Town Meeting" that Brown held before a live television audience in New Delhi.

Visits of these kinds require an enormous amount of preparation and support. I couldn't begin to name all the Indian and American officials whose tireless efforts made it all possible. In the case of the five-day Brown mission, however, I would like to cite the remarkable contributions and cooperation provided by three sponsoring organizations-CII, FlCCI, and ASSOCHAM. The dedicated professionals who make these organizations and others like them so effective in promoting India's business interests, proved invaluable in assuring the success of Secretary Brown's visit.

2

Killer Microbes-Are

Antibiotics Up to the Fight?

by Gene Bylinsky

8

Living to 150

by Robert Langreth

12

Beatrice Wood: Over 100 and Forever 32

19

Drift, Diversion, and Snake Oil An Interview

With Paul Krugman by A.J. Vogi

24

The Photography of Robert FrankLess Art, More Truth

30

Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy

34 38 39 40

A Reverence for Space

A Review by Inam Rahman

by Robert Draper

Focus On ....

On the Lighter Side America Wants Stronger Security Ties With India,

by William J. Perry

43

Mission Accomplished

An Interview

With Ronald H. Brown

Front cover: U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan

in New Delhi.

Publisher, Thomas A. Homan; Editor, Guy E. Olson Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumar; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Managing

DocumentatioIT Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover, Inside front cover-Avinash Pasricha. 2-Andrew Brusso. 3Illustration by Tony Mikolajczyk for Fortune © 1994 Time Inc. All rights reserved. 9Mark Ferri. Io-B. Roy Choudhury. 12-© 1994 Robert Lewine. 14 top left-Beatrice Wood Archives; top right, bottom left and center-Anthony Cunha, courtesy Garth Clark Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; bottom right Garth Clark Gallery. IS-Anthony Cunha, Garth Clark Gallery. 19-Bachrach. 24-29-© Robert Frank; 24 top and bottom-Gift (partial and Promised) of Robert Frank in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art; 24 center-Collection of the Artist; 26 center, 27-Gift of Robert Frank; 26 bottom, 28-Gift of the Collectors Committee; 29-Gift of Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. All courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection. 25, 26 top---Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with Funds given

by Dorothy Norman. 30-31-eourtesy of Culver Pictures. 34-37-Laura Wilson. 38 top-courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, New York. 4,0-42-Avinash Pasricha except 40 center & right center by Capt. K.K. Awasthi, courtesy Dept. of Public Relations, Ministry of Defense. 44-48 & back cover-Avinash Pasricha.

Published by the United States Information Servi(;e, American Center, 24 Kaslurba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi \10001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. Primed al Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad. Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use a/SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price a/magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. 110 for students): single copy, Rs. 12.

"The African clawedfrog taught us that it has the equipment to sterilize its own skin and gut using antibiotics. " -MICHAEL

A. ZASLOFF.

Magainin Pharmaceuticals

K LLER M CROBES ARE ANTIBIOTICS UP TO THE FIGHT? Just when we thought we had vanquished bacterial infectious diseases, the bugs are back with a vengeance.

Their increased resistance to antibiotics-ironically, brought on partly by overprescription-makes them more dangerous than ever. Scientists hunting for new wonder drugs now know that this will be a never-ending fight.

O

nly 25 years ago, Homo sapiens Probably, says Cynthia Robbins-Roth, most common antibiotics. conquered the moon. But now an immunologist who publishes the trade For a long time, resistance seemed a the proud splitter of the atom, paper Bio Venture View and often blasts fairly minor nuisance. Drug manufacinventor of the electronic computer, de- biotech companies for hyping what they turers felt confident that they could alcipherer of the genetic code, and devel- do. She says the syarch for new antibiotics ways pull new antibiotics out of their oper of the information highway may be is "biotech at its best-understanding the screening programs if necessary. The humbled by a lowly denizen of the sewers underlying mechanisms of disease and compounds came mainly from soil microand soils-the microbe. trying very powerful new approaches. But organisms such as molds, which produce Of the 160 antibiotics in use in the it's going to take a real effort to succeed." antibiotics as they compete against miUnited States today, only. one-vanPray that it does. Hair-raising exam- crobes for living space and nutrients. comycin-stands shakily against un- ples abound of microbes that are rapidly By 1993, U.S. drug companies had controlled ravages of Staphylococcus becoming resistant. Public health officials built antibiotics into a $6,000-million-aaureus, or golden staph, the most com- speak openly of a crisis in the making. year business, accounting for roughly ten . mon cause of skin, wound, and l\lood A panel of experts convened by the percent of prescription-drug sales. But infections. Staph infects nine million National Academy of Sciences recently the larger, more lucrative markets for Americans each year, according to the concluded that the U.S. public health cancer and heart disease medications Centers for Disease Control (CDq in system's capacity to deal with microbes is have diverted the drugmakers' attention: Atlanta, Georgia (see SPAN, May 1992). in jeopardy. Concerned about the resis- According to a survey by a scientific panel The overwhelming majority of people tance problem, the Federal Drug Admin- at the National Institutes of Health who get staph infections are treated with istration (FDA) has said it will speed (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, by the antibiotics. But now 40 percent of the promising antibiotics through the fast- mid-1980s about half of U.S. drug infections respond to no other antibiotic track approval process originally devised companies had cut or abandoned rebut vancomycin. What happens whenfor anti-AIDS drugs. Any doctor who search into new antibiotics. the question is no longer if-vancomycin encounters a bug he can't treat can get The major players that remain all have fails? Says a scientist: "A lot of people will immediate permission to use an experi- pursued the same strategy--economizing die-you can die of a boil if there's no way mental drug by calling the FDA. on R&D while trying to stay a step ahead to treat it."

What brought all this on? Massive use of both corporate rivals and the bugs.

That's just the scariest Andromeda of antibiotics around the world has sub- They have limited their efforts largely to Strain scenario. Suddenly, when human jected microbes to Darwinian pressure of constant tinkering with existing antibiotbeings thought they had vanquished bac- a severity the bugs have not faced since ics, a method reminiscent of U.S. autoterial infectious diseases, the bugs are the last Ice Age, says microbiologist Stan- makers' bygone practice of merely back with a vengeance. "Almost all dis- ley Falkow at Stanford University in redesigning cars' tail fins each year. "We ease-causing bacteria are on the pathway California. The first strains of staph that were always modifying the same classes of to complete resistance," warns Robert could withstand penicillin were spotted in antibiotics; a very large percentage were B. Naso, vice president of research at a London hospital as early as 1946, just modifications of penicillin," says George Univax Biologics of Rockville, Mary- two years after wide introduction of the Miller, an executive at the Scheringland, one of a dozen small biotech compa- wonder drug. As time passed, dozens of Plough Research Institute in Kenilworth, nies trying to combat the resistance bugs found ways to render harmless the New Jersey. "We knew that resistance problem in novel ways.

The prospect of biotech having to rush to the rescue of embattled Homo sapiens may sound a bit far-fetched, particularly icrobes, which have inhabited considering that investors lost millions Earth much longer than people, are in the industry's biggest letdown to date-the failure of medications aimed master survivors and much better at sepsis, a bacterial blood infection chemists than human beings. that kills 100,000 Americans a year.

Three highly touted U.S. companies, A single microbe can produce ten Centocor, Xoma, and Synergen, were million to 20 million offspring in a day. clinically testing novel biologically engineered compounds to thwart the disease. The approach failed, and the stocks were severely hurt.

Will other researchers fare any better?

was lurking around the corner, but commercially it was very difficult to bring a new antibiotic into the marketplace, because the existing ones were already so good." The 160 antibiotics on the market today are variations on only IS major compounds.

The bugs kept gaining as science neglected to attack them in new ways. "It's very embarrassing for man to have microbes coming out on top," says Stanford's Falkow. But it's not surprising.

Microbes, which have inhabited Earth much longer than people-for billions of years-are master survivors and much better chemists than human beings. The creatures replicate as often as once every 20 minutes, a rate at which a single microbe can produce ten million to 20 million offspring in a day. As a result, resistan t strains evolve with striking speed. What's more, scientists have found to their amazement that bacteria of different species often share new resistance mechanisms with one another, by exchanging tiny round genetic structures called plasmids or even smaller bits of DNA called transposons. A single plasmid can carry genes with frightening versatility: When a microbe gains the ability to defeat one antibiotic, it can often withstand six or seven others to which it has never been exposed.

In hindsight, the species Homo sapiens has made so many mistakes in battling the bugs that it has made a homo sap of itself.

For example, human beings now face a toxic strain of a ubiquitous and usually benign bug, E. coli, that lives in the intestines of people and animals. The new strain evolved in beef cattle when the bacterium, threatened by constant exposure to antibiotics in the animals' feed, borrowed a toxin-producing resistance plasmid from the shigella bacterium, which causes dysentery. First detected in 1988, toxic E. coli in 1993 killed four people and sickened hundreds of others who ate hamburgers at fast-food restaurants in four U.S. Western states. Last summer, the bacterium infected people in the Northeast. "We've created little monsters in what has become microbial warfare in reverse," says Naso of Univax.

octors have overused antibiotics, often prescribing the drugs as a panacea for colds, sore throats, and other common ailments that sometimes aren't even bacterial in origin.

Antibiotic-resistant salmonella is another dangerous bastard of the wonder drugs.

Many factors have combined to endanger the public. Doctors have overused antibiotics, often prescribing the drugs as a panacea for colds, sore throats, and other common ailments that sometimes aren't even bacterial in origin. Farmers, meanwhile, are pouring into livestock and poultry a quantity of antibiotics equal to that used for human health.

In hospitals the risks are particularly grave. The appearance of AIDS, the increasing use of invasive surgery and organ transplants, the aging of the population so that more people need hospital care-all have contributed to an upsurge of bacterial infections in hospitals. Many patients have impaired immune systems and provide fertile breeding grounds for drug-resistant bugs.

About two million patients, or five percent of those hospitalized in the United States each year, get bacterial infections; up to 60 percent ofJhose infections involve drug-resistant strains.

In some intensive care units, the odds of acquiring a bacterial infection are as high as seven in ten.

Societal changes playa role too. The explosion in the number of child care centers in the United States, with an estimated 13 million children now in attendance, has created a broad new avenue for contagion.

According to the American Society for Microbiology, kids in child care centers are 18 times more likely to contract bugs than kids who stay at home. CDC statistics show that the number of children who went to the doc-

tor with middle-ear infections soared from ten million in 1975 to 24 million in 1990. A growing percentage of those children have resistant bugs, and the spread of such strains "is beginning to create a problem in office practice," according to Stephen L. Madey, a pediatric allergist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Hospitalizing children with middle-ear infections that a few years ago could have been cured with a shot of penicillin is a vision nearing reality.

Antibiotic-resistant microbes have struck hardest at the very young, the very old, and people with impaired immune systems. But even if no one in your family belongs to these groups, don't get the idea that you are in the clear. "Virtually everyone is at risk," says microbiologist Alexander Tomasz of Rockefeller University in New York. "Microbes respect no geographic or social borders."

I

nfection is a ubiquitous threat because we live in an invisible sea of microbes.

Each square centimeter of our skin, for instance, hosts a million or so bugs, including staph and strep. Bacteria can be transmitted by physical contact, such as a handshake. Every time you inhale or eat, you take in microbes that regard the body as "just one long, damp tube for potential invasion," in the words of Thomas P. Monath, chief of research at biotech start-up Ora Vax in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A healthy immune system usually copes with the bad bugs. But the system can falter when an injury, even a minor one like a scratch or insect bite, lets toxic bugs enter the bloodstream. That's

apparently how some people succumb to Group A streptococcus, a vicious strain that kills by devouring tissue and releasing toxins into the blood. One victim, Gary Meadows of Ypsilanti, Michigan, was a healthy 33-year-old who scraped his knee when he fell off his bike in June last year. He died of Strep A four days after being admitted to a hospital. Muppeteer Jim Henson, another healthy man, succumbed to Strep A in 1990. He was 53.

Where people congregate, microbes follow. A Wall Street analyst riding the subway to work has a greater than ever chance of contracting tuberculosis, which is caused by an airborne bacterium. A physician who has studied the spread of TB in New York, David Alland of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, says the city's transmission rate matches that of many developing countries. Jet travel, meanwhile, helps spread the bugs, especially since the air in passenger cabins is unfiltered and circulates many times in the course of a flight. According to CDC, drug-resistant strains ofTB bacteria have so far been detected in 36 U.S. states.

To counter the rising threat, biotech small fry have mobilized far more quickly than the pharmaceutical giants. The counterattack against the bugs is developing on four major fronts. • Harnessing nature's own contact killers. Researchers have begun to extract a bonanza of antimicrobial substances from the tissues of moths, bees, cows, pigs, and even human beings. Some of these new antibiotics work by punching holes in bacterial walls, causing the mi-

crobes to pop, like tanks hit by armorpiercing shells. This instant action is in sharp contrast to that of conventional antibiotics, which generally disable the bugs over the course of hours or days by inhibiting cell wall construction. Many of the new compounds act by combining physics and biology. A powerful electrical charge on their surfaces displaces ions in the bacterial cell wall, turning it into the bioequivalent of Swiss cheese; the microbe's innards spill out through the holes as it dies.

In the forefront of this new field is Magainin Pharmaceuticals, a publicly held company in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Magainin was formed to exploit a remarkable discovery in 1986 by molecular biologist Michael A. Zasloff, then at NIH. Zasloff had operated on African clawed frogs to remove their eggs, and afterward put the animals back in their murky holding tanks. He was startled to see the sutured wounds close quickly in the days that followed, with no infection and hardly any inflammation.

This healing process was strikingly different from that of most animals, whose natural effort to ward off infection usually produces robust inflammation.

Intrigued, Zasloff analyzed the frogs' skin. He discovered antibiotics that he named magainins, after the Hebrew word for shield. He has since found eveh more potent magainins in dogfish sharks, and he is now studying alligators.

Says Zasloff: "Animals are hard-wired with these substances to protect them from being consumed by microbes."

In the lab, magai~ins kill not only

he 160 antibiotics on the market today are variations on only 15 major compounds.

The bugs kept gaining as science neglected to attack them in new ways.

bacteria but also fungi, protozoa, and some cancer cells; Magainin researchers have successfully used the substances to treat infections in lab animals. But the first human trial had indifferent results.

When magainins were administered to children with impetigo, a skin infection, the cure rate of 80 percent was equal to that ofa nonmedicinal cream. Magainin's stock sank almost 60 percent on the news.

The FDA is allowing the company to proceed with a more significant trial, against infected dia betic foot ulcers; if the drug proves useful, it could be on the market in about three years.

Other bug-bla~ting antibiotics are on the way. Applied Microbiology of Brooklyn, New York, derives its drug, Ambisin N, from bacteria in milk. In lab tests, Ambisin has shown itself effective against H. pylori, a bacterium recently unmasked as the main culprit in peptic ulcers. Micrologix Biotech, a publicly held company in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada, is concentrating on Enhancers, genetically engineered versions of microbe-busting pep tides from bees and moths. The company's most promising compound is a potent killer of drug-resistant staph and other species of microbes. • Crippling the bugs by attacking their surfaces. After invading the body, microbes must attach themselves to cells in order to infect. Neose Pharmaceuticals of Horsham, Pennsylvania, aims to thwart that process by filling the bloodstream with fake copies of carbohydrate receptors found on the cells' surfaces. These decoy the bacteria into docking with them, thus handcuffing the microbes and rendering them harmless; before long the bugs are excreted from the body by normal physiological processes.

Neose's drug is patterned after antiadhesion compounds that occur in human mother's milk and help babies stave off ear infections and diarrhea. Says senior vice president and chief scientific officer Stephen Roth: "This is an antibiotic designed by the human body." The. beauty of Neose's approach is that since the decoy compounds don't kill the bugs

esearchers have begun to extract a bonanza of antimicrobial substances from the tissues of moths, bees, cows, pigs, and even human beings.

but simply render them inactive, no Darwinian pressure is brought to bear, and the m!crobes are far less apt to develop resistance. Neose will soon launch clinical trials of an aerosol spray to prevent pneumonia and an oral medication to block H. pylori in the stomach.

Other targets beckon on the bugs' surfaces. Microcide Pharmaceuticals of Mountain View, California, is developing chemicals to keep bacteria from receiving the biochemical signals they depend on for orientation. Micrologix Biotech is investigating the use of penetrins, protein complexes that can carry antibiotic molecules through the walls of infected cells and hunt down bacteria that cause TB, food poisoning, and other afflictions. • Torpedoing bacterial DNA. Scientists at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, have discovered a cluster of five genes in bacterial DNA that serves as the bugs' alarm bell. When a microbe encounters an antibiotic, the cluster goes off, triggering as many as 40 additional genes that direct the synthesis of protective proteins. Lab director Stuart Levy and his associates are developing drugs to silence the alarm.

Researchers expect more genetic targets to emerge as the deciphering of bacterial DNA accelerates. Human Genome Sciences of Rockville, Maryland, a publicly held leader in gene analysis, has begun to apply its automated sequencing equipment to decode genes upon which microbes depend at different stages of their lives. "It's like shining a light into darkness," says J. Craig Venter, pre-

sident of the Institute for Genomic Research in Gaithersburg, Maryland, an affiliate of Human Genome Sciences. "By knowing all the genes and metabolic pathways, we can develop whole new ways of killing off these disease-causing bacteria. It's almost here now." • Devising brawnier vaccines. The use of vaccination against bacterial infections dates back to Pasteur, who discovered that microbes cause disease. Vaccines typically use harmless fragments of disease bugs to sensitize the immune system so that it recognizes and kills the real thing when an infection occurs. But while vaccines for children and the elderly are a standard part of modern medicine, the great success of antibiotics pushed antibacterial vaccine development out of the labs. Now the search is being revived.

Univax Biologics has devised a clever, double-barreled approach against a strain of golden staph. Using genetic engineering, the company replicated a portion of the chemical capsule'in which the staph camouflages itself from the immune system. Now in clinical trials, the resulting vaccine can be administered to people at risk, such as kidney dialysis patients, for long-term protection. By itself the vaccine has a limitation, however: It takes days to stimulate the production of antibodies, a delay that could prove fatal to patients such as auto accident victims who contract infections in hospitals.

To help doctors protect such patients, Univax has been injecting healthy volunteers with its new vaccine, extracting antibodies from their blood, and bot-

tling them in a preparation for use In trauma units.

Apollon, a privately held start-up in Malvern, Pennsylvania, is exploring another tactic in its effort to develop an antiTB vaccine. The company's scientists want to co-opt the process that microbes use to pass along resistance genes. Into harmless plasmids from ordinary E. coli, they insert a few genes from the TB bug. If all goes according to plan, the plasmids, injected into muscle or skin, should generate an immune response against TB. Apollon will soon test its approach on animals; clinical trials are at least two years away.

Many other vaccines are under development. In New York, bacteriologist Vincent Fischetti and his colleagues at Rockefeller University are preparing to test a nasal spray against the strep that causes sore throats in 30 million Americans each year. Ora Vax in Cambridge is working on an oral vaccine to eliminate a serious side effect that many antibiotics create by suppressing normal bacteria in the digestive tract. This disruption of the natural balance allows Clostridium deficile, a relative of the tetanus bacterium, to proliferate, causing severe diarrhea and even colitis, which can be fatal. Says Thomas Monath of OraVax: "This is an emerging health problem of immense magnitude in the United States and elsewhere, causing havoc in hospitals and nursing homes."

If the vaccines and other new medications work, science will be able to prevent a return to the pre-antibiotic era, during which bacterial infections accounted for one-third of all deaths in the United States. But that is about the best to be hoped for. Sobered scientists now know that the fight against microbes will be never ending, with the bugs gaining advantage in one round, human beings in the next-or so everyone hopes. Says Apollon CEO Vincent R. Zurawski Jr.: "It's too horrible to contemplate if 0 the bugs win."

About the Author: Gene Bylinsky, who is on the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine, has won several awards for his scientific reporting.

Living to 150 For years research on prolonging life was considered a haven for quackery. But now, scientific research reveals there may be no built-in limit to human life, making even skeptics wonder about the possibilities of cheating death. os,Goddess of morning ,fell in love with young Tithonus, son of Troy, whom she carried away in a golden chariot.

Thereupon she went to Zeus and begged him to grant Tithonus immortality, and to this he assented. But she forgot to ask for perpetual youth. And Tithonus became daily older, grayer. and more shrunken, his voice grew shrill. and. when Eos grew tired of nursing him, she locked him in her bedroom, where he turned into a cricket.

-ROBERT GRAVES, The Greek Myths'

E

Unlike Tithonus, within a few generations we may be able to have it both ways. Not eternal youth exactly, but active lives well past 100 or even 120.

In 1900, the average American could expect to live about 47 years. Today, average life expectancy is more than 75 years.

But these numbers are deceptive. That's because most of the life-expectancy improvements have resulted from slashing the number of childhood deaths-not from people living longer than their ancestors.

In fact, until recently many scientists believed that human beings-and most other animals-wear out at some predictable age. Even if heart disease and cancer were conquered, people would still not live much beyond 85.

But the latest scientific research challenges this dogma. It reveals that there may be no built-in limit to life. And it opens up the possibility of tinkering with the body's hormonal systems, or even the genetic code, to stretch human life span significantly.

The most persuasive results have been achieved not in human beings, but in laboratory animals. Over the past several years, biologists have done things that would have been considered impossible a decade ago. They have: • doubled the life span of fruit flies by selective breeding; • stretched the life span of roundworms 70 percent by altering a single gene, dubbed Age-I; and • raised rodents that live to the human equivalent of 160 years when fed super-low-calorie diets.

In all three cases, the longer-lived creatures are just as ac-

tive and healthy throughout their lives as their ordinary counterparts.

The biologists who performed these feats believe their achievements can be extended to human beings. "It sounds like science fiction, but it's really going to happen, whether 100, 50, or maybe even 20 years from now," enthuses Tom Johnson, a 46-year-old geneticist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who helped discover Age-I. "I have a shot at making it [to ISO]. Kids born 20 years from now will make it for sure."

No one wants to produce people who live to ISO but spend their last 65 years in a nursing home bed, says Richard Sprott, associate director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at Bethesda, Maryland, the agency that funds most U.S. research on aging. The idea is to postpone the disabilities associated with the onset of aging, not to make those who are already decrepit hang on by a thread for decades. Instead of slowly declining, people would remain active for virtually their whole lives, then perish with their tennis shoes on.

Scores of start-up companies in America are examining a hodgepodge of chemicals that they hope will postpone the effects of aging. Several hormones are being tested in human beings, and one trial-involving human growth hormone-has already claimed limited success. So far, researchers have only been able to reverse some of the symptoms of aging, but their ultimate goal is to actually increase human life span.

Not everyone agrees that prolonging life is an achievable goal, or even a worthy one. For decades, research on aging was considered both a quagmire and a haven for quackery. To this day, many gerontologists insist that the only legitimate objecJ tive is wiping out senility and age-related diseases. The NIA and large drug companies still target most of their multimilliondollar budgets for research on aging at diseases like Alzheimer's.

Numerous other experts say the longevity optimists are just plain wrong. "Mammals are fundamentally different" from fruit flies and roundworms, argues biochemist Anthony Cerami, founder and director of the Picower Institute, a biomedical research facility in Manhasset, New York.

"I don't see anything that makes me believe we can live much beyond 110."

Even the naysayers, though, can't deny one fact: Not all living things age. Bristlecone pine trees, sea anemones, rockfish, • and certain shellfish-some of the oldest species on Earthdon't deteriorate with age. Only environmental disruptions and

predators kill them. "It appears that non-senescing [not aging] was the original state of living on Earth," conclude Caleb Finch, gerontologist at the University of Southern California, and Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurosciences at Stanford University in California, in a recent article. Like Homo sapiens, then, aging evolved.

This 95-year-old retiree who gardens and raises birds is indicative of the growing number of elderly Americans who lead active, productive lives.

Living to 150

conlinued

W

hen Methuselah had lived 187 years, he became the father of Lamech. Methuselah lived after the birth of Lamed1 782 years, and had other sons and daughlers. Thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years; and -Genesis 5:25-27 he died.

Michael Rose isn't your average scientist. He is a zealot. The theory of evolution is his bi ble, and crea ting a modern Methuselah his Holy Grail.

"Evolution is the only scientific theory that can explain why we age," the 39-year-old evolutionary biologist says, speaking with the quiet assurance of someone who knows he is right.

"My colleagues in other disciplines don't always like to hear this," says Rose, sitting in his office at the Irvine campus of the University of California. "But that's the bottom line." Evolution (or more precisely, natural selection), Rose explains, is primarily concerned with making sure an animal is around long enough to reproduce. Anything unfavorable-like death-that happens after an animal has raised its children is inconsequential. Put bluntly, animals die because there's no reason for them to stay around after they procreate.

What's worse, Rose continues, genetic defects that harm the elderly tend to accumulate over generations, like garbage piling up in a dumpster. Why? Because there is no way to breed such "trash" genes out of the population. By the time someone gets Alzheimer's disease, for instance, he probably has already passed the responsible genes on to his children.

"So that's it. These are the reasons why we age," Rose concludes, and then pauses for a moment, as if waiting for a challenge to his theories. When none is forthcoming, he continues. "The next question," he says, "is what to do about aging."

Unlike many brash talkers, Rose has done something about itin fruit flies. Over a period of about 20 years, he has bred a strain of

The Guinness Book of Records lists Shigechiyo Izumi as the longestlived human being. Born on a remote northern Japanese island, he lived for 120 years and 237 days before succumbing to pneumonia in 1986. He attributed his longevity to "God, Buddha, and the Sun." Unfortunately, the vast majority of us will die long before we reach 120. Physical deterioration begins in middle age, with big declines in athletic skills for both sexes, and menopause for women. In

20s

40s

• You are at your physical peak, with top performance in both strength and cardiovascular endurance exercises.

• Your immune system is as effective as it will ever be.

• If you are a woman, you experience menopause at age 48 on average.

• Your measurable reach their peak.

mental skills

• Your hearing and vision are most acute.

• The annual chance of contracting most cancers is virtually nil.

• Your bones begin to atrophy.

• Self-confidence and "real-life" problem-solving abilities are at their zenith.

• For males, baldness generally begins to set in.

• Your annual chance of getting colon or rectal cancer is about one in 5,000 (men and women); it's one in 700 for breast cancer (women).

flies that live twice as long as normal flies. Why fruit flies, of all things? Because they are easy to study: They breed fast and furiously (Rose was recently to approach his 400th generation); they take up little space in the lab (Rose keeps them in stacks of plastic cages unceremoniously distributed across various counters); and they don't cost much to feed. Graduate students brew batches of food from yeast, overripe bananas, molasses, and com syrup. "We sometimes throw in leftover Chinese food," one student jokes.

Rose's breeding method is simple: From each new generation of flies, he keeps only the progeny of late sexual developers. This works, he says, because late bloomers are more likely to live long-a theory with which many other scientists agree. His experiment rewards the late bloomers by allowing them to pass on their genes.

The super-flies don't just sit around waiting to bite the dust, however. They are more active and resist heat, starvation, dehydration, and alcohol poisoning better than normal flies. "It's as if you go to Las Vegas, gamble all night, get wasted, eat hardly anything, then wander around in the desert on a hot day," Rose quips. And you still live twice as long as everyone else.

What do these studies prove? As usual, Rose doesn't mince words. "I don't think there is any predefined limit to life span in flies," he says with a smile, "or humans."

This does not mean that cheating death will be easy for us.

Rose has identified several hundred genes in fruit flies that may be responsible for longevity. But how to discover exactly which genes are most important-so scientists can eventually make a drug for human beings that imitates their effects? In a fruit fly, there's no simple way to do this.

Here is where Tom Johnson's roundworms could help. In his Boulder lab, Johnson has increased the life span of his creatures about 70 percent. He has done it not through mating, but by (Continued

on page 17)

the sixties, the risk of disease soars; muscles and bones shrink without careful nutrition and exercise.

Mental setbacks are harder to quantify.

On average, cognitive abilities wane as early as the sixties, but a great many individuals retain razor-sharp mental abilities well into their eighties. Many cases of "senility" are probably undiagnosed diseases like Alzheimer's.

80s • Your cerebral arteries are probably constricted by fat deposits, a condition that can lead to stroke.

• If it hasn't yet, your hair color fade~ ..

• Your sex drive generally wanes.

• There's roughly a 70 percent chance that at least one mental ability (such as math skill) has started to fade.

• Your annual chance of getting colon or rectal cancer is about one in 600; breast cancer, one in 450.

• More than ten percent of your peers have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

• You have lost one-fourth or more of the muscle mass you had in your twenties.

• You probably have arthritis.

• There's an 85 percent chance that at least.one mental ability has declined.

• Your annual chance of getting colon or rectal cancer is one in 250; breast cancer, one in 300; an agerelated hip fracture, one in 50.

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Indian jewelry and a sari are everyday clothing for Beatrice Wood, playfully called the Mama of Dada, at her home in Ojai, California.

B

eatrice Wood, a magic hand at crafting sinuous pots and luminous glazes, a stellar figure among contemporary cerarrusts, a name known to collectors and museums in the United States and abroad, an artist whose works command prices that spiral to five large figures, a woman so wed to her craft that she is at her wheel every morning before she is out of her nightgown-before breakfast, before the

sacrosanct period reserved for silent meditation-Beatrice Wood says she would give it all up in a minute for the love and devotion of a man.

Preferably young. And, of course, handsome.

Never mind that the visitors guide for Ojai lists her studio as a "Point of Interest," a notable tourist attraction of that scenic California town; or that in one of several books bearing her name she reported that,

Btafritt Wood: OVtr100 and fortVtr 32

more than anything in the world, she longed to be a "great artist"; or that next monthMarch 3-marks the 102nd year since her birth. In the teeth of a convention that insists that passion surely withers with age, Beatrice Wood is passionate witness to the fact that the heart's quest for romance never dies. Or, in her own words, delivered with a ripple of enveloping laughter, "If a man says he loves me,I fall into his lap like a ripe grape."

It is of more than passing interest that some of her opinions are to be found in pretty much the same language in half a hundred published interviews. The casual researcher might conclude that she is taking refuge in safe, remembered language; in fact, five minutes in her presence is sufficient for one to realize that Wood is forever a woman of the theater. In her youth, she acted on the stage and on the vaudeville circuit in a career driven less by artistic yearning than by a serious need to escape a controlling, socially ambitious mother. Wood knows from experience that you don't tinker with a good line.

Striking evidence of her dramatic art is to be observed in Beatrice Wood: Mama of Dada, an hour-long documentary on her life, loves, and work filmed when she was 98 years old and shown on public television in 1993. There she was to be seen and heard delivering lines with fine shadings and theatrically astute pauses that belie her insistence that she was no great shakes as an actress. And the producer-director Tom Neff recalls how, with perfect calm, she would break off in mid-anecdote while the camera was reloaded, and then resume her narrative with seamless precision.

When Neff showed her a finished print, he asked, "Well, what do you think?"

"Well," she said, "I think it's a great film except for the lousy subject matter. Too much on me."

Neff was hoping to get her on television's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, to promote the documentary and asked her, "Is that all right with you?" Wood has never lost her pleasure in or timing for adroit one-liners. Without missing a beat, she replied, "Yes. But I won't sleep with him."

Cultural Renegades Now, as to the Mama of Dada. It's a catchy title but a role Wood properly disclaims. She was more like an accidental tourist, a questing but barely cultivated mind and spirit waiting Wood with director Reginald Pole (above), one of her "three great loves," and posing in a Coney Island, New York, amusement park studio (below) with Dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.

to be seeded, a fugitive from social conventions. Freedom beckoned from a group of cultural renegades who were fomenting what would be a genuine revolution in the artsNew York Dada, a movement bent on demolishing all the old rules.

The dominant figure was Marcel Duchamp, who had scandalized the art world in 1913 with his masterful Nude Descending a Staircase and would cause earthquake-scale tremors with his proposal that a urinal turned upside down and called Fountain could be a piece of sculpture commanding attention. Duchamp and circle were sitting out World War I in New York when Wood, an eager little creature with smoky blue eyes and a full, provocative mouth, fell into their company.

For a few years she, Duchamp, and Duchamp's friend Henri-Pierre Roche, a writer who was in the French diplomatic service, were a threesome. The two men essentially educated her. They involved her in

avant-garde events that were to become indelible elements of this century's cultural history: A splendidly irregular art show of "Independents," a short-lived, tradition-bashing magazine of the arts perversely called The Blind Man, evenings among the literati at the Manhattan apartment of Walter and Louise Arensberg, two of the earliest serious American patrons of the new art. Wood had once, briefly, studied drawing, and with Duchamp's encouragement began producing the first of hundreds of spare, witty sketches that now form a kind of seven-decade pictorial diary and have found their way into museum shows.

Roche became her first lover, and when she felt betrayed by his casual involvement with a woman friend of hers, Duchamp replaced him.

To this day, Wood, clinging to the vintage phraseology of an earlier time, speaks of Roche as one of the three men in her life who "broke my heart" (or, more vividly, "When the bowl that was my heart was broken, laughter fell out").

She is not, however, greatly impressed that, years after their romance, he immortalized the Duchamp- Wood- Roche trio in his novel Jules et Jim, which, in outline at least, recalls their triumvirate. Later, the book became a celebrated Francois Truffaut film; Wood, having known the real thing, found it boring.

So here she is, shoeless, with rings on her toes, her body wrapped in one of her 50 beautiful saris, costuming she took to after several trips to India. As usual, she is festooned with pounds of jingling Indian jewelry. The walk is slow, the back somewhat bent by a spinal problem that has periodically caused her great misery for much of her adult life. Hearing aids are hidden by abundant hair. Her speaking voice has the cracked timbre-less sound associated with age, but when she laughs-and she does the minute she has said something that could be considered mildly naughty-the sound that emerges is an engaging girlish giggle.

In her heart, Wood is forever 32 years old.

The secret of a long, productive life is probably insoluble, but let's give it a try. Only consider the benefits of a lifelong addiction to "chocolate and young men." Moreover, she has never smoked or consumed spirits. Since the age of 16, she has, out of tender feelings for living creatures, consumed only vegetarian dishes-and, of course, desserts. She has been married twice, both times for convenience and neither time happily. It may be significant that she seems to have no gift for rancor.

Setting in Ojai Beatrice Wood came to Ojai 47 years ago in quest of spiritual guidance offered by two

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IS MY HAT ON STRAIGHT?

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FOOTED BOWL WITH FIGURES; circa 1988; 15 em.

BLUE FOOTED BOWL WITH FIGURES; BLUE AND GOLD CHALICE; 1987; 27.5 x 17.5 em; earthenware with lusters.

at Ultra Bohenllan, Pre-

1993; 25 x 22 em; earthenware with lusters (right top).

Marcel Duchamp chose Wood's playful sketch for this poster advertising a 1917 costume ball in Greenwich Village, New York (right).

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TO THE WHITE HOUSE; 1988; 59 x 59 x 27.5 em; earthenware. earlier settlers, Dr. Annie Besant, the English theosophist, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, both of whom she knew. A valley town 110 kilometers north of Los Angeles, Ojai is a happy surprise; it has managed to hold on to its tranquillity while becoming a model of rural chic. Modern Ojai is a popular resort, a refuge for retirees, home to a string of select private schools, and magnet for a thriving assortment of merchants of arts, crafts, clothing, and self-improvement.

Wood's place is on the outskirts of Ojai, a mountain away from the center of town; it is a modest home-cum-studio, surrounded by a garden of spectacular cactus plants and crammed with the folk arts of India, one of her abiding interests. Until recently, 300 tourists arrived at the doorstep each month. Since her widely publicized 100th birthday and the telecasts of

Mama of Dada, the number has edged up to 400.

What they see is Wood herself, wedged into a corner of a couch, surrounded by stacks of books and magazines as well as the materials for her sketch work; two large, quarrelsome dogs of uncertain ancestry; a small table offering her published works for sale, including her autobiography, 1Shoek Myself, and, displayed in glass cases along three walls, the products of her wheel, hand, kiln, and sensibility.

Eternally a contradiction, this woman who came of age at the dawn of the new modernity makes pots that might have been dug up from the burial places of long-vanished civilizations. The vessels, frequently classical in form, are opulent-ehalices often wear multiple handles that make them seem to be on the verge of becoming living things. Interestingly enough, the pieces are seldom faultless. Garth Clark, who is also an art historian of ceramics, likes to say that "Beatrice is not a great craftsman; she is a great artist."

Wood came late to the potter's wheel, and the trained eye can find slight wobbles in the wheel marks. No authoritative figure seems to object seriously to these minor defects. On the other hand, forever on the prowl for selfimprovement, Wood recently persuaded a young visiting potter to give her a few pointers to improve her technique on the wheel. (Why not? This is, after all, a woman who, II years ago, acquired a word processor to deal with her large correspondence.)

Her glazes are what lend a Wood piece its special distinction. From the beginning of her venture into ceramics, Wood was first fascinated by and then obsessed with creating luster glazes. Lusters are not new to ceramics, but they are fraught with treachery: The technique of mixing and firing the glaze compounds is rarely foolproof. On the other hand, uncertainty and surprise are elements of the process. As Clark notes, "Beatrice is a risk taker." When everything works-when the

chemical mix is right and the firing is idealthe results are brilliant, iridescent surfaces, a shining array of colors that appear simultaneously to reflect and radiate light.

Sculpting "Naughty Figures" There is a second strain to Wood's work with clay: When she tires of making pots, she abandons the wheel for a spell and goes to work sculpting small, often comical replicas of human beings or, as she likes to call them, "naughty figures." These are folk art pieces for which she has more recently drawn museum attention and a separate measure of fame; they may be single figures or groups of figures or images incised in tile. What they have in common are her lively humor and unblemished gift for biting commentary. Most recently, the glass case in the showroom offered a small work consisting of three naked ladies stonily perched on the prone form of a clothed, bewilderedlooking man. It is called Career Women. In an earlier piece, she dressed a young woman in ankle-high boots, long gloves, and a large flowered hat, leaving the rest of the body unclothed. Its title: Is My Hat on Straight?

This is the sort of imagery and humor that would have surely distressed Beatrice Wood's extremely proper mother, who cared deeply about such matters as handmade lace on underwear. The Wood family came from San Francisco, where Beatrice was born, and lived mostly in New York, sustained by substantial real estate holdings. The material benefits included a governess and later a lady's maid, a home packed with antiques, and annual summer trips to Europe. The Woods' daughter, one of two children, had a spell in a French convent school-just long enough for her to acquire fluency in the language. She was further educated at several of the best American private schools, where she never entirely learned to spell, and was subject to the unwelcome process of a full-scale debutante's introduction to society. She escaped by taking acting lessons, finding work as an ingenue in French theater companies, which, at the time, flourished in New York and Montreal, Canada; and by falling in with the Duchamp crowd.

After the New York Dada period, there were hard times and good times. She began visiting Los Angeles and eventually moved there. She had five good years with Reginald Pole, a baroquely handsome Briton who was a multitalented theater figure; he left her to marry a teenage girl. She met Krishnamurti and became a follower. Indeed, she appears to have met half the seminal figures of her day. A woman of exceptionally orderly habits, Wood

Wood, in her forties, examines a bowl on the potter's wheel in a class at Hollywood High School. has kept a brief, daily record of her activities since 1915. Francis M. Naumann, an art historian whose scholarly studies have leapt beyond New York Dada to encompass the work of Wood, has had access to several volumes of her diaries and found the pages festooned with such tantalizing one-line notes as "Tie-dyed scarves today for Isadora Duncan."

The transformation of Wood's life began in 1930 when she traveled to the Netherlands to take part in a Krishnamurti study project.

Browsing in an antique shop in Haarlem, she found a half-dozen lusterware plates. When she came home, she gave some thought to matching a teapot to the plates. Finally, in 1933, Wood set out to learn how to make one in a ceramics course at Hollywood High School. The job demanded far more than a beginner's enthusiasm.

Her first finished works were little modeled figures that were admired and actually brought in some small change. She was hooked. She went on to study with a few fine potters and to work obsessively at refining her technique at the wheel. In a few years, posh department stores were selling Wood pottery, and museums as well as galleries were putting her pieces on display.

After all these years, Wood might be expected to repeat herself and would be forgiven if she did. Clark, who has showrl her work since 1981, says that one of the striking things about it is that in the past decade she has been more innovative than ever with both form and decoration. In Wood's private world, whatever success she has now has been forged out of the difficult times of her early years. All art, she insists, is neurotic activity. As she put it one day recently: "Anybody who pours themselves into art, I don't think has had a happy childhood. Every child does decoration. But when you read the early lives of artists, all that I know of have been tortured mentally at some time in their lives."

Ritual Wrangling Still, nowadays, Ram Pravesh Singh insists that "Beatrice is having a helluva time."

Singh, 74, is part of a small staff that sees to it that her days and nights are free of worry.

They met in 1961 on the first of her three trips to India, when she was officially invited to show her work throughout the country. Singh, who was with the American diplomatic service in Calcutta, came to work for her almost 20 years ago and functions as her associate, manager, and sparring partner.

Together they are a long-running act engaged in ritual wrangling; they usually manage at least one quarrel a day, which seems to buoy or revive their spirits. In conversation with a visitor one day, she uses "careful" when she means "careless." He corrects her and tells her she has used the "wrong word."

"Well, what of it?" she replies sweetly. ''I'm a hundred. I can say anything I want. I'm not supposed to speak clearly."

"Why don't you say what you mean?" he demands.

"But I rarely do. I'm much too smart," she counters.

Wood's days are fanatically scheduled. She feels she must be present in the showroom when visitors are present; later, after they are gone, part of each evening is set aside for a second workshop session. Then, a half-hour is allocated to one of her two cats, Coco, a needy creature requiring regular rations of attention.

Coco curls up purring on her lap while Wood reads aloud to her from magazines as well as books of biography and philosophy. Occasionally Wood "cheats" with an Agatha Christie mystery. She is indifferent to almost everything on television except Ted Koppel's Nightline and, cheating again, Perry Mason.

Some days Wood will matter-of-factly report that her energies are waning and speak of the probability that she will not be able to produce the dozens of new objects required for her next gallery exhibitions. But the last time Clark suggested she take it easy-the two galleries could always show her less-current pieces-she let a moment go by and then said sternly, "Don't you ever say that to me again."

To be sure, Beatrice Wood is aware that time is running out. As she told Francis Naumann a few years ago, there are moments when she feels very tired and thinks, "Now my heart's going to stop beating and I'm going to die. Great!" Then she remembers three or four pieces she has been thinking about and wants to make before she departs. Suddenly her heart is beating strongly.

"And I'm back."

0 About the Author: Helen Dudar frequently contribu'tes to Smithsonian and other generalinterest magazines.

•

Living to 150

continued

turning off a single gene he calls Age-I. Johnson's roundworms take a normal amount of time to reach adulthood; but once there, they linger a lot longer.

He studies roundworms because their peculiar sexual traits (they are hermaphrodites) allow him to alter individual genes easily. As early as 1980, he tried to find genes that influence aging, with little success. Then a friend at another university sent him a batch of roundworms with a mutation (the deactivated Age-l gene) that supposedly made them live longer.

Johnson was skeptical: According to conventional wisdom, no single gene could have such an effect. When the graduate student assigned to the project reported that the mutants really did live longer, Johnson still didn't believe it. He had the student repeat the experiment 14 times to see ifit was a fluke. It wasn't.

At first, Johnson assumed that the achievement had no relevance to human beings. What could be more different from a person than a transparent worm a tenth of a millimeter long? Then Johnson uncovered clues that the mutant roundworms contained high levels of chemical warriors called antioxidants. Antioxidants attack free radicals, the poisonous byproducts of biochemical reactions such as breathing. Free radicals, many biochemists believe, are one of the prime cell killers during old age (see box on page 18).

Could Age-l be one of Rose's "trash" genes, a life-spanlimiting gene that accumulates stead'ily in the gene pool as it is passed on from generation to generation? Suddenly the results of Johnson's experiments seemed very relevant.

Johnson is currently trying to pin down the exact location of the Age-l gene on the worm's long strand of DNA. Once he does this, researchers will be able to clone the gene and find out how to block its chemical effects, eventually even in human beings. But he is not likely to be successful quickly. "It hasn't been as easy as I thought," he says with a sigh. "It's like searching in a two-meter haystack for one straw that is bent slightly differently than the others."

I

can do anything now at age 90 that I could do when I was 18.

Which shows you how pathetic 1was at 18. -GEORGE BURNS

Rose calls it the "Las Vegas approach." Across the United States, a large number of researchers and start-up companies are taking on the problem of aging by betting not on slot machines, but on biochemicals-hormones, enzymes, brain proteins, even aloe vera. The jackpot: Finding a chemical that slows one or more aspects of aging.

The odds on anyone substance are long, but the stakes are huge. "If people will spend $100 billion a year just to make themselves look younger," says Rose, "imagine how much they will pay for products that actually make them younger." This undeniable logic has lured drug companies and venture capital firms into spending millions each year on treating and preventing age-related diseases.

In the most publicized experiment to date, doctors injected human growth hormone into 21 elderly men who, like many older people, were deficient in the substance. The results? Like the nursing-home residents in the movie Cocoon, who are rejuvenated by swimming in a pool filled with life-giving alien

"pods," the patients felt more energetic than they had in years.

And it wasn't just psychological: On average, their muscle mass shot up nine percent, body fat shrank 14 percent, and skin became seven percent thicker, according to physicians from the Milwaukee and North Chicago veteran's hospitals who conducted the tests. "I never felt stronger in my life," one patient told reporters. It was the first time that a drug had reversed some of the effects of aging in human beings, even temporarily.

But in life, as in the movies, good things don't last forever: Follow-up studies have found that the measurable improvements vanished rapidly after patients stopped taking the hormone. Moreover, some volunteers suffered side effects like breast enlargement and carpal-tunnel syndrome, a painful inflammation of the wrist.

While doctors sort out the pros and cons of human growth hormone treatments, University of Utah immunologists are beginning another hormone experiment that could give 80year-olds the immune systems of people half their age. Like so many other parts of the body, the immune system fades with age, explains Utah immunologist Ray Daynes. Many vaccines do not work for octogenarians; moreover, a case of pneumonia that would just be a nasty ailment to a 20-year-old could mean the end. One guilty party, Daynes and his collaborators believe, is a natural hormone called DHEA. As human beings grow old, their DHEA levels decline, apparently preventing the immune system from getting the instructions needed to combat illness.

Over the past three years in his Salt Lake City lab, Daynes has proved that elderly mice fed DHEA fend off artificially implanted cancerous tumors that would otherwise kill them. And there are no obvious side effects. Last spring, Daynes and the company he helped found, Paradigm Biosciences (also of Salt Lake City), began administering DHEA to 40 elderly people. continued over extended periCould DHEA therapy-if ods-prolong life? That question is destined to remain unanswered for the time being. Daynes divulges, however, that the animals on DHEA therapy reach death later and "look far, far healthier in their later months" than other mice.

Molecular toxicologist Robert Floyd is taking a more direct apPI:Oach. At the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, he is tinkering with PBN, a tiny molecule that seems to battle free radicals, just as the antioxidants produced

by Johnson's mutated roundworms do.

Floyd likens the body to a biochemical see-saw: On one side, free radicals pile up by the billions every day; on the other side, our defenses weigh in to counteract them. Late in life, our body loses its ability to keep the see-saw balanced, and the ride comes to a smashing end. In gerbils' brains, PBN apparently traps free radicals to restore some of this balance, improving short-term memory and lessening the likelihood of stroke.

Researchers at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation are now testing whether PBN adds to the life span of gerbils. In the meantime, a start-up company is commercializing the drug-initially, at least, for treating brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Living to 150

continued

GETTING OLDER, CELL BY CELL

Ultimately, how much difference can PBN or any other chemical make? The odds are that no one substance will have a significant effect, just as randomly adding one bolt to the frame of a jumbo jet probably won't make it last longer. But if the bolt happens to hit exactly the right spot, it could shore up a weak link.

"In spite of the complexity of human beings," concludes Richard Cutler, a veteran researcher at the NIA's Baltimore lab, "there may be just a few [chemical processes] that govern longevity."

U

ntilage 40, Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro lived a life of culinary excess. But after that, he subsided on a mere 14 ounces offood a day. Shortly before he died in 1566, at age 102, he published a series of essays explaining his secret: "Not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health."

If you are middle-aged now, the work of Rose, Floyd, and other researchers is likely to benefit your children or grandchildren. In the short run, heeding Cornaro's advice is more likely to help you live longer.

After centuries of obscurity, the nobleman's thesis is enjoying a surprising renaissance. It began in 1934, when two Cornell University nutritionists published a small-scale study showing that rats that were consistently underfed-but not starvedlived twice as long as those allowed to eat as much as they wanted. For many years, no one bothered to pursue this lead seriously. But in the past decade the field has exploded, with dozens of studies confirming the 1934 report.

"I can increase both the average and maximum life span of my rats by at least 40 percent," declares Richard Weindruch, associate director of the aging institute at the University of Wisconsin and one of the leading experts on calorie restriction.

He divides rats into several groups and feeds the groups different amounts of nutrient-rich food, from all-you-can-eat to just above starvation. The bottom line: No matter what the precise composition of the rats' diet, the less they devour, the longer they hang around. Better yet, their chances of getting cancer plummet. Why these things happen is not well understood.

"Calorie restriction is the only method that has been repeatedly shown to increase the maximum life span of mammals," the 44-year-old professor emphasizes.

That may be true, but naysayers see another side of the experimental coin. Perhaps the all-you-can-eat rodents, locked in cages with little to do, are gorging themselves into early graves-and skewing the results. Says Sprott, "The human equivalent would be comparing someone on a diet to someone eating Twinkies [a cream-filled pastry] all day long."

Sprott, whose agency funds Weindruch's research, believes that the effect is too pronounced to be all wrong. One logical way to settle the matter, of course, would be to compare the eating habits of the caged rats to wild ones. But because that's hard to do, Weindruch and others are repeating their tests on monkeys, whose eating habits and natural life span are closer to those of human beings.

Unfortunately, the verdict won't be in for more than a decade. But even if the skeptics are vindicated, it doesn't mean the diet has no value. After all, who's to say some people aren't

FREE RADICALS

Just as a car engine generates unwanted exhaust fumes when it burns fuel, your body creates harmful byproducts in the process of using energy. Each day of your life, your internal organs generate around 10,000 million "free radicals"-products of natural processes such as breathing and digestion. Like rust gnawing at the frame of an old Chevy car, these molecular marauders will attack and damage almost any cell surface if nothing stops them. When you are young, your cells contain the biological equivalent of "rust protectant," biochemists theorize. But as you age, this protection inexplicably fades, and your cells are overwhelmed.

AGEs

A second theory holds that glucose in the body combines with various profeins to create tiny lumps of mustard-colored goo called Advanced Glycosylation Endproducts (AGEs). Scientists theorize that AGEs not only harm vital organs but also damage DNA, -R.L. destroying cells' ability to maintain themselves.

eating themselves into early graves as well?

Rather than wait until researchers have conclusive results, many people are venturing out on their own. "Every week I get a call from someone who wants to try the Qow-calorie] diet," says Weindruch. He himself has not adopted a special diet; a veteran of 15 marathons, he burns so many calories that he can't afford to cut his food intake. But his graduate-school mentor, Dr. Roy Walford of the University of California at Los Angeles, has become a human low-cal guinea pig. The 70-year-old physician and gerontologist recently emerged from Biosphere 2, where he and his seven cohabitants followed a low-calorie diet he designed. The Biospherians lost a lot of weight during their two-year stint in the giant greenhouse, but it's impossible to tell whether any of them will live longer because of their altered eating habits.

Rose, not surprisingly, favors a grander approach, which¡ he calls the Methuselah project. First, he says, researchers should repeat his selective breeding experiment on mice-animals that are biochemically similar to human beings. The next goal of the project would be to pin down the genes responsible for longevity.

Finally, Methuselah would design drugs that recreate the effects of these genes in human beings. "Every year we delay this project is another year people are going to die sooner," Rose says.

More cautious researchers note that it took nature millions of years to create people-and the things that kill us. In hoping we can start reversing the process within decades, Rose and other optimists may be underestimating nature.

For that matter, even if Rose or Johnson does come up with a pill that, in theory, lets thirtysomethings live to be one-hundredthirtysomethings, in practice, it will still be a century before anyone knows for sure.

In 'the meantime, there is at least one prudent thing to do: Eat more vegetables. Like Tom Johnson's roundworms, they're full of antioxidants.

0 About the Author: Robert Langreth is an associate editor with Popular Science magazine.

How satisfying to have the title of your book become part of the language.

Paul Krugman had that satisfaction with his The Age of Diminished Expectations (The MIT Press). First published in 1990, a new and revised edition of Diminished Expectations was issued last year, then followed in short order by Peddling Prosperity (W. W. Norton). His latest book is afrontal attack on what Krugman calls the policy entrepreneur-"the economist who tells politicians what they want to hear." These entrepreneurs, he says, range from left (Robert Reich and Lester Thurow) to right (Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski).

Krugman, 41, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) , defines himself as a liberal"that is, J believe in a society that taxes the well-off and uses the proceeds to help the poor and unlucky"-but he says that the 'fault line between serious economic thinking and economic medicine, between the professors and the policy entrepreneurs, is at least as important as the divide between left and right."

A.J. Vogl, editor of the business and management magazine, Across the Board, spoke by telephone to Krugman at his office at Stanford University, where he currently serves as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Business.

DRIfT, DIVERSION, AND SNAKE OIL A.J. VOGL: In Peddling Prosperity, you argue States exports only about ten percent of its Economist Paul Krugman that the common view of international tradegross domestic product. If you were to create a casts a cold eye that it's a war with winners and losers-is similar number for General Motors (GM)on government that deals wrongheaded.

What's the ratio of exports to the gross PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes. A lot of people corporate product of GM?-it actually with trivial issues seem to think that countries compete with turns out to be more than 250 percent; in major ways and major each other in the same way that corporations that has to do with the fact that we measure issues in trivial ways. compete with each other. One of my favorite output by value added. So first, then, the quotes on this comes from a speech President United States or the European Union-or Clinton made to Silicon Valley workers in Japan, by the way, which is not that depenwhich he said America is like a giant corporadent on international trade either-are bation competing in the global economy. That's sically economies that 90 percent produce a view that makes a lot of sense to people if things for their own use. they don't think about it too hard.

Unlike Coke and Pepsi, big national units But it's really very wrong. I like to explain are each other's main customers and main why by comparing the way Coke and Pepsi suppliers as well as each other's main competrelate to each other to the way that the United itors. As I said, if Pepsi does well, that's purely States and Western Europe relate to each a competitive threat to Coke. That's it: Purely other. If you were to look at Coke and Pepsi, adverse impact. If the European Union does you'd say they were rivals. There's no reason well, that does increase the competitive presfor Coke to see a silver lining in success on the sure on U.S. products, but it also expands the part of Pepsi. A negligible fraction of Coke market for U.S. exports, and it also improves sales are to Pepsi workers, and a negligible the supply of goods to you as a consumer. fraction of what Coca-Cola workers buy are On balance, it's at least as likely to help the Pepsi products. So as far as these two companies are conUnited States as to hurt it; in practice, it turns out that the cerned, they are selling similar products in a market, and if one impact of international competition on the living standards in of them succeeds it's to an important extent at the price of the the United States-or, for that matter, Europe or Japan-has other. It is really a kind of zero-sum game. been very small, roughly a wash. So the prevailing view of Now look at the United States and Western Europe, or the opinion leaders-that our basic problem is lack of international European Union as we have to call it now, and ask if we're competitiveness-is just flatly not true given the facts. competitors in the same way. In the first place, we're not dependent on international trade. An economy like the United

vasiveness, and also its persuasiveness? A lot of supposedly smart people-not all oj them politicians, by any meansbecome downright eloquent speaking about our trade deficit, the importance of establishing a level playing field with Japan, and so on.

Put yourself in a position of a CEO of a corporation that does sell on world markets. Now, you've got to keep your eye on the ball that's relevant for your company. If your company has a foreign competitor or there are several foreign competitors in your market, that's what you're going to be paying attention to. That's an effect: It's really true that you face that foreign competition. However, the other effectthat we are both producers and consumers, and you as a consumer buy foreign products-well, that's much more diffuse.

That's not your immediate strategic concern. So it's a terrible thing to say, but I think CEOs have got, necessarily and correctly, what you might call a worm's-eye view of international competition.

They're down there in the trenches "fighting a foreign rival head to head," to quote Lester Thurow. They don't have any particular reason to back up and look at the relationships between the economies and see they aren't really competitive at all.

All right, if this international-trade contretemps is a diversion, from what is it a diversion?

Let me first say there's a certain limited amount of attention that the government can give to issues. If the Cabinet members are spending most of their time in meetings talking about the next moves in our trade war with Japan, they're not going to be talking about how we should fix the health-care plan so it actually will work.

Now, there are three levels of damage. The first level is just misplaced priorities. Look at the very limited amount of support for technology development.

Where's it going?

It's almost entirely focused on manufacturing, which is the sector most favored by the Clinton Administration because it's the sector that tends to compete in international markets. Well, there's nothing wrong with trying to support manufacturing, but the truth is that ours is mostly a service economy. And the place where we have the most disappointing productivity growth is the service sector. For example, we'd do more for our living standards in the United States by working on the office of the future than by figuring out how to use robots in factories.

What's the second level of damage?

If you've got this misguided belief that international competition is what it's all about, then you naturally develop a kind of belligerence about trade policy that can easily spin out of control. It's not that we don't have valid complaints against the Japanese, but we have valid complaints against lots of people and countries for lots of things. That doesn't mean we commence hostilities against them. It's very risky playing hardball at the level we're playing, because once you get into a trade war,

it's extremely difficult to get out. We've seen that happen historically: Once countries descend into a spiral of retaliation---even if only a year or two later they realize it was all a mistake-it can take decades to undo the damage.

The third level is more diffuse but I think very important: An administration that believes in something that isn't true-and anyone who does his homework realizes it isn't true-will find it hard to make sensible policy, even in areas that don't seem to have anything to do with that belief.

In Peddling Prosperity, you criticize both the supply-siders in the Reagan Administration and the people whom you characterize as strategic traders in the Clinton Administration. Why don't you put these criticisms in context?

The context is simply the 20-year-old stagnation of middleclass living standards in the U.S. economy. That's the starting point, and then there have been two popular movements that have proposed explanations for this stagnation--eures that look to people like me like economic snake oil. supply-sidersIn the I970s, we had a group of people-the who said the reason why the U.S. economy is in trouble, the reason why we're not managing to achieve the kind of growth that we achieved between World War IT and about 1970, is big government. The whole problem, they said, is that the tax rate is too high, and if you just cut taxes everything would solve itself; and, in fact, cutting taxes is such a wonderful medicine for the economy that you don't even have to worry about finding spending cuts to pay for the tax cuts. Just cut taxes.

This was a view that was really coming from only a couple of professional economists, but was enthusiastically picked upfirst by the editor of the Wall Street Journal and then by a wing of the Republican Party. I think it's safe to say that as late as 1980 most establishment people, even in the Republican Party, had a hard time taking this stuff seriously. When Ronald Reagan announced that he favored the supply-side platform, his then-contender for the Republican nomination, George Bush, called it "voodoo economics."

But it was, in fact, adopted under the Reagan Administration-huge tax cuts without any compensating spending cuts.

And, in the end, we discovered it didn't do anything for our long-run problems. Real wages for many workers continued to decline, the long-run rate of the growth of the economy remained inadequate, and poverty continued to rise. And we had a new problem that we didn't have before: A $4 trillion federal debt and an intractable budget deficit that has now become a permanent feature of our economy.

At some point, the strategic traders succeeded the supplysiders?

Yes, they emerged during the course of the 1980s as a kind of liberal counterpart to the supply-siders. They wanted more government, not less, but they also had a very simple explanation of what all our problems were about. This time it wasn't

the government: It was foreign competition. And by adopting an aggressive policy on trade, by promoting high-value industries, we could solve all our problems. In the view of the strategic traders, we weren't doing what was necessary to compete in the global marketplace.

Like the supply-siders, the strategic-traders group really contains just a handful of economists, but it struck a chord with some politicians.

And, again, I think it's fair to say that it wasn't really taken seriously by the establishment.

children have a better chance of being born healthy. A relatively small amount of money, because the poor are very poor, can make a big difference there. Of course, you need to structure poverty programs so that they don't provide incentives that lock people into poverty.

I think we understand, or I thought we did-God knows what we understand now, given the way political discourse is being dumbed down-that saying, "Well, there are a lot of low-wage workers out there whose wages are really not enough to get them above the poverty line, so let's increase the minimum wage"-is a counterproductive measure. Yes, those people who still are working will be earning more, but you'll also reduce the number of jobs available. That's an example of screwing up the incentives. Instead, for example, you want to provide earnedincome tax credits. Beyond that, we can hope that by improving basic education we not only make our population more skilled but make the distribution of skills more equal, although I have my doubts about how much we can really do on that level.

Well, if you don't have the hubris required to offer guaranteed solutions, you do have the confidence to tell us what our principal problems are. In your book you say there are really only two.

One is that our productivity rate, which averaged 2.5 percent a year in the postwar years, up until about 1973, has been more like one percent a year since. That doesn't give you very much margin to have rising living standards.

The second problem, which is related to the first, is that we have growing poverty, which is the consequence both of the fact that the Improving education along the lines you deoverall pie is growing slowly and that the scribe-that requires a rather long-term view, distribution of the pie is getting more and One thing that's doesn't it? more unequal. People at the bottom have had quite clear is All of these things require long-term views. a quite rapidly falling share of national inIf I had to zero in on our problems even come, and we're pushing more and more that you can help further, I'd say the one that holds the greatest people over the edge into a really appalling poor people. You concern for the future of the United States is state of poverty, given that we are still a can at least not simply poor people but poor childrenvery rich country. children growing up in poor families, children We don't have any magic solutions. Proalleviate some of who are caught up in a culture of poverty. If ductivity is the very hard problem. One of my the conditions of you say you're going to try and deal with that, favorite comments on productivity growth really impoverished then, almost by definition, there's not going to comes from Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate be visible payoffs in gross national product for at MIT, who said that in trying to explain families.

20 years, not until these kids really are part of differences in productivity performance the productive labor force. across countries and across time, we usually end up in a blaze of amateur sociology.

I suspect that many executives who read what There's a lot we don't know about productivyou've just said will feel a sense of deja vu, of ity growth. The best you can say about it is frustration. It seems that we've put so many antipoverty programs that there's a checklist of things we ought to be doing. It makes in place, but what have we got to show for it? no sense for us to complain about low growth while continuing Fair enough, but let me say two things: First is that while to run large budget deficits, so taxes should be raised and we've had a zillion programs, relatively small amounts of wasteful government programs, like farm subsidies, should be money have actually gone to poor people. So, if you ask cut. We should reform our deeply distorted health-care system. how much support does the United States give to people who We should make greater use of innovative schemes like taxes on are earning very little or who are unable to work, by comparpollution and congestion that exploit the power of market ison with any other advanced country, we're spending very, incentives. No one can tell exactly how much better offwe'd be very little. if we did the things on this list, but there's certainly no lack of Second is to understand it's a hard problem and try to do a things to do-probably the most important being the eliminabetter job of it. Admit that it's one of our two big problems. tion of the budget deficit and working on basic education.

Keep our focus on it.

With poverty we have many more levers to use if we're serious about it. One thing that's quite clear is that you can help poor people. You can at least alleviate some of the conditions of Even with a sharp focus, you seem dubious about what government can do. In your book, in response to your rhetorical really impoverished families. For instance, you can provide question-How should the u.s. government set about solving the nutrition and medical programs for pregnant mothers so their

problems of productivity and poverty?-you reply, "The answer is straightforward: It shouldn't."

Sometimes we actually do know enough to be able to say, "Follow my advice and your problem will be solved." We could do that in the case of malaria, for instance. Other things being equal, it would be better to seek fundamental solutions to our economic problems, but it's no use insisting that economic policy face the big issues when you have no good idea what to do about them. Where I say that in the book I quote Raymond Chandler: Other things being equal, he said, the bigger the subject of a book, the more interesting it is.

But there have been some pretty bad books written about God, and some pretty good ones about making a living while staying fairly honest.

Reno, but he does it better than he does being an attorney general. That sounds trivial, but it's the reality: That a low-productivity country would love to be a high-productivi~ country, and should try to become one if it knows how, but the fact that it's got neighbors that are more productive is actually a plus, not a minus.

The second question: What happens to a country whose productivity growth lags that of its rivals?

That's a twist on the same thing, but it raises some different issues. In the United States, by the way, our productivity is still the highest in the world, but our growth rate has lagged behind it and other countries have been catching up. Let's try a thought experiment: Supposing that every nation in the world had one percent productivity growth, what would be the trend in our standard of living? The answer is tha t you'd expect it to rise about one percent everywhere. Now, just suppose that the rest of the world's productivity accelerates at three percent and we don't match it. A lot of people's instinctive reaction would be that The availability we're in big trouble; after all, a corporation that doesn't keep up with its rivals' productivof international trade ity gains is not going to stay in business. That means that you suggests our economic health is dependent on can concentrate on our rate of productivity growth relative to other nations. But think it through: To a doing the things pretty close approximation, the rate of growth that you do not as of our living standard equals the rate of badly as others-and growth of our domestic productivity.

Full Period.

How fast productivity is growstop. import the things ing elsewhere, and whether we're ahead or beyou're particularly hind the pack, is irrelevant. It's not a combad at doing. petitive game. We're competing against ourselves, not the world.

The connection between productivity and international competition is of keen and continuing concern to senior executives. In your book, you pose three questions about this relationship, then tell the reader his answers probably will be wrong.

The relationship between productivity and competitiveness is very different from a lot of people's gut reaction to it.

The first question: Are you in trouble if your productivity is worse than that of another country? If, for instance, your productivity is half that of the country next door, does that cause problems? Now, it's important to be clear about what we mean by causing problems. If your productivity is half that of your neighboring country, will your standard of living be lower than your neighbor's?

Of course it will. But that would be true if you had built the Great Wall of China between the two countries and there was no contact between them at all. Low productivity means a low standard of living. The question is: Does the fact that the neighboring country has higher productivity aggravate the cost of having low productivity in your country?

The answer is no.

If you look at the evidence and think it through, you discover that having a highly productive country next door at least offers you some opportunity to alleviate the consequences of your own low productivity-primarily because your productivity isn't going to be equally low across the board. So the availability of international trade means that you can concentrate on doing the things that you do not as badly as others-and import the things you're particularly bad at doing. The classic economist's example would be something like this: What if Janet Reno is actually a better typist than her secretary? Well, it still makes sense for him to do her typing and for her to run the Justice Department. Maybe he doesn't type as well as

For your third question you ask what's more important-productivity growth in sectors that J must compete with foreigners, or sectors that are basically producing for themselves.

Put it this way: Which would you rather have-a doubling of our productivity in the electronics industry or a doubling of our productivity in the fast-food industry? Again, most people's instinctive reaction is to say what matters most are the industries that are going head-to-head in world markets.

But, again, if you think it through carefully, the truth is U.S. living standards would benefit much more from an increase in fast-food productivity than in electronics, for the simple reason that we have many more people employed in fast food than we do in electronics.

But wouldn't our failure to be competitive in electronics contribute to our trade deficit?

It's a little hard to believe, because if we think about a

particular. industry, we may say, "If we get more productive, we're not running the kinds of deficits that would make the federal government insolvent in the lifetime of most of the we're going to be able to roll back imports and export more," but there's no particular connection between the level of readers of your magazine. productivity and a country's trade balance. To illustrate, look So much for a hard landing. On the other hand, we have a at Mexico. If you go back to the 1980s, when Mexico was in the happy-ending scenario, the return of a vigorous economy. To throes of a debt crisis, you'd find that during those years some extent the deterioration of U.S. performance after 1970 is Mexico was running big trade surpluses because the country's a mystery; and, since it's a mystery, who's to say the magic that mysteriously disappeared won't mysteriously come back again? economic prospects looked bleak. Nobody would lend it money. Bankers who had lent it money were demanding Sounds rather like wishful thinking. payment, and Mexico was being forced into running a trade Well, it's not entirely wishful. The most hopeful argument is surplus essentially to pay its bankers. It did that with a very the one made by Steve Roach, codirector of global economic weak peso, a very undervalued Mexican currency, plus a recession that depressed the level of imports. analysis at Morgan Stanley, which is that we are just about to After about 1990, as the reforms of the Salinas government actually start figuring out what to do with all this information took hold and people began to be much more optimistic about technology. We've got all these local-area networks, we've got all of these pes on everybody's desks, but we haven't really Mexico, and as some U.S. companies began demonstrating that changed the way our offices do business.

Mexican workers could achieve high levels But we're about to start. There's a historical of productivity, money began pouring into precedent-the use of electrical power in facMexico, which enabled it to import lots of tories, which was eventually a big source of capital goods, and it began running large productivity gain. We went from the old trade deficits. mechanical factory with huge arrays of axles Well, would you really want to say that and pulleys to the modern factory in which Mexico was highly competitive in the 1980s We've got all these most machines are driven by stand-alone moand became uncompetitive in the I 990s? Aclocal-area networks, tors. That meant a big improvement in the tually, that trade surplus in the 1980s was a we've got all of layout of factories, material flow, and so on, sign of weakness and the trade deficit that it but it took a long time for people to figure out has been running in recent years is a sign of these pes on how to redesign the factories to take advanstrength. It's a vote of confidence by intereverybody's desks, tage of the new technology. So you have to national business. but we haven't really believe that, sooner or later, this astonishing Let's conclude by looking into the future. information technology we've been developchanged the way our ing will yield a huge productivity payoff.

You've just published a revised and updated offices do business. version of your Age of Diminished Expectations But you say that the chances for such a and I note you still posit three possible scenarios happy-ending scenario are about 20 percent. for the 1990s-"hard landing," "happy ending," Yes. My estimates on that have been and "drift." Which is most likely? fluctuating. We had a very good productivWe could have a hard landing if interity year in 1992 and I thought this was the national investors pull the plug on our imcoming of the millennium. But now I think, well, maybe not ports of capital the way they did on Latin America in the 1980s. yet.'-Make that 25 percent. The interesting thing is that public I guess, given the current context, we should also throw in the possibility of some kind of really damaging impact stemming policy is not doing anything to make that happy ending more from the international-trade conflict, although I suspect that, likely. We're counting purely on the dynamism of the private sector and luck. even if it does get quite nasty, its effect will be more insidious than catastrophic. Then there's the possibility of an oil crisis: World consumption is up again, and we're as dependent as ever What should public policy be doing? on supplies from the Middle East.

Working on the big drags on our economy-productivity and poverty. Which leads me to the most likely scenario: That But let me say that the reason I don't put too much weight on we just don't really come to grips with things. We don't do hard-landing scenarios is that the U.S. economy is a very big, very robust entity. It's not easily triggered into crisis. We've anything major to control the budget deficit. We have a few tax seen its resilience in the face of everything from the 1987 stockincreases and spending cuts to hold the deficit within bounds to market crash to the oil crises in the past. And the kinds of avoid crisis, but don't really move significantly toward eliminating it. And we don't really do anything about educairresponsibility that we're engaging in-like the budget defition or poverty, except rearrange the rules a little bit. And cit-are not really world-class. That is, we're not running 0 Italian-level deficits, we're not running Brazilian-level deficits, nothing terrible happens.

Men of Air, New York, 1947 Silver gelatin developed-out prinr

35.1 x 23.6

em.

New York City, 1947 Silver gelatin developed-our print 23.3 x 19.1 em.

THE PHOTOGRPf'HY OF

ROBERT FRANK Couple/Paris, 1952 Silver gelarin developed-our print

19.1 x 33.2 em.

LESS MT MORE TRUTH 1

In a career that spans five decades, Robert Frank has redefined the boundaries of the art of photography. A retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., recently closed and will now tour muse-

ums in Japan, Europe, and New York. Titled "Robert Frank: Moving Out," the exhibit's 159 poignant and often unsettling photographs reflect Frank's lifelong search for truth in the commonplace and the mysterious.

rom his earliest photographs in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War II, up to his most recent work, Robert Frank has continually parted with artistic convention, producing images that have influenced the course of modern photography the world over. His early blackand-white pictures, raw and grainy "street photography," startled viewers with their bluntness and deliberate lack of balance. His more recent work is even less conventional; haunting, deeply personal composites, the photographs are the antithesis of refined and carefully crafted "art." Indeed, his work has always been moving toward what Frank himself calls "less taste and more spirit ...less art and more truth."

Born in 1924 in Zurich, Robert' Frank is the son of successful, middle-Class parents who took a keen interest in art. At the age of 17 he began an apprenticeship with two Swiss photographers.

From them he learned to shoot and process film and make technically perfect prints.

He left Switzerland in 1947 and immigrated to the United States in 'pursuit of greater freedom of thought and expression. He was hired as a fashion photographer for the magazine Harper's Bazaar, but he quickly became unhappy in that line of work and soon left to become a freelance photojournalist, traveling to South America and later Europe on assignment.

Using a 35mm Leica, he examined the cultures of Peru, Spain, France, and England.

F Parade-Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 Silver gelatin developed-out print 31.3 x 47.6 em.

London, 1952-53 Silver gelatin developed-out print 27.3 x 39.9 em

Mabou,1977 Silver gelatin developed-out prints with marker 50.3 x 80.2 em.

Mabou, Nova Scotia, 1977 Silver gelatin developed-out print 34.4

x 47 em.

He sought out situations that were mundane but left the observer with a sense of mystery, such as the child running down a fog-laden street in London (opposite page).

In 1953 Frank returned to the United States to, as he put it, "try to reach the top through my personal work."

Uninterested in commercial photography as a means of making a living for himself, his wife, and his two small children, he set out to capture on film a civilization that had become his adopted home.

Fellow photographers Edward Steichen and Walker Evans encouraged Frank to

apply for a Guggenheim fellowship, which he was awarded in 1955. His aim was ambitious-to document American culture. He spent two years traveling across the United States, shooting more than 20,000 photographs. Of these, he selected 83 to appear in his book, The Americans,

published in 1959.

Initial reaction to the book was negative; its controversial photographs were scorned as anti-American. Frank had made no attempt to remain objective; instead, his pictures reflected his reaction to the social and political condi tions he saw beneath the veneer of

Mabou,1979 Silver gelatin developed-out print with acrylic paint 51.1 x 60.6 em.

post-War optimism portrayed by such popular magazines of the day as Life and Look. In a recent New York Times interview with Richard B. W oodward, Frank reflected on his photographs of America during that period: "They had another tone, the pictures. One became aware of white cities, black people, no money, no hope. The noise.

The violence. How brutal people were. A brutal country.

Still is. And I began to be part of it."

He saw, and photographed, AJmericans who suffered from alienation and racism. He depicted politicians as disingenuous, and establishment religion as commercialized and crass. The beauty he found in America lay not in majestic landscapes or in the hackneyed symbols of patriotism, but in the gas stations and juke-box diners along the country's highways, and in religious gatherings in the Black South (page 25).

Art critics gradually began to appreciate The Americans as an eloquent and provocative commentary on Am~rican society, and by the 1960s it had become the Bible of modern art photography.

"The book galvanized successive waves of artists," writes Woodward, "and not just photographers.

Tune in to any beautifully bleak, high-grain, low definition MTV video, and you're probably watching refracted

Look Out For Hope, Mabou-New Silver gelatin developed-out 60.7 x 50.6 em.

York City, 1979

print with ink

Robert Frank."

Shortly after publication of The Americans, Frank abandoned still photography and began to work in film. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he helped introduce a new era of avant-garde filmmaking.

His raw "cinema verite" style did not please everyone, however. After commissioning Frank to make a film about the Rolling Stones in 1972, Mick Jagger refused to let the film be released, recognizing that the explicit language and drug use depicted in it would only harm his and the group's public image.

To date Frank has made

more than 20 films and videos, including a series of what Woodward calls "emotional self-studies" in which Frank tries to make sense of the losses in his life, chief among them the loss of his 21-yearold daughter Andrea in a plane crash in 1974.

Her death was a factor in his return to still photography in the 1970s. Whereas his earlier photographs depicted his experience with a number of different cultures and societies, those from the 1970s and 1980s chart a more personal journey. They speak about his relationships with family and friends, and chron-

icle day-to-day life at his homes in New York City and Mabou, Nova Scotia. His style changed as well; he began printing two or more negatives on one piece of paper, and combining several prints in a composite work, taping or glueing pieces into place and scoring words onto the surface of the print.

Tn these later works the photographs themselves were not as important as what he did with them and how he presented them. He created compositions intuitivelytearing, cutting, and painting or writing on his prints. He merged reality and illusion into complex visual images in order to "destroy the descriptive elements," as he put it, and eliminate the aura of perfection surrounding art.

These techniques still dominate Robert Frank's photographs today, and the subjects of his most recent works draw upon his memories, his past, his present, change and continuity.

"Who and what Robert Frank is has never been entirely clear," writes"Woodward.

"He has remained a celebrated enigma for many years by switching to a new mode just as his audience has grasped the old one." Always, there has been the search for truth. Perhaps as a way of explaining this, Frank quotes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

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or serious students of international relations, a book by an author of Henry Kissinger's extraordinary accomplishments and renown should not be missed. His II th and latest, Diplomacy*, is in a class by itself, a kind of summing up that not only informs, but also guides and inspires.

Indeed, in its 900 pages the book packs a wealth of information and masterly analyses of some of the world's most significant diplomatic events.

Henry Kissinger sets the tone for this monumental study by asserting that in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values. This would be a rather sweeping generalization were it not for the fact that his primary focus'is clearly Europe of the past three centuries and the United States of the 20th century. Diplomacy surveys on a grand scale how two different traditions-the European and the American-have evolved, interacted with each other, and influenced in a decisive manner not only the course of international relations but the very nature of the world order.

The European tradition is embodied in the doctrine of raison d'etat (reason of state), which gave rise to the principle of balance of power and the concept of Realpolitik. The American tradition is rooted in the doctrine of American exceptionalism-the belief that the nation stood for something new under the sun, that its values were applicable universally, and that its destiny was to lead the world from the old to a "new order of the ages." The principle of collective security to' preserve peace and freedom has been a dominant factor in American thinking on foreign policy issues.

The vast scope and uncommon structure of the book are largely defined by the author's background. Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian villageof Fiirth in May 1923.By the time he was seven, the streets of his village were overrun by Hitler's young bullies. Heinz and his Jewish classmates were beaten up regularly. The Kissinger familyfledGermany in 1938 and came to America. Heinz, now 15, became Henry. He went to school in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City. Early in 1943he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served three years in counterintelli-

F

gence and one year as an instructor of German history.

In 1947he enrolled at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. He received a BA degree in 1950,anMA in 1952, and a PhD in 1954.

Those were the years when communism was on the move abroad-in East Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam-and the United States was in the grip of McCarthyism. These developments "may have seemed remote to many students at Harvard, but not to Kissinger whose own experience, in the words of jOlJrnalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb, "led him almost inevitably toward the strategy of Realpolitik, a belief that power was the elemental force in history." The crucial question was how power was to be used, and reflections on this. shaped his academic output-he held a variety of teaching positions at Harvard from 1951 to 1969-as well as his thoughts and actions thereafter. From 1969 to 1977he was National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State (holding the posts simultaneously for three years) in the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R, Ford, acquiring celebrity status in the process.

Henry Kissinger's own story, as biographer and political scientist Robert Isaak notes, "refutes the myth that individuals are of little importance in the world of politics of the nuclear age." The combination of formidable knowledge and experience at the highest levels of diplomacy distinguishes him as a statesman whose opinions on international affairs are widely sought, and received with respect if not always with agreement.

European Concepts Diplomacy is more about the philosophy of great power relationships, and about the politics of power, than it is about the theory and practice of diplomacy in the conventional sense. As a study of power and its uses, the book is equally concerned with the dynamics of leadership. Immersed as he is in European history, Kissinger gives an absorbing account of the great events and personalities that dominated the European scene from the emergence of the state system in the mid-17th

DIPLOMACY

century to its collapse before World War II. He describes the evolution in thought and practice of such fundamental concepts as raison d'etat, balance of power, and Realpolitik, providing in the process insightful glimpses of the life and work of statesmen he greatly respects-Richelieu, Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck. They all practiced power politics, and it is from them that Kissinger largely derived his values.

Richelieu, 17th-century French prelate and father of the modern state system, promulgated the concept of raison d'etat, which asserted that the well-being of the state justified the means used to promote it. National interest thus replaced the medieval concept of universal moral values. In his Political Testament, Richelieu wrote, "In matters of state, he who has the power often has the right, and he who is weak can only with difficulty keep from being wrong in the opinion of the majority of the world." Not surprisingly, the doctrine of raison d'etat became the guiding principle of European diplomacy.

The international order that emerged after the Congress of Vienna in 1814 was explicitly based on the concept of balance of power.

Europe experienced the longest period of peace it had ever known because "there was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one." Kissinger claims that Prince Metternich, 19th-century Austrian politician and one of the chief architects of the balance-of-power system, presaged U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the sense that he believed in a shared concept of justice as a prerequisite for international order. In practice, however, the

Henry Kissinger's new book presents masterly analyses of some of the world's most significant diplomatic events.

threat or use of force was an essential ingredient of the system and war "the supreme argument of reason of state." The operation of balance of power led in the 18th century to the great power partitions in Europe, and in the 19th century to the grabbing of vast territorial and human resources in Asia and Africa.

For two decades, Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire in the late 19th century, was the dominant figure of European diplomacy. That was when the German word "Realpolitik" replaced the French term "raison d'etat" without, however, changing its meaning. Bismarck sought to prevent challenges from arising by establishing close relations and overlapping alliances with as many parties as possible. In a remarkable exercise of Realpolitik he maintained good relations with both Russia and Great Britain even though the latter perceived its overseas interests threatened by Russian expansion in Central Asia aimed at India and Constantinople. By 1890 the balance-of-power concept had reached the end of its potential. With the rise of democracy around the same time, public attitudes toward foreign affairs also changed. As Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann put it: "Diplomatic issues moved from the calculations of the few to the passions of the many."

American Pragmatism Kissinger makes the point that "At no time in its history has America participated in a balance-of-power system. Before the two world wars, America benefited from the operation of the balance of power without being involved in its maneuvers." This I found puzzling. However, relief replaced puzzlement a few pages later where Kissinger states that "the Founding Fathers showed themselves quite ready to manipulate the despised balance of power when it suited their needs; indeed they could be extraordinarily skillful at maneuvering between France and Great Britain not only to preserve America's independence but to enlarge its frontiers."

The chapter on "The New World Order" begins on a familiar note: In the 20th century no country has influenced international relations as decisively and at the same time as ambivalently as the United States. No nation has been more pragmatic in the day-to-day conduct of its diplomacy, or more ideological in the pursuit of its historic convictions. The

American experience has produced two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy.

The first is that America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting as a beacon for the rest of mankind; the second is that America's values impose on it an obligation to crusade for those values around the world. Both attitudes envision a global order based on democracy, free commerce, and international law. Irt any event, there is a national disposition to look upon freedom and security as natural rights.

The triumph of Woodrow Wilson's ideas over those of Theodore Roosevelt was a critical turning point in American and world history. "He [Roosevelt] insisted on an international role for America because its national interest demanded it," Kissinger asserts.

For Wilson, "the justification for America's international role was messianic: America had an obligation, not to the balance of power, but to spread its principles throughout the world." In his first State of the Union Address, Wilson outlined what later came to be known as Wilsonianism. Universal law and not equilibrium, national trustworthiness and not national self-assertion, were the foundations of international order. There was no essential difference, in Wilson's view, between freedom for America and freedom for the world. Roosevelt understood how international politics worked, but it was Wilson, as Kissinger says, who not only responded to the wellsprings of American motivation, but took it to a new and higher level. Wilson's brand of idealism did not imply any denial of national interest. On the contrary, as historian John L. Gaddis says, "No one had ever combined the fact of self-interest with the appearance of disinterest more skillfully than Woodrow Wilson." That his principles have remained the bedrock of American thinking on foreign policy issues is a tribute to his genius in articulating the American Dream.

The Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was another innovative era in American diplomacy. Kissinger has written with feeling about FDR's qualities as leader: "No President, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, has made a more decisive difference in American history." Roosevelt's role in moving his isolationist people, step by step, toward committing themselves to ensuring the defeat of Hitler's Germany is one of the finest illustrations of leadership in a democracy. Roosevelt

dreamt of a cooperative international order based on harmony, not on equilibrium. His commitment to the United Nations was no less profound than was Wilson's to the League of Nations, but Roosevelt understood that perfectionism and power politics could block the path to international peace. "This was the President who propelled America into a leadership role internationally, an environment where questions of war or peace, progress or stagnation all around the world came to depend on his vision and commitment."

This creative impulse in American foreign policy was evident in the post-World War II years as well. While all other great powers were in ruins, America emerged as the superpower with military, economic, and technological capabilities unparalleled in history.

Had the sole concern of the American nation been domination and the politics of power, it could have ensured its supremacy by adopting means more aggressive than containment against communism. But American values dictated a policy that combined elements of idealism and realism, largeness of spirit and confidence in its strengths, humanitarianism and pragmatic understanding of its long-term interests. Some of the remarkable manifestations of this policy were the Marshall Plan, the Point Four Program, Open Skies, Atoms for Peace, the Alliance for Progress, and the Peace Corps. As Kissinger writes: "The postwar world became largely America's creation, so that, in the end, it did come to play the role Wilson had envisioned for it-as a beacon to follow and a hope to attain."

The chapters on the Cold War and on containment are among the best essays written on these subjects. The story of how George Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" became instrumental in reshaping Washington's view of the world at a crucial moment in history continues to fascinate (see SPAN, February 1994). The Truman Doctrine provided an unambiguous rationale for the containment policy and marked a watershed in American diplomacy. I am glad that Kissinger decided to include a memorable account of his only meeting with Harry S. Truman, in 1961, because "it captured so completely Truman's quintessentially American nature: His sense for the majesty of the presidency and the responsibilities of the President, his pride in America's strength, and above all, his belief that America's ultimate calling was to serve as a fount of freedom and progress for all mankind."

In Kissinger's view, the containment policy wasted precious time by abjuring negotiations during the period of America's greatest strength-while it still had the atomic monop-

oly. The policy did see America through more than four decades of construction, struggle, and ultimately success, but it became overextended and a heavy price in "blood, sweat, and tears" had to be paid. Vietnam was not only a military and foreign policy disaster; it caused large-scale domestic upheaval and left deep scars across the body politic. "It all began with the best of intentions." Could there be a more poignant opening to the journey on which Kissinger takes us through the tortuous passages of the Vietnam episode?

With the ending of the Cold War, the Soviet Union turned overnight from one of the strongest to, as Kennan had predicted in 1947, "one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies." Victory without war was what America achieved, a victory which, Kissinger says, has now obliged it to confront the dilemma described by George Bernard Shaw: "There are two tragedies in life: One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it." Fashionable though it is to quote Shaw, one wonders whether in this instance it is not a case of rhetoric getting the better of reason. By winning the Cold War does America find itself in such a tragic, no-win situation? The debate goes on. Recently, the Cold War has been called by John Gaddis "The Long Peace," by political scientist G. John Ikenberry "The Long War."

Short Shrift for India A regrettable shortcoming in this otherwise brilliant analysis of the international scene is Kissinger's tendency to equate Asia with the Asia-Pacific region. For instance, when Kissinger states that America's capacity to shape events and to preserve equilibrium in Asia will depend primarily on its bilateral relations with the major countries of Asia, he means only China and Japan. He makes no bones about his admiration for China: "China is on the road to superpower status"; "of Jail the great, and potentially great, powers, China is the most ascendant"; "equality of status, a fierce insistence on not bowing to foreign prescription, is for Chinese leaders not a tactic but a moral "imperative." He is even ready to accept the view that "China welcomes American involvement in Asia as a counterweight to its feared neighbors, Japan and Russia, and-to a lesser degree-India."

Now this does sound strange to us: India a neighbor feared by China!

Discussing the international system of the 21 st century, Kissinger foresees that the new order "will contain at least six major powersthe United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably India." He does not elucidate this' qualified recognition of India's stature and potential as a major power. A

better acquaintance with India's history, sensitivity to her national ethos, and of the changes that are taking place in contemporary society would have resulted in a more positive appraisal of India's potential as a major international player and partner.

It is possible for instance that Kissinger is unaware of the long tradition of Indian statecraft and diplomacy. One of its most accomplished exponents and practitioners, Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, lived in the fourth century B.C. A brilliant statesman and pragmatist, he rose to be prime minister to Chandragupta, founder of the powerful Maurya empire. In his celebrated treatise the Arthashastra, Chanakya presaged Machiavelli's Prince (1532) in enunciating many of the principles that inform diplomacy and governance today. At the least, half a dozen other learned works on Indian polity have come down to us from ancient times.

This is only one of the many facets of the rich heritage that binds the people of India together as a modern nation and as one of the oldest civilizations.

Whatever the reason, Kissinger's infrequent references to India reflect an ambivalence toward the country and its people.

One example should suffice: The two events in 1956 that transformed the postwar pattern of international relations were the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising. Kissinger is unsparing in his criticism of all the major and Soviet minor players in the episodes-the Union, Great Britain, France, Israel, Egypt, the United States, the Arab nations, and the nonaligned countries. After accusing India, among others, of being partial and subjective in its approach to the events, he concedes that "India's reaction [to abstain from voting for the U.N. resolution condemning Soviet acts in Hungary] was entirely in keeping with the practices of Realpolitik. "However, ha ving got that off his chest, apparently he could not resist taking a swipe at Indian diplomacy:

"India did not conceive of foreign policy as a debate in the Oxford Union, however its diplomats might pretend that they were in the discriminating audience with the right to choose a winner purely on the basis of moral merit. India's leaders had attended schools in England and had read American classics. They combined the rhetoric of Wilson and Gladstone with the practices of Disraeli and Theodore Roosevelt. From the Indians' point of view, this made eminent sense as long as their interlocutors did not delude themselves into thinking that Indian rhetoric was a guide to Indian practice, or that Indian foreign policy was governed by abstract, superior morality."

These Kissingerian hyperboles are reminiscent of the sparkling banter and the verbal duel that characterized many a social gathering in Washington of the 1970s at which he presided with great aplomb and with obvious delight in being the center of attention. The gibe he aims at the Indian style of diplomacy underscores the intractable gap between rhetoric and practice, between promise and performance. No political or cultural tradition can claim total immunity from it. So let us leave it at that and urge our two nations to enlarge the areas of collaboration. Indeed, more and more policymakers, diplomats, and others on both sides seem committed to doing just that in an atmosphere of growing interdependence and mutuality of interests.

Defining National Interest America, Kissinger suggests, will finally have to face the challenge it has been able to avoid through most of its history: "Whether...it must at last develop some definition of its national interest." The guidelines have been there for a long time. The crucial years of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution provide a classic example of the inspiring power of wise political leadership. America's Founding Fathers combined idealism and realism-what historian Bernard Bailyn has called "this spirit of pragmatic idealism." Under this influence, the primary goals of American foreign policy have been amazingly constant. It is the means employed to realize them that have changed with the circumstances.

The goals could be summarized thus: Safeguarding national security; preserving international stability; promoting democracy, freedom, and open markets; curbing transnational threats; and responding to humanitarian needs of other peoples. With regard

to the means, there is, for instance¡, greater reliance now on economy and trade and on public diplomacy to enhance American prosperity at home and influence abroad. Public diplomacy is at last moving toward the center stage of foreign policy because it is identified with new sources of power-power of knowledge, power of intellect, and power of communication.

We may thus say that American foreign policy reflects the nation's pragmatic tradition and that this way of defining its national interest has enabled the United States to achieve its objectives more consistently and at less cost to its people than any other great power of modern times. Indeed American diplomacy has demonstrated an impressive capacity for adaptation to change, for creating new opportunities, and for innovation in pursuit of its goals.

What about the future? In a short time, the environment of diplomacy has been transformed by momentous developments such as modern technology, the collapse of communism, and the great proliferation of new states of different types. The Wilsonian principles of self-determination are as outdated and dangerous as the old concept of nationhood based on common language and culture.

As Kissinger surmises, it is the continental type states-India, China, Europe, Russia, America-that will probably represent the basic units of the new world order. Already power is diffused, and the emerging international system poses a greater range of challenges for American diplomacy than ever before.

Understandably concerned about the dangers inherent in Germany and Russia getting together or at each other, Kissinger emphasizes the importance of strengthening the special relationship between the United States and Europe. He makes the point that without America, Britain and France could not sustain the political balance in Europe; a strong Germany would be tempted by nationalism, and Russia would lack a global interlocutor. Fair enough; but then he overstates the case adding: "And without Europe, America could turn, psychologically as well as geographically and geopolitically, into an island off the shores of Eurasia." What does he mean by that? An island like today's Japan and 19th-century Great Britain, or a nonentity? Is America still utterly dependent on Europe for its identity as a great nation and civilization? How does this scenario tie up with his subsequent estimation that "the Western Hemisphere seems on the verge of turning into a key element of a new and humane global

order" and that ÂŤa Western Hemisphere-wide free trade system-with NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] as the initial step--would give the Americas a commanding role no matter what happens"?

Kissinger raises questions about the propriety of America "applying its domestic values to the world at large." What are these values? The list is long, but our purpose will be served by recalling that the Revolutionary era produced the basic American values of freedom, equality, rule of law, and the well-being of ordinary people. These are now widely recognized as universal values and as the primary source of inspiration for the worldwide movement toward democracy. The problem therefore is not America's advocacy of its values but the manner of their projection abroad, which at times tends to be preachy and out of tune with indigenous models or local sentiments. Kissinger is right in stating that "world leadership is inherent in America's power and values, but it does not include the privilege of pretending that America is doing other nations a kindness by associating with them, or that it has a limitless capacity to impose its will by withholding its favors."

The reach of American influence is immensely greater than many of its own policymakers realize. One of the most important tasks of diplomacy in the new era is to make maximum use of international institutions for developing collective approaches to common concerns. The United States is uniquely qualified to provide the lead in reinforcing the international system. In fact the United Nations, which symbolizes the international system, cannot succeed without strong U.S. support and involvement.

More than any other nation in the world, the United States has created the basis for an unprecedented degree of international cooperation, prosperity, and freedom. The challenge now is to find new ways of cooperating with other nations and establishing relations of mutual benefit and trust to achieve shared goals. A combination of pragmatic idealism, dynamic equilibrium, and interdependence will enable American diplomacy 0 to meet this challenge.

About the Reviewer: Ambassador Inam Rahman, retired from the Indian Foreign Service, recently spent several months in the United States doing research for a book in progress with the working title, "Groping for the Stars: America's Genius for Change. "

A Reverence for Space

The late sculptor Donald Judd fled New York for the West Texas town of Marfa and turned it into modern art's most unlikely outpost.

The West Texas sunlight plays against the exquisite aluminum sculptures (right) in a converted artillery shed at Fort D.A. Russell (above), a former military post just outside Marfa that became a permanent exhibition space for Judd (left).

I

nMarfa, nothing fractures the vastness of land and sky. Among the towns scattered across the Big Bend region-Alpine, Marathon, Terlingua, Shafter, and Fort Davis-none is as far removed from mountainous peaks as Marfa. The Cuesta del Burro Mountains to the south and the Davis Mountains to the north seem, from their distance, like vaporous mirages. Still, flatness never had this much character. The air is gentle on the lungs, the plateau is cactus-spiked and well-trodden by antelope, and the starlit evenings are a communion with heaven. Marfa is a land for Reprinted with permission from the July 1994 issue of Texas Monthly.

Copyright

Š

1994 by Texas Monthly.

those who are spare of words and who wish to keep their distance. Tourists visit to wander through the region where Giant was filmed, to stroll through the Spanish-style Paisano Hotel, and to search the sky at night for the bizarre Marfa lights. But space is the adhesive that holds Marfans to their community.

It is a reverence for this wide-open space, if nothing else, that the great minimalist sculptor Donald Judd had in common with his neighbors. For Judd's visionary artwork, however unconventional it might appear, ultimately seems perfectly placed under the endless West Texas sky.

After dying of lymphoma at age 65 this month last year, Donald Judd was buried at

his 18,000-hectare ranch, some 80 kilometers south of Marfa. The Missouri-born Judd first laid eyes on the town in 1946, while on a bus bound for California. Twenty-five years later, at the height of a fabulous (if controversial) career, the internationally celebrated artist packed his bags, said good-bye to New York, and moved permanently to Marfa.

Judd left New York City because he loathed its claustrophobic feeling, its art sycophants, and its museum directors who, he felt, were clueless when it came to his precise and elegant works. He also moved to Marfa to work. In Marfa, Judd pursued, with a perfectionist's deliberate pace, the art that won him international renown: Sleek free-standing metal

and Plexiglas sculptures, with emphasis on industrial precision; spare modernist furniture; and coolly dignified architecture ranging from gallery interiors to stock tanks.

Though he produced paintings, sculptures, and architectural projects in venues as scattered as Manhattan in New York, Basel in Switzerian.d, and Cologne in Germany, it was Judd's contemporary artwork in Giant country that the New York Times labeled "among the largest and most beautiful in the world."

What Judd left behind in Marfa amounts to a tremendous collection of artistic treasures, ranging from his own paintings and sculptures to beautiful Navajo blankets, avant-garde works from Iceland and Korea, and early 20th-

"."mom ,~, 35

century furniture. The artist's work is carefully exhibited in seveml of the 17 buildings he bought and restored, a's well :as throughout the l40-hectare Fort D.A. Russell at the edge of town. Some of the exbibits have been and continue to be open to the public; the I'est ,of Judd's art is expected to be available for viewing after his estate has been ·sorted out. Judd's collection provides a rich cultural addition to the many places to visit on an extended West Texas weekend, which might include hiking through Big Bend National Park, stargazing at the McDonald Observatory, checking out the country acts at Terlingua's Starlight Theatre Restaurant and Bar, and availing oneself of the creature oomforts at the Holland Hotel in Alpine and the Gage Hotel in Marathon.

Dallas-based photographer Laura Wilson had unprecedented access to the reclusive sculptor's world. This was no small feat, as Wilson learned when she first visited Judd in November 1993. "He was ornery, testy, and wary of people, a very withdrawn man who felt uncomfortable being photographed," she says.

Judd's wariness evaporated after Wilson gave him one of her photography books depicting a 90-year-old West Texas rancher. The following day, he showed up early for the shooting and allowed Wilson to stay for a week.

Judd purchased. restored. and worked in the old Marfa National Bank building. He placed butcher paper over the windows to deter snoopers.

•••••• --:~------

Judd's most striking works can be seen by ,any visitor. He converted Fort D.A. Russell, a former military post and German POW camp, into a permanent exhibition space. What was once the gymnasium is now a metal-roofed arerra and reception area, with long pinewood tables and even longer zen like gravel floors.

But the fort's most astounding spectacles are the two artillery sheds with Quonset-style roofs that house 100 aluminum box sculptures, placed in precise rows on each side of the sheds' stark cement columns. By replacing the brick walls with windows, Judd has achieved a breathtakingjuxtaposition of his sleek objects with the raggedy Marfa landscape. In an uptowngallery, the boxes might seem cold and stoic. But the effect is oddly yet undeniably harmonious when poised against the plateau.

At dawn, the sculptures radiate bronze and copper; under the evening light, they maintain a dimly silver glow. At any time of day, however, the artillery sheds reflect an awe of space and proportion. It becomes immediately apparent why Donald Judd took refuge here.

Though he had a circle of friends in Marfa, Judd was not an easy man to get to know. One friend, Big Bend Sentinel editor Robert Halpern, observes: "Don was a very shy man, as well as a very purposeful artist. So a lot of folks viewed his shyness and his singlemindedness and misinterpreted him as being standoffish." It did not help matters that Judd plastered the windows of one of his buildings,

the old Marfa National Bank, with butcher paper to ward off the curious or that he maintained a long-running feud with his next-door neighbor, whose ice-making machine Judd found infuriatingly noisy. To this day, many in the region know Donald Judd only as the man who bought the popular Kingston Hot Springs and promptly closed them to the public.

The sculptor's generosity was real but measured. Every October, Judd threw an expensive weekend-long party that was well attended by Marfans. Yet he was a reserved host and shied away from the meeting and greeting. To the townsfolk, Judd was a wealthy landowner, but he had two additional strikes against him: He was an outsider, and his artwork was forbidding to the average resident. Halpern believes that most of the local Judd critics "never took the time to see his work." Some of those who did gained a new outlook on the man, while others shook their heads in bewilderment. Both the artist and his art had to be taken on their own terms.

Because of his low profile, few Marfans knew how deeply Judd cared about their town.

He was an active follower of local issues and enjoyed talking Marfa politics with his friends.

Deeply committed to preserving the area's environment, Judd considered hiring an attorney to fight the City ofEI Paso when the latter bought a farm in nearby Valentine that sat over a precious aquifer. He purchased the 18,000-hectare Ayala de Chinati Ranch in large part to rule out the possibility of development in the Chinati Mountains.

Among the numerous projects he contemplated were plans to boost the Marfa economy, such as marketing Highland Hereford beef, bottling and selling the local water, propagating chemical-free agricultural products, and renovating several vacant homes for use as a subsidized retirement community.

Fortunately, Judd's Chinati Foundation not only remains in operation but continues to develop new artistic projects. His children, Flavin and Rainer Judd, say that many more of their father's art objects exhibited and stored throughout the world will be moved to Marfa, making this dusty town an astonishing repository of modern art. Though such additions would give a boost to Marfa's hobbled economy and prompt warmer sentiments among local Judd detractors, no one need fear that the money of Donald Judd will be used to clutter the town's landscape. This is, after all, minimalist country.

0 About the Author: Robert Draper is a senior editor of Texas Monthly.

Judd's outdoor sculptures contrast the smooth and rectilinear with the rough eternity of the Marfa landscape, while his library blends stark splendor and functionality.

Brooldyn Museum's Heroes Recent visitors to the Brooklyn Museum in New York City were treated to an exhibition of Indian miniature paintings dating from the 15th to the 19th century.

The exhibition, entitled "Realms of Heroism: Indian Paintings at the Brooklyn Museum," featured more than 80 paintings from the museum's permanent collection. Its central theme was hero worship, depicting the hero as warrior/adventurer, ruler, or Hindu deity.

The paintings, most of which were commissioned by Rajput or Mughal royalty, portray the heroic deeds for which the rulers wished to be remembered. Hindu mythological subjects, like their mortal counterparts, are shown sitiing on thrones, surrounded by devotees, or engaged in a battle against the forces of evil. The "romantic hero" is exemplified in paintings that show the exploits of Lord Krishna as a young man, or the lovers' stories found in the Nayika-nayaka literature.

Most of the paintings in the exhibition were illustrations for manu-

Welcomgroup's quarterly travel magazine published from New Delhi, has won the prestigious Golden Bell Award from the Hospitality, Sales, and Marketing Association International (HSMAI), headquartered in New York City.

Competing with some 1,400entries from 47 countries, Namaste was awarded the Golden Bell for the second year in a row. The awards, presented annually to publications in the travel and hospitality industry, are considered to be the most important measure of excellence in travel trade communications.

Editor Monisha Mukundan credits much of the magazine's success to its designer, Gopi Gajwani. One of India's bestknown graphic artists, Gajwani, we are proud to say, works at the U.S. Information Service in New Delhi He frequently contributes drawings and cartoons to SPAN.

scripts, and were probably created by more than one artist in a workshop setting.

The artists used water-based paint, applied in multiple layers and burnished between each layer to produce a translucent effect. When the painting was complete, gold and silver paint, gold leaf, or even iridescent beetle wings were applied over the color, giving it a luminous sheen and jewel-like quality.

The Brooklyn Museum's interest in Indian miniature painting dates back to 1914, and its permanent collection now contains 275 paintings and 85 drawings from the 400-year period covered in the recent exhibition. A wide range of educational and cultural programs accompanied the display of paintings, among them interpretations of the Ashta Nayika stories, entitled "The Romantic Heroine," by Bharatanatyam dancer Swati Bhise.

Medical Journal Editor

Namaste,

Dr. Ajit P. Varki, one of the medical profession's most acclaimed specialists in hematology and oncology, teaches medicine at the University of California in San Diego. He has published many papers relating to his cancer research and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout the world. In 1991, Varki was elected editor of the prestigious Journal

of Clinical

Investigation

(JCI), which was begun in 1924

A resident of the United States since 1975, 43-year-old Varki originally hails from Kerala. He attended Bishop Cotton

Boys' High School in Bangalore, and did his medical studies at Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore, earning his degree in 1975. Now residing with his wife, Nissi, also a doctor trained at CMC, and their 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, in San Diego, he is the first foreign-born, foreign-trained doctor to edit the JC/. In an interview during a visit to Madras, Varki said he believes that his selection exemplifies the lack of discrimination in the higher echelons of the American academic system, in which an individual's.merit counts most.

His job as editor of JCI entails choosing articles from among approximately 2,500 submissions a year. He works with a staff of 13 associate editors. Under Varki's leadership, they make a special effort to be fair to contributors from outside the United States, who often face disadvantages of time and distance in discussing the status of their manuscripts with editors.

"By policy we try to publish only well-documented and nonspeculative work, selected from contributions received from around the world. This is one of the reasons JCI is greatly respected in academic circles."

The journal has about 6,000 subscribers worldwide.

Varki has done extensive original work in cancer research and has contributed many scientific papers at seminars and conferences throughout the world.

His work occasionally brings him to India, which, he says, gives him great personal satisfactionand the chance to see his parents, who live in Madras.

-Jalboy

Joseph

ON

THE LIGHTER

"There will be no economic report tonight, as our economic correspondent is incoherent."

SIDE

"And if granted absolute power, I promise not to abuse it. Trust me."

RighI: Delense Secrelary William J. Perry calls on Prime Minisler P. V. Narasimha Rao. Beloll".¡Perry pays homage al Ihe Al1IarJmran Jyoli. a memorial 10 Ihe Unknown Soldier in Nell' Delhi. Far righl: Perry and Home Minisler S.B. Chavan exchange documenls ller signing an agreemenl on defense cooperalion.

Above: The secrelary greels officers afler observing join! army and air force exercises al Jodhpur.

Lefr: Perry addresses Ihe Uniled Service InslilUlion in Nell' Delhi.

America Wants Stronger Security Ties With India u.s. Secretary

of Defense William J. Perry visited India January 12-14. In addition to meeting with President Shankar Dayal Sharma, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, and top defense and civilian officials, Perry spoke with the press and traveled to Jodhpur to observe army and air force exercises. While in New Delhi he signed a minute with Minister of State for Defence M. Mallikarjun on defense relations between India and the United States that covers "civilian-la-civilian cooperation, service-to-service cooperation, and cooperation in defense production and research, " according to the official text. Perry also visited the United Service Institution in New Delhi where he delivered a major policy address, an abridgment of which we present here.

I

want to start off by giving a global overview of the United States' defense and security policy. And then from that, I want to focus on security issues in South Asia. And I want to specifically talk about areas where I think there are opportunities for expanding the security ties between the United States and India.

Finally, I want to explain why the United States places such a high importance on the issue of nonproliferation in this postCold War era.

I start with this fundamental fact: The

end of the Cold War has completely changed the security equation not only for the United States, but for the entire world. During the Cold War, the policy of containing the Soviet Union drove almost every aspect of our security thinking, planning, and action. And our overriding goal was preventing a nuclear holocaust.

During the height of the Cold War, the Russian nuclear physicist, Andrei Sakharov, said: "Reducing the risk of annihilating humanity in a nuclear war carries an absolute priority over all other considerations." And it did. That was what guided our security policy during the Cold War. The United States had a total commitment to nuclear deterrence.

Today, the Soviet Union, whom we were deterring, no longer exists. But in the post-Cold War security era, the security problems for America, for Russia, and, indeed, for the rest of the world are both very different and more complex. First of all, the world is more interdependent economically, both with good effects and bad effects on the potential of conflict. On the one hand, increased trade forges important bonds between former adversaries. But at the same time, the growing world trade in illegal narcotics tears at the fabric of both producing countries and consuming countries. The challenge of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction seems to loom larger every year. And across the globe, "ethnicity"-what the former American Ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called the "great hidden force" of our age-is hidden no more. It rips old states apart, and causes the sometimes viole.nt birth of new ones. And as these and other conflicts multiply, the role of international peacekeeping effort grows in importance.

America cares about these problems, first of all, because we care about our own self-interest. But we also care because we have a more general, and a broader, interest in trying to help build a new and a better world; a new world in which democracies based on law and economies based on market can thrive and flourish.

Protecting America's interests in this new era means having security policies that are pragmatic, flexible, and directed at no

one. During this era we have no enemies.

Nowhere are the new challenges of the post-Cold War security era more demanding, or more potentially rewarding, than here in South Asia. Here, all of the characteristics and problems of the post-Cold War security environment can be found at once. And nowhere have the removal of Cold War restraints opened up more opportunities than in South Asia-especially for the United States and India. We want to develop stronger security ties with India and with other states of the region. Stronger security ties can help us develop common understanding and approaches to the threats to democracy and stability, such as proliferation and narcotic trade. And stronger security ties will also help us tackle important challenges, such as United Nations peacekeeping.

First and foremost, we share an interest in the security and stability of the Indian Ocean region. We also share an interest in the stability of the Persian Gulf region. And we share an economic and a political interest in a stable and economically open Southeast Asia and Western Pacific region.

Additionally, the economies of both of our countries depend absolutely on freedom of the seas. This reliance will only grow as our economies become even more global in their markets and in their sources of supply.

Finally, both of our countries are bearing a heavy burden in United Nations peacekeeping efforts, with our military forces sometimes serving side by side. Because of this, we share an interest in making peacekeeping operations work better.

No two countries can'Jhave an exact identity of interests, and certainly our two countries do not have this exact identity of interests. But with these very real, very pragmatic mutual interests serving as the strategic basis of our relationship, we can build an American-Indian security relationship that is both strong and stable.

An important component of a healthy strategic relationship are military-to-military ties. Today, Minister Mallikarjun and I signed an agreed minute on defense relations which will go far to advance these constructive relations. This agreement allows us to build trust, and by building

trust, these ties will allow the U.S.-India relationship to be a force for stability in the entire region. One way they build trust is by helping both sides understand each other's defense policies and strategic intentions. This is what we call transparency.

The agreed minute calls for expanded cooperation and contacts between our top civilian defense officials and our top military officials. India is a large country with a proud and an independent spirit. Your capabilities in all areas, including the military area, are very impressive. But we welcome your assurances about the peaceful and defensive focus of your defense program. Nevertheless, it would be helpful to nations throughout Asia-and to the United States-if your defense budgeting and strategic planning were more open and visible to the outside world. We have nothing to fear from a better understanding of each other.

Of course, we understand that this is a two-way street. We want you to know about United States planning. That's why I'm pleased to come to India personally to help this process along.

The agreed minute will also pave the way for gradually increasing cooperation in defense research and production.

I need to point out that this will not be an area for immediate, bold steps. For now, arms transfers and joint technology development cannot be our primary areas of cooperation.

The United States greatly appreciates the active and generous contribution made

by India to UN peacekeeping missions.

We express our sincere condolences to India for the seven peacekeepers and three medics who lost their lives in Somalia.

Americans too suffered losses in that country. So, we understand the difficulty in sustaining political support for these missions in the face of casualties. South Asia generally has been a major supplier of forces for UN peacekeeping efforts.

Another area where we can make important contributions is joint training and exercises. Our two militaries have already conducted several joint exercises and they've been quite successful. The United States welcomes the opportunity to do more.

A very important benefit of increasing

'>AN """""~,

41

J

the cooperation between our two militaries is that it will make us more efficient, effective, and safe when we work together in UN peacekeeping operations.

We should also look for the ways to spread the lessons we have learned from past peacekeeping operations, and from our joint training, to other countries, particularly other countries in the region.

I've described for you the type of security relationship that the United States would like to develop with India. At this point I need to emphasize that improvement of relations with one country need not be at the expense of good relations with another. I've just come from two productive days in Pakistan. While I was there I reiterated that the United States remains a friend of Pakistan. We have a strong and long-standing interest in its security, its prosperity, and the development of its democratic institutions. I believe that India does also.

Right now the United States is also in the process of expanding our security ties with China. China's booming economyby some estimates now the world's third largest-makes it a strategic power which cannot be ignored. But I want to emphasize that just as America's growing security ties with India are not a threat to Pakistan, America's growing security ties with China are not a threat to India.

Hopefully, the United States' growing security relationship with China will contribute to an atmosphere in which effective dialogue can take place on issues of critical importance-such as missile technology transfer, human rights, and economic reform. Our growing security ties to China will include military to military ties-but it will not include arms or technology transfers.

Finally, I'd like to address the topic of nonproliferation.

There can be no doubt that in the post-Cold War world, the role of nuclear weapons has changed dramatically. Now, more than ever, it is incumbent on the world's responsible nuclear powers to set an example. Containing and reversing the spread of nuclear weapons is a high priority for the United States. I want to stress that in our discussions and in our interest in nonproliferation, we are

not singling out South Asia on this topic-our efforts in this area span the globe. And we've had some important achievements recently.

In 1988, in his famous address to the UN General Assembly, your late Prime Minister [Rajiv] Gandhi committed to a goal of denuclearization.

In just a few years since then, the United States has reduced its strategic nuclear warhead stockpile by almost 50 percent; and our nonstrategic nuclear force by a full 90 percent. That is, we've reduced it 90 percent from what it was during the Cold War. The United States is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear weapons a year-a rate limited not by political will, but by physical capacity.

The START I treaty, besides greatly reducing the arsenals of the United States and Russia, also entails the complete renunciation of nuclear weapons by three other states-Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. We also think it is an important achievement that China this year agreed not to make transfers of missiles that violate the rules of the missile technology control regime.

No informed observer can reasonably dispute that South Asia-India and Pakistan specifically-present special questions on the world's nonproliferation agenda. India and Pakistan are two great nations which have fought three wars against each other since their independence. That's why it is so important that the governments of both countries work hard to carefully manage any tension between them. But the fSlct that they now both have nuclear programs that make

them nuclear-capable states, raises the stakes dramatically. Consequently, South Asia must have a place on the world's nonproliferation agenda.

And this agenda needs to address delivery systems as well as weapons.

We recognize India's need for a capable defense. We also recognize that for India the nuclear question does not just involve¡ what Pakistan does or does not do, but involves China as well.

Certainly, there are a number of areas where the United States and India share the same goals. For instance, we look forward to continuing to work with India on a comprehensive test ban treaty and also on a global halt to the production of fissile material, the raw ingredients for nuclear bombs. But the United States continues to see the extension of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty as a critically important national security interest of the United States. And we will continue to seek the support and participation of like-minded states. In 1954, Prime Minister Nehru observed: "The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction." His comments, of course, at the time, were directed to the two superpowers. But now, in the post-Cold War era, his words also apply to regional powers with nuclear potential, such as Pakistan and India.

History has given the United States and India a historic, new opportunity. I'd like to summarize my comments on this opportunity by quoting a favorite author of mine, Graham Greene. He once wrote that there always comes a moment in time when a door opens and lets the future in.

The end of the Cold War has opened such a door. In particular, it has opened such a door in South Asia. The future that comes in could be a future of continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. Or, the future could entail evolving coexistence leading to peace and stability in the region. I can only hope that India and Pakistan will choose the right future. And I hope that the new security relationship between India and the United States will allow the United States to playa useful and a constructive role in helping India and Pakistan to a better future.

0

Mission Aeeomplished Top-Level U.S. Trade Delegation Accelerates Business Ventures With India u.s.

Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown led a delegation of top American business executives and governmel1l officials to India last month, giving a major boost to Indo- U.S. trade relations. During stops in Delhi, Bangalore, and Bombay January 14-20, delegation members signed contracts or agreemel1ls totaling more than $7,000 million with Indian organi::ations in the fields of power, telecommunications, health care, environmel1l, petrochemicals, insurance, and financial services.

In New Delhi Brown met with Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, among many other government officials, andjoined Minister of Commerce Pranab Muk/1eIjee in signing an agreement creating the United States-India Commercial Alliance.

This organization of government and business officials is tasked with finding, Brown said, "a new and flexible means of bringing together business and governmel1l" and "challenging all of us over the next two years, at a minimum, to lay thefoundationfor the closer commercial ties which we seek. " In Bangalore, where he met with Chief Minister H.D. Deve Gowda,

It is my honor and pleasure to be here with you this afternoon. I have been in India with a delegation of 26 chief executive officers of American companies and senior officials of the Clinton Administration.

We have focused on meetings with officials of the Indian government, including the Prime Minister and a number of other ministers as well as captains of industry. I thought it was terribly important, if I really wanted to know India and

Brown held a roundtable discussion on technology with businessmen, spoke to studel1ls at the Indian Institute of Science, and gave several il1lerviews to the press. In Bombay, he met with Chief Minister Sharad Pawar, spoke to business organizations, held a press conference, and visited the Bombay Stock Exchange to make a practice stock purchase on its newly computerized trading system.

On the evening of January 17 in New Delhi, Brown did something that no other visiting foreign government official has ever done in India before. He held a "Town Meeting" at the Indian Institute of Technology (lIT) auditorium (below), answering questions from an audience of students, professors, small business el1lrepreneurs, social activists, and others. Sponsored by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the U.S. Information Service, the meeting was televised live by Doordarshan. In the give-and-take with the audience, Brown covered most of the points that he made in speeches and press conferences during the rest of his visit. Presel1led here is an abridged transcript of the "Town Meeting."

understand India, to talk to people from all walks of life. Not only talk to them, but to listen to them. To get a sense of what is on your minds, what your concerns are, what your perspectives are, what your views are, and to give you an opportunity to ask me questions.

In the United States, we call these sessions town hall meetings-meetings where people have an opportunity to ask questions of their leaders and to get responses. There is no kind of setting that makes me happier or gives me more comfort, where we can have free and

open exchange, particularly with a diverse group-students and professors, entrepreneurs and working people. And to have it telecast live makes it very special because it is historic, something new, and something that demonstrates the vibrancy of India, an open and free society.

Let me just say one or two more things before I take your questions. India is a very special place with a very special history and a very special culture. A culture that too few people around the world know about, too few

people in th United States knov. about even though there are over one million Americans of Indian descent. This has been an opportunity for us to connect in a very special way with the Indian people. An opportunity for us to overcome too many years of apprehension and distrust and to build a new era of real, deep, and sincere friendship.

I would like to just mention to you where we started our visit. The first stop that we made v.as at another special place, the cremation site of Mahatma Gandhi. I thought it was important for business leaders. for senior government officials to go there, to feel in an emotional way part of the important history of India and its liberation and quest for freedom and equality. We know that this year marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Gandhi.

The day that we went was also the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. And that speaks volumes to the conneCllon that exists between our two countries. Two great men, princes of peace and nonviolence. Two men who had a profound impact not only on their own countries but on the entire world.

Who responded in a unique way to a unique set of circumstances.

Who really didn't exercise power in the traditional way, but yet exercised it in a very effective way. A way that lives on. But not only is our connection cultural and moral. our connection is also economic. The world is a different place than it was just a short time ago. We are now all inextricably tied together.

Sir, in what way, if any, is the U.S. investment going to benefit the small-time businessmen, the entrepreneurs who don't have the resources, the capital, nor the background or the experience to compete with the seemingly threatening monopolistic multinational corporations?

I see you don't like the multinational corporations so much. There is no way in my judgment for people who live in poverty, for people who are struggling to make ends meet, to have a chance to improve their lives unless the economy of India is growing. I think the challenge is to ensure that as that economy grows, the growth includes all of the people of India. That is something that nations around the world struggle with. not just India. The United States struggled with that as well. In recent years, in the United States, there has been a growing gap between rich and poor.

One of the things that President Clinton is most concerned about is how we target our resources to those people who need resources the most. It takes a combination of things, it

takes giant companies, it also takes small entrepreneurs.

Those giant companies deal with all kinds of businesspeople, men and women, businesses of all sizes, that are crucial to their ability to grow, to create profits, and to reinvest those profits in plant and equipment, in research and development so that more people can be employed. Economic growth if it is going to reach all the people has to come in all kinds of ways, generating enat the community level, maktrepreneurship ing sure that small businesspeople can become medium-sized businesspeople. making sure that large corporations understand that they have a corporate responsibility for the wellbeing of the people of their country. that they cannot survive or exist in a nation that is destabilized because its social fabric is torn asunder. So I don't think it is an either/or. It is a question of doing things right. creating economic growth. and assuring that that growth reaches all of the people of your country.

I represent one of the oldest women's nongovernmental organizations in India-All India Women's Conference. We have got a lurking fear in our minds. With the opening up of the economy, the structural adjustment policy, and intellectual property rights, the women at the grassroots, the rural women, may be losing, because women are the poorest of the poor ...

Let me start a response to this. India will gain, the people of India will gain. The fact is there is profound change going on, not only in India but all over the globe. I would submit to you that change is irresistible. It has to do with the globalization of the marketplace. We need to adapt to that, we need to adjust to that. We do need to be concerned about dislocations which do occur because of the globalization in the marketplace.

They occur in the United States, they occur in India, they occur all over the world. But things are neyer going to be as they were. There is no way that we can maintain the status quo. We have to learn to embrace change as our friend. We need to make sure that we use technology to create economic growth, to create new opportunity.

Let me give you an example. About a decade ago, in the United States, there was a raging, often hostile, debate between those who had as their priority economic growth and job creation, and those who had as their priority environmental stewardship. It was as if never the twain shall meet. We have found a decade later that we have created a whole new sector of the American economy. It is called environmental technology and it employs hundreds of thousands of Americans in jobs

that did not even exist a decade ago.

So it seems to me that one responsibility of the leaders of any society is to help prepare people for the jobs of the 21 st century, not the obsolete jobs of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s. If India is going to grow and prosper it has to respond to those changes. They have little to do with trade agreements and policy discussions. They have to do with the realities of a new global marketplace. India has got to find a way to be more productive and more competitive just as the United States has to find a way to be more productive and more competitive.

And by doing that India will provide new opportunities to raise the standard of living of all of its people. But because these changes are so dramatic, there needs to be a special sensitivity to those who are apprehensive, and feel that they would be hurt by them. There needs to be a way of government communicating with people to see what the real problems are, what the real dangers are, and how new opportunities can be provided for such people.

I am a fourth year student of biochemical engineering in lIT Delhi. When the Mexican economy opened up, the country went through an initial phase of high inflation and high budgetary deficit. Our economy opened up three years ago but, fortunately, we are still talking of only two-digit budget inflation. My question to you, sir, is that what prevents us from going through the same high budgetary deficit and inflation as Mexico? After an economy opens up, the relationship between a developing country and a developed country is more like that between a prey and a predator.

First of all, I do not believe there is any comparison between Mexico and India. And I think much too much has been said pessimistically about the economic future of Mexico.

Mexico has a strong economy. Very strong fundamentals, very strong foundations.

The Mexico of 1994 is not the Mexico of 1982.

Because of economic reform, Mexico can weather a storm. I predict to you that the Mexican economy will come back, and it will come back strong because of the economic reforms that have taken place. There is no economy in the world that does not go through periods of change. It is often like a roller-coaster ride. We have economic downturns in the United States when unemploy-

ment goes way up, inflation goes way up. But you have an adaptable economic system that is able to adjust to those changes. Without that and without playing to compete in the global economy, nothing can happen but a downward trend.

It is impossible to protect an economy, particularly one as big as the Indian economy.

Protecting that economy is not an option. The global marketplace will not permit or allow that. What India has to do, I repeat, is to be more productive, to be more competitive, to join the global marketplace as a coequal.

There are things that India is going to be able to do better than any other country in the world. And there are things that India might not be able to do as well as some. But India has many advantages. Nine hundred million people, highly educated segments of the population, particularly in science and technology, a highly motivated workforce, a strategic location in the world. And now, competition among other countries trying to be involved in commerce' in India and competition within India itself. Competition encourages investment which India badly needs. Competition improves the quality of products, it gives consumers more options, and it also lowers costs to consumers. I believe that India is on the right track and one of the things that makes me, and I think our entire delegation, feel so good about this visit is the fact that economic reform has clearly taken hold. I believe that it is irreversible in India. And from our conversations with Prime Minister Rao today, we were encouraged by his tenacity, by his vision of the future, by his willingness to pursue economic reform in a way that makes sense for the Indian people.

I am on the faculty of lIT Delhi. Up to the 1970s, most land grant and state universities in the U.S. gave almost free education to state citizens. Do you think that was good for the economy?

It was great for the economy. It was one of the best things that the United States government did at that particular time in American history: Building institutions of higher education that were accessible to the masses of the people. I think it is one of the reasons why the American economy has grown and been able to prosper. It is one of the ways in which we have been able to close some of the social gaps within the United States-people who lived in rural areas haci the same kind of access to higher education as people who lived in other parts of the country.

I am a student at lIT. Seventy percent of India is still in the villages. Do you think that

opening up to the global marketplace will help the rural poor?

Well, obviously most of my knowledge is based on the American experience. There has been a tremendous shift in the population of the United States away from rural communities toward urban and suburban communities. Forty or 50 years ago, 60 or 70 percent of the American people lived in rural areas.

We became much more productive as far as the production of agriculture is concerned. So, now, we are in effect the breadbasket of the world. It did take fewer people to produce more and more agricultural products. Many of those people migrated to other parts of the country. To maintain a situation which is not economically competitive, I would submit, is counterproductive.

As I said in response to one of the other questions, it is impossible in the world as it is today, to keep everything static, to maintain the status quo. The status quo is not an option.

The point is that India mayor may not have the holding capacity to let so many people get urbanized. We are talking about a totally different situation. I want to know whether Americans can really understand the situation.

I would submit to you it is not totally different. This doesn't happen overnight. This happens over several generations. And I believe that nations do have the capacity to adjust. No matter what happens from a public policy point of view, India will not have 70 percent of its people, 20 years from now, living on farms, living in rural areas. That will change. The question is, do we make it change for the better?

As compared to China, I think India has got a much better human rights record, yet India has not been given a special status as compared to China.

Indians are always discriminated against, even a skirt becomes a burning issue.

Why is that so?

Well, I don't agree with ydur assessment.

The United States is concerned with human rights and improvements in human rights all over the world. We are going to continue to have that concern [and] to express that concern publicly. We have done it in China, we have done it in India. I think India is a different situation.

India is a democracy.

There are institutions in place to deal with such issues. There is now a recognition of the fact that there is a human rights problem and the beginning of a process to deal with that problem. We ought to support that, we ought to encourage that, as we are doing. The United States does not just point a finger at India, or point a finger at China, we have a policy which

speaks to the issue of human rights all over the world. I don't believe that is something that works in opposition to our economic interests or commercial interests. We continue to pursue our commercial interests because that is good. for the American people, but we also pursue our social justice issues.

If you are talking about most favored nation (MFN) status, China for many years did not like the MFN status that they had. Now that we have a World Trade Organization, and now that we have completed the Uruguay Round-and India is a signatory to the Uruguay Round-there should be equalization in that regard. India is a member of the WTO before China, so China might argue that it is being discriminated against.

I'm on the facuIty at lIT Delhi. Do you have any proposals for the development of manpower, any alliances to bring that about? The second question: The Indian taxpayer contributes substantially to the education of Indian engineers and scientists in this country, and we have provided almost a million of them to the United States. Is the Indian taxpayer a shareholder in U.S. Incorporated?

Very much so. I think the greatest asset that any country has is its people. I think the United States is very fortunate to have a million Americans of Indian descent who have chosen to live in the United States. Many of them are professors or entrepreneurs, many of them are scholars. That's a good thing for the United States. I would also submit to you that that's a good thing for India. The fact is that those people now have a good deal of influence in the United States. Our delegation is made up of a large number of Americans of Indian descent. That gives us a real advantage in the global marketplace. We are now, as I have indicated before, more and more interdependent. Borders, as much as they cause conflict, are less and less important each year.

Your question about manpower is very important. One of the things we have to do is to make sure that we prepare our people for the future, that we have education, and training programs that prepare our people. It means that our society is going to have to

devote more and more resources to human development, to education and training. It means that corporations are going to have to take more of a responsibility for training and retraining their workers. Motorola spends more than $150 million a year for worker retraining. They do that not just because they are good corporate citizens, but they do that because it makes sense. It's the only way that they can have a workforce that is competent to manufacture the products that they manufacture. Many of the jobs that were good jobs at Motorola five years ago are obsolete today because of different manufacturing techniques, because of new technology.

I'm a student of Delhi Public School. There is a view, held by some people, that the very high salaries offered by MNCs could be a form of indirect trade warfare against Indian companies because if they try to match those salaries they'd almost be financially crippled. Could you please comment?

Well, again, you're dealing with the reality of the global marketplace. Your options could be to close off your economy, to not allow competition, to not give your consumers the options. I would submit that if you do that you are going to have a declining economy and more and more poverty in India. What you have to do is deal with that reality. How can

you mesh the realities of the Indian economy with the realities of the global economy?

We've spent a lot of time over these last several days talking about small and medium-sized businesses. Everything isn't being done by the giant corporations. And, as a matter of fact, in the United States most of the giant companies are downsizing, they are employing fewer people. That downsizing is very painful, it is wrenching. It is causing all kinds of problems in America. The fact is, if those companies did not downsize they would not be competitive and they would be out of business within five years. They'd be employing no one.

There are small companies that grow, that take a giant leap forward and become medium-sized companies, and then become big companies. That kind of activity is impossible

u.s.

Clockwisefrom left: Ambassador Frank G. Wisner (center) with executives Keshub M ahindra (left) and Pralhad Chhabria at a dinner sponsored by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry; Captain D.G. Mathur (left), managing director of Air India, shakes hands with Richard Albrecht, executive vice president of Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, sealing an agreement to purchase two 747¡400 aircraft; and Secretary Brown lights an oil lamp at a ceremony to inaugurate computerization of the Bombay Stock Exchange. Ambassador Wisner is at upper right.

to stop. But it does mean that we have to focus on small and medium-sized companies because they're the ones who are growing, they're the ones who are employing more and more people. And it seems to me that it would behoove India to try to think through how you use this spirit of entrepreneurship, how you use the strength of small companies to mesh, to interlock with some of the larger companies that are also coming on to the scene here.

"Those companies need suppliers, they need joint venture partners, they need all kinds of smaller companies to work with them. They can't do it by themselves.

I'm a local businessman here. Most U.S. companies when they go beyond U.S. borders, become environmentally unconscious. We have a terrible example in Union Carbide. Within the U.S., the federal government makes sure that they don't become environmentally unconscious. What measures, if any, can the U.S. government take [here)?

Let me answer two ways. First, I'm not sure it's fair to use an example which is an old example. There have been a lot of changes since then. Secondly, every American company that signed an agreement as a result of this mission is meeting the highest standard.

There is a United States standard, there is an international standard, and there is an Indian

MAKING DEALS 1. Mission Energy and Tata Iron and Steel approve a $400 million agreement for 300 megawatt power plant in Bihar.

2. Officials of the Enron Corporation, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and the Industrial Development Bank of India sign agreementsfor a power plant in Maharashtra.

3. Officials of Cogentrix Energy and several U.S. and Indian companies sign memoranda of understanding in connection with.fly ash utilization facilities.

4 & 5. CEOs and senior representatives of government agencies finalize agreements in the energy and petrochemicals fields.

6. Light Helicopter Turbine Engine, a partnership of AlliedSignal and Allison Engine, agrees to provide turboshaft helicopter engines to Hindustan Aeronautics.

7. Y.K. Modi of Modi Enterprises and

Qualcomm CEO Irwin M. Jacobs establish a joint venture to bid on basic services telecommunications licenses.

8. Minister for Communicatio.ns Sukh Ram and Jack A. Shaw, CEO of Hughes Network Systems, approve a $5 million contract to assist in building and operating a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSA T).

9. Telecommunications Secretary R.K. Takkar and U.S. West CEO Richard D. McCormick approve a $/00 million pilot project to provide India with its first nongovernment operated telecommunications service.

10. Motorola CEO Gary L. Tooker (right) signed three letters of intent to build cellular telephone networks in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi.

11. Brown at a Delhi luncheon with Amit Mitra (center), secretary-general of FICCI, and Commerce Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

standard.

They have to meet down the road with a democracy than there is with a totaliwhichever is the higher stantarian form of government. dard, and in most cases it's goI'm a student in the Indian ing to be the American standard.

Institute of Foreign Trade. The We are absolutely confident that U.S. propagates free trade and in all of our discussions, with all globalization, but it is also being the commitments that have been said that the U.S. is a protecmade, that there is a concern tionist economy and starts to for environmental stewardship, slap on nontariffbarriers the mothere is a process for assuring ment the economy starts hurting. that that concern for the enA case in point are the increasvironment is demonstrated in ingly restrictive laws for Indian the work that these plants and software developers who are companies do. making their presence felt in the These companies want to do U.S. market, the backloading of business around the world. In the multi-fiber agreement phasorder to do business around ing-out in the GAIT, and the the world and be competitive, campaign relating to the inflamthey've got to be good cormability of the ghagra skirts. porate citizens. I mean, ifin fact Secretary Brown. with Ambassador Wisner to the rightJaces the You're right. We haven't gotsomething happens that is dispress outside South Block after separate meetings with Prime ten there yet. We are propotasteful in India, that would reMinister P. V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan nents of free and fair trade, but sound all over the world with Singh. He praised the Prime Minister as "a man of great courage we have some progress to make telecommunications as it is toand of great character who has set a course for India that is a in the United States, too. If day. You're not going to be able consistent course which is in the best interest of India and all of the we're going to promote open to compete around the world Indian people." During his meeting with the Finance Minister, markets, we need to make sure unless you are sensitive to these that ours are open as well. But Brown said, "... we applaud and revere your courage and your corporate responsibility issues. the fact is, that the United I'm an lIT Delhi student. In tenacity and your perseverance" in charting a course of economic States of America has the most the process of liberalization isn't reform. Brown thanked Singh for the support he had given to the open markets in the world, and there a risk involved that the trade mission, adding, "By any objective analysis or evaluation we what we're insisting on now is developed economies will treat have made extraordinary strides and laid the groundwork for the that the goods, products, and the developing and the underfuture. We said at the beginning, this mission is not a one-time services of other countries have developed economies as dumping event but we hope is viewed as the beginning of a new era in the free access to our marketplace, grounds for their products? relationship between our two countries. " that our goods, products, and Well, it works both ways. We services ought to have free acjust went through a big debate with the handicaps that are there between counin the United States-two big debates, really. cess to the marketplaces of other countries. tries and current laws?

The American multinationals that are coming One over NAFT A, the North American Free Every country that has handicaps also has to India are coming to make a profit out of the Trade Agreement, and one over the Uruguay Round of the GATT. And the position of advantages. Every country that has liabilities Indian manufacturing facilities. Will they also also has assets. The key is determining what many people in the United States is: "Aren't cooperate with and promote the small-scale we exporting our jobs to low-wage countries? those assets are and making¡the best use of them. industries here with respect to technology and That is what is happening all over the world. marketing?

Isn't that going to be the result of the They have to or they can't succeed in globalization of the economy? Isn't it going to What are the advantages that India has over mean higher unemployment in the United our competitors? this marketplace. Most American companies I'll try to articulate a few of them. One is States? Aren't these factories just going to pick that come to India, or any place else-the clearly a highly educated people in science and first thing they do is look for a joint up and move to the country that has the lowest venture partner, a local partner. The key wage rate?" Nonsense. Nonsense. Business technology.

A large population which is, therefore, a very good consumer marketplace. to success is establishing a connection with people have so many different factors that go into a decision about where they locate a A democracy, which tends to increase the the place in which your operation resides. plant. The key is productivity, the key is to comfort level of potential investors, because It's very difficult to be successful if you're have a highly trained, high quality, and there is a way for the society to let off steam in ¡not a good corporate citizen. Making profits a democracy, a way for it to adapt to change, a gives you resources to plow back into reproductive workforce. That is what makes an way for it to create long-term stability. One search and development so you make proeconomy productive, that is what makes an economy competitive. thing that investors want is predictability. ducts that consumers will want in the They want to be able to look ten and 15 and 20 future, to plow back into plant and equipIf you look at the world, there are countries and 50 years down the road. There's a much ment, to be able to hire more workers. That's with handicaps. Is it fair to expect them to better chance of being able to look 50 years what making profits means.

0 compete? Is there really a level playing field

As India's future unfolds, the demand for telecommunication and computing is

growing steadily. And, AT&Tis working closely with local partners to map out the nation's communication needs.

AT&T's wide range of technology will help connect the nation with a world-elass telecommunications

network. One that will fuel the growth of India's industry and

economy. It will allow for the easy flow of communications between individuals, businesses and markets in India and abroad.

It's all part of AT&T'scommitment to help improve telecommunications throughout India and around the world. After all, with over 100 years experience and the unparalleled achievements of AT&T Bell Laboratories, we are the only company that designs, builds and operates complete, state-of-the-art communications networks worldwide.

Our business is complex, but our vision is simple.We want to help bring people together, across India and around the world. Anytime, anywhere.

ATSaT

Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown started his visit to India by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat (left), where he was presented a set of books (left above). Brown and his delegation also visited two of the capital's most famous historical monuments, Red Fort (above and far left) and Humayun's Tomb (top and center far left).