May 1995

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SPANMaY/995 May I was Law Day in the United States. This is a yearly commemoration that President John F. Kennedy initiated in 1962 with a call for "increased respect for law and for the rights of others as basic elements of our free society." In his proclamation this year urging Americans to observe Law Day, President Bill Clinton said: "If we are to further advance thecauses of democracy and human dignity around the world, we must not falter in enforcing the rule of law here at home .... The legal community must help to restore Americans' sense of security and faith injustice. Most important, our laws must continue to fulfill our founders' ideals of fairnessand equality."

Criminal acts and the legal procedures to deal with them are always under scrutiny in America, but perhaps never more so than now in the wake of the terrorist bombing last month of a federal office building in Oklahoma and the highly publicized murder trial of celebrity athlete-turnedactor O.J. Simpson. SPAN has three articles this month that examine facets of the American legal system.

One is a picture story on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI. Photographs give glimpses of the intense training that agents undergo and the high-tech tools they use in crime detection and analysis. DNA testing has become an important example of the latter, and in a separate article science writer Jim Schefter explains just how it works. DNA analysis, which may well determine the outcome of the Simpson trial, is new to law enforcement but it already has had some remarkable successes. For instance, DNA analysis of saliva used to seal a letter envelope led to the detection and arrest of one of the suspects in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.

Legal expert A.G. Noorani reveals howan old American law, the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, has been applied to human rights cases. One of its most remarkable uses has been in the prosecution of foreigners in the United States accused of committing torture in their own countries.

"They cannot make the U.S. a retirement home because they will have to answer for their actions," says a human rights attorney. Noorani notes that America has fortified its provisions against torture and other human rights abuses by passing the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991 and adopting the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

As conditions change, so must the law to keep up with them. The process is never easy, something that is quiteevident now as the Clinton Administration, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, seeks broader powers to combat terrorism. Intense discussion is under way in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere over the need to ensure constitutional rights if expanded law enforcement authority is to begranted.

"The choice between civil liberties and a safe society is a false choice," Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick asserted in recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering new antiterrorism legislation. "We need not -and we will not - trade off the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to uphold our duty to 'insure domestic tranquillity.'"

-T.A.H.

2

Berea: A College Where Students Work

by Rudy Abramson

10 No Industry

Will Be Untouched

With C. K. Prahalad by A.J.

An Interviell'

Vogi

15 Outlawing Torture by A. G Noorani 18 DNA Testing on Trial bylimSchefter

22

America's National Crime Fighters

28 34 35 37

CornofPlenty

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Time, Women, & Sun The Little Magazines Norma

by Natalie Angier bylacquelinSingh

A Story by Sonia Sanche:

38 My Heritage, An Interviell'

My History

With Sonia Sanchez

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FocusOn ...

45 46

On the Lighter Side

by Asha S. Kanwar

Institute of Invention

50 Man

by Sandra Gurvis

Shoots Dog-The

Art of William Wegman

Front cover: Fay Ray, one of William Wegman's Weimaraner models, posed for Three x5l em.

Legged Dance, 1988,colorPolaroid,6l

Publisher, ThomasA. Homan; Editor, Guy E.Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Associate Editors, Arun Bhanot, Prakash Chandra; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rashmi Goel, Ashok Kumat; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Contributing Designers, Gopi Gajwani, Suhas Nimbalkar; Staff Designer, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS

Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-William Wegman, courtesy Pace MacGill Gallery/New York. 2-3-Kelly/Mooney Photography. 6-7-courtesy Berea College Public Relations.

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by Suhas Nimbalkar. 19 top-Cellmark Diagnostics; bottomLife Codes Corporation. 20-Cellmark Diagnostics. 21-Perkin-Elmer.

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BEREA: A COLLEGE

If you can afford to pay the tuition, you probably can't get in. Financial need is a major requirement for admission.

Teacher Sandra Redmon (above) works lI'ilh children al Berea:S child-care cenler; a fanner il1lern al Ihe cel1leJ; Redmon gradualed from Ihe New OpporlUnily School for Women before relllming IV leach jilil-lime. RighI: Berea sllIdenl Brian Jones lulVrs a communily olllreach program pupil.

~RESTUDENTSWORK

Above: The picturesque 56-hectare Berea campus sits on a narrow ridge in the eastern part of Kentucky, overlooking farmland and forests.

Here, a student strolls past the Draper classroom building.

Left: Tenpa Dhargyal, a junior who works ten hours a week, fashions a broom handle at the school

s broom

shop.

Linda Gadd declared her independence on a crisp, sunny morning in January 1989. She was then 35 years old and already a grandmother. She had been one often children of alcoholic parents who would disappear for days, leaving her in charge of six younger siblings. When she was 13, she had dropped out of school to marry a 21-year-old farmer in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. Her first baby arrived the following year, and by the time she was 20 she was the mother of five, consigned to a ramshackle farmhouse. Her life, up to that point, was a stereotypical Appalachian tragedy.

In the fall of 1987, a generation after she completed the eighth grade, Gadd fulfilled the requirements for a high school equivalency cet1ificate, but that accomplishment did nothing to improve her circumstances. Her interest in books and signs of personal aspiration, she felt, only made her husband feel threatened and angry.

So, she packed a flimsy suitcase and drove 16 kilometers up Scaffold Cane Road to Berea College where she enrolled in its New Opportunity School for Women.

Ensconced in a handsome old Victorian-style house near a stand of tall oaks where the college campus meets the town of Berea, the

school is a place for mountain women who are down to their last chance. Its founder and director is Jane Stephenson, whose husband, John B. Stephenson, a sociologist and Appalachian scholar, stepped down as Berea's president in 1994 after a decade in office.

Being a mountain woman herself, she had long known there were Linda Gadds throughout Appalachia-and in recent years, their numbers have been increasing.

They are poor, widowed, divorced, and sometimes abused; wives with dreams deferred, needing education, wanting jobs, wishing to change their lives but not knowing how to start or where to turn. To Jane Stephenson, helping them seemed an obvious undertaking for Berea, an institution mandated by its founders to serve the poor of America's poorest region. In 1987 the New Opportunity School accepted its first group of these women for a crash course in self-esteem.

In the winter of 1989 Gadd and a dozen classmates were treated to manicures and facials, given new hairstyles, and outfitted in dresses suitable for job hunters and office workers. A physician offered them mammograms and Pap smears, and professors told them inspiring stories of strong and successful women. Counselors tested them, coached them in resume writing and job interviews, and sent them out to campus offices and local agencies for brief internships.

All of this is crammed into a mere three weeks, which may seem too little a time to turn lives around, but 140 women have finished the program and most of them have gone on to jobs or college. Gadd, who eventually divorced her husband and reclaimed her maiden name, Linda Lamb, did both. She attended Eastern Kentucky University, about 20 kilometers up the road, while working in the social services department of Berea Hospital.

The women who attend the New Opportunity School are not typical college students, obviously, but then Berea is not a typical liberal arts college. From the day it opened its doors in 1855, it has gone its own stubborn, sometimes radical way. It was the first interracial college in the South. It was unequivocally coeducational long before higher education for women was fashionable. In the face of stem disapproval by some locals, it welcomed JapaneseAmerican students from government internment camps soon after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

For more than a century and a quarter, Berea has been educating those who otherwise would never see the inside of a college classroom.

Long before decent roads reached into rural Appalachia, it sent teachers and speakers into the mountains on muleback and dispatched traveling libraries by riverboat, railroad car, and horse-drawn wagon. Today, its 1,500 students pay no tuition, and most pay only a portion of their room and board-this in an era when the average bill for a year in a private four-year college in America has risen to more than $14,000. The bargain is made possible by a whopping endowment of$360 million-one of the largest among small colleges in America-a rejection of frills, and strategic use of student labor. Every student is required to work ten to 15 hours each week for Berea.

Not surprisingly, as many as 18,000 inquiries pour into the college annually from potential applicants. Most need not bother to

For more than a century and a quarter, Berea has been educating those who otherwise would never see the inside of a college classroom.

write because the first requirement for the 450 or so students admitted each autumn is financial need. "It doesn't matter how bright a student is, how high he can jump, or how well he can sing," says admissions director John Cook. "Ifhe doesn't meet the need criterion, he cannot come to Berea."

Finding needy students in Appalachia has never been a problem. More than half of each year's new class falls into the category of "total need." In other words, these students are unable to make any financial contribution to their schooling.

Year after year, most Berea students are the first members of their families ever to attend college. Yet, remarkably, in a 15-state southeastern region, only North Carolina's prestigious Davidson College has seen a higher percentage of its alumni go on to earn PhD degrees in the past century. More than half of Berea's graduates eventually receive advanced degrees.

One reason for this success is Berea's emphasis on teaching rather than research. Classes are tiny; the student-teacher ratio is 13 to one. More than 80 percent of the faculty members have doctorates. The place is teeming with Berea alumni who have returned to spend their careers in the same venerable buildings where they were undergraduates.

History department chairman Paul David Nelson, a biographer and recognized authority on the American Revolutionary period, originally came to Berea from a tobacco farm in southwestern Virginia, graduating in 1965. Five years later, after receiving his PhD from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, he came back to teach. "I don't think for a moment that Berea is perfect in doing everything it professes to do," he says, "but institutionally, it comes as close as one can ever expect. It is idealistic, it stands for something, and that is why 1 stay."

History of Struggle Outwardly, it appears a quintessential small-town college. Its quiet, shaded campus is immaculately kept, its brick buildings deJY the ravages of age, an old clock softly tolls each quarter-hour. But beneath the tranquillity, Berea suffers more than ordinary stresses and strains, trying to serve sometimes conflicting objectives and keep old commitments without becoming a throwback to another time.

Before Berea became a college, it was a one-room school and church-the cornerstone of the Reverend John Fee's audacious attempt to create, in the midst of a slave state, an institution that "would be to Kentucky what Oberlin is to Ohio, anti-slavery, anticaste, anti-rum, anti-sin." Early in the winter of 1859, vigilantes, aroused by rumors of a slave insurrection, forced Fee and his flock of 34 to flee to Ohio. When they returned from exile at the end of the Civil War, Fee had raised enough money to expand the school and church into a college.

Founded in 1833 to train preachers and teachers, Fee's model, Oberlin College, was Christian, coeducational, and interracial. The town of Oberlin had been a station on the Underground Railroad,

•

helping slaves escape to freedom. It provided Fee not only with an inspiration, but with the nucleus of a staff as well. Berea's first teachers and four of its first five presidents had Oberlin connections.

In the beginning, Fee's school was committed to serving two minorities united only by the Christian ethic-former slaves and the impoverished whites of Appalachia. During the last few decades of the 19th century, many of its graduates earned distinction as educators, ministers, and physicians. Not the least of these were Mary E. Britton, who attended the college from 1871 to 1874 and became the first black female doctor to practice in Lexington, one of Kentucky's largest cities, and Carter G. Woodson, a 1903 alumnus who is known today as the "father of black history."

Born in Virginia, Woodson attended Berea during summers while working as a high school principal. His parents had been slaves, and he was largely self-taught until he entered high school.

After graduating from Berea, he went on to obtain advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard, and devoted the rest of his life to the study and preservation of African-American history. He died in 1950.

Berea's quest for utopia was dashed in 1904 when Kentucky outlawed interracial education. For more than 40 years thereafter, Berea was an all-white institution. Black enrollment has never returned to the 50 percent levels of the pre-1904 era, but the old commitments still resonate on campus. Berea "is a rock in the stream of higher education," says John Stephenson. The ever-present danger, he adds, is that it will be swept along "and turned into just another good liberal arts college."

For now such danger seems remote. There is still vitality in being different, and the New Opportunity School for Women is but one of a hotbed of activities that sets the college apart. The Brushy Fork Institute works to stimulate grass-roots leadership in mountain communities. The Black Mountain Youth Leadership Program and the Black Mountain Improvement Association conduct summer studies for African-American teenagers and coordinate literacy programs in eastern Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. And Students for Appalachia deploys scores of volunteers to work in the community.

During her first year in Students for Appalachia, Stephanie Flanary, a senior from Grundy, Virginia, spent each Saturday with a 92-year-old woman who lived alone, making it possible for her to avoid moving into a nursing home. Arriving in the morning, the young volunteer carried in enough coal and wood to fire a heater for several days and shopped for groceries before heading back to campus. Tara Eckard, a math education major, is driven to Lexington to work in a nursing home each week and to Mount Vernon, Kentucky, where she spends several hours with a seven-year-old girl whose father is terminally ill. Brian Jones organized a "readin," bringing adult "new readers" to the campus to talk about their learning experiences and to read in public for the first time. An audience of more than a hundred turned out, and the next day the telephone rang often at Students for Appalachia-new volunteers to work as tutors in the adult reading program.

Jones is a story. He first entered Berea in 1987, but withdrew after a semester in which he not only failed to pass anything but

violated the rules against drinking and using drugs. Before enrolling there he had been kicked out of the U.S. Air Force and even lived briefly among the homeless in Southern California. His heavy drinking continued after he left college; he married, but it didn't last; he tended bar, worked as a bouncer, and was employed for a time in a sock factory. Eventually, feeling he was at a dead end, he wrote the registrar at Berea, pleading to be taken back. He was. Now 25 years old and in his junior year, he is an honor student and coordinator of some 200 students who do volunteer work through Students for Appalachia.

Mandatory Work Program Pastor Fee and his associates could not have dreamed what they were starting when they promised to provide Berea's students with jobs to offset their expenses. For two hours each afternoon, Tenpa Dhargyal, a Tibetan who grew up in exile in India, sits at a table in the school's broom shop cutting cornstalks into thin strips with a razor-sharp knife. It is a task devoid of real challenge, Dhargyal concedes, but it is the first time he has worked with his hands, and it has taught him patience. The narrow strips he trims will be dyed and plaited into sheaths connecting the handles to the business ends of handmade brooms. The brooms are sold in shops on campus and in nearby cities and through catalog sales.

As Dhargyal wields his knife, Becky Lowery, an art major from Georgia, is up the street working at a pottery wheel, and Amy Miller, who aspires to attend medical school, is at the college loom house weaving a rug. The campus workday begins at 6:00 a.m., when students report for the breakfast shift at the cafeteria and at the dining room of the Boone Tavern Hotel, which the college owns and operates. Altogether, there are more than 140 different types of jobs to be done. Freshmen can earn $1.95 per hour for waiting tables at the hotel, upperclassmen up to $3.90 for the top supervisory jobs in the school's own little civil service system. Besides working in food services, serving in social outreach programs, making crafts, and staffing the 57-room hotel, Berea students act as teaching assistants, secretaries, janitors, and computer operators.

The work program has been a vital part of the school from the beginning. Students built roads, helped clear and fence a farm adjacent to the campus, and made bricks for the first masonry building, a wdmen's dormitory still in service after 120 years. Phelps Stokes Chapel, the site of concerts, convocations, and foul-weather commencement ceremonies, was constructed entirely by student workers at the insistence of Olivia Phelps Stokes, a New York philanthropist who donated the money for it. Scholar-workers ran a dairy with 100 cows; they pasteurized and bottled milk, then delivered it in town. They collected eggs from a flock of 4,000 chickens, operated a bakery and cannery, raised cattle, hogs, and sheep, and tended extensive vegetable gardens.

In time, it became cheaper to buy milk elsewhere. Besides, says William Ramsay, who was dean of labor when a number of foodbased enterprises were shut down, "it became mbre relevant to know how to operate a computer than to gather eggs."

Work-study arrangements are still commonplace in colleges and universities across the United States, but Berea is one of only five

schools that make student jobs obligatory for all students. Not even varsity athletes are exempt. A few years ago, when the men's basketball team returned from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics' championship tournament in Kansas City, the players had to make up hours lost from their assignments as janitors and hotel clerks.

Mountain Crafts Connection Berea may be the only college in America with a winning basketball team that is overshadowed by a crafts program. With the popularity of its pottery, woodworks, and weaving, it is often mistakenly thought to be a crafts school. In 1992 sales of crafts made mainly by students exceeded $2 million. More than $100,000 worth of brooms were exported to Japan, England, and Italy. When Toyota station wagons, assembled in Georgetown, Kentucky, were shipped to Japan for sale, the manufacturer bought $50,000 worth of Berea's baskets and carved letter openers to present to Japanese car buyers as authentication of American quality.

It was college president William Frost who first made the connection between Berea and mountain crafts in the early I 890s, when he and his wife spent a summer traveling the backwoods of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. They returned with two

A turn-of the-century photograph of afraternity football team.

Berea 50 express goal was to serve two minorities-former slave families and impoverished white people of Appalachia.

sacks bulging with homespun coverlets and quilts they had seen in cabins they visited. Berea began selling them to its financial supporters, raising money for both the college and the artisans.

Soon mountain women were coming to Berea to weave at a collective set up on campus and to teach their craft to female students; it'was the beginning of the student industries. A few years later, Wallace Nutting, the famed New England photographer, furniture designer, and collector, led the school into another craft field.

Enchanted by the campus when he visited jt as a commencement speaker in the early 1900s, Nutting invited Berea carpentry instructors to his factory in Framingham, Massachusetts, to learn furnituremaking skills. "We believe that working with the hands, making things of high quality, is good for character," says Garry Barker, who is in charge of marketing the products that Berea students make.

"You learn things about dedication, workmanship, and the quality of materials-things that carry over into the rest of your life."

That may be so, but there is a certain uneasiness these days about the crafts program-partly because it has drifted so far from its mountain roots, partly because some question whether it still fits in with the college's purposes. The time has come, John

Stephenson said just before he retired, to take a hard look at it. "My guess is that we will decide that it serves a useful public relations function in introducing people to the name of Berea College. We will probably decide that it shouldn't grow any more and that, in fact, it might be downsized."

If the growth of the crafts program has exceeded all expectations, the same cannot be said about the number of black students matriculating at Berea. Carl Thomas, who graduated from Berea in 1978, is a full-time, paid recruiter for his alma mater. Among his prime territories are the black neighborhoods and high schools of Birmingham, Alabama. Each February, which is Black History

Clockwise from top left: Founder Reverend John Fee, an outspoken abolitionist, was forced to flee Kentucky during the Civil War; Berea horse-drawn forenmner of the bookmobile helped to

s

s

bring literacy to many a poor family in the hollows; Berea "extension" faculty members set off on an assignment to mountain communities (circa 1900); Lexington first black female physician, Mmy E. Britton, attended Berea in the 1870s.

s

The student body, with five percent of each new class reserved for international students, now represents nearly 50 countries and includes Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus.

Month, he takes a chartered bus full of promising prospects to Berea for a weekend visit. "If I can get young people to the campus, I can convince them that this is a place where they want to spend the next four years," Thomas says. "It's a culture shock for them at first, but they feel a warmth, and they soon feel a part of what is going on." Over the past 15 years, about 170 African-American students who have made the trip have returned to enroll.

One of them, Tallese Johnson, was senior at the virtually allblack A.H. Parker High School in Birmingham in 1989. From the time she began thinking of college, Johnson had wanted to attend the predominantly black Howard University in Washington, D.C., but she joined the bus trip to Kentucky because of the powerful appeal of free tuition at Berea. "It was like no place I had ever seen," she recalls. The picturesque campus had only a few hundred more students than her high school, and most of them were white.

"But people immediately made me feel comfortable, and that weekend I decided that Berea was my school."

Some of the white students Johnson met had been equally isolated in their own culture. Tim Lawson from Floyd County, Kentucky, for one, had grown up in an all-white mountain community, attended an all-white high school, and had made his first friendship with a black person when he arrived at Berea. But from these cultural extremes there, somehow, comes a surprisingly easy social atmosphere. "I think it's in part because we're all here as a result of financial need," Johnson says. "We're all in the same boat."

As the Alabama recruiting suggests, the college has found it increasingly difficult to live up to its interracial commitment. Rural Appalachia's black population, historically concentrated in scattered coal-mining communities, dropped sharply during the 1980s.

Across the region served by the college, blacks now account for about five percent of the population. By the mid-1980s, minority enrollment hovered at about six percent, and in 1988 Berea President Stephenson set a goal of a student body with 15 percent by 1993. "In the 19th century, nobody except Oberlin, Berea, and a handful of others would even take a second look at black students," he says. "Now we find ourselves competing with many other institutions that also want African-American students."

But there is more to it than that. Fee's vision had already been dimmed when the Kentucky legislature banned interracial education. President Frost, an Oberlin graduate, arrived at a time when black students outnumbered whites. Unlike Fee, he saw the moral uplifting of whites as the principal benefit of interracial education.

He promptly focused on increasing white enrollment and emphasized the school's interest in mountain people. While there was only a small drop in black enrollment, whites poured in, and by 1904, when Kentucky issued its interracial ban, blacks amounted to only 16 percent.

"There was a feeling among blacks that Berea had abandoned them," says Loyal Jones, who recently retired as director of the college's Appalachian Center. "And understandably

so. It would have been quite logical for Berea to have said that since blacks and whites could not be educated together, then the school would educate blacks. But when you got right down to it, the whites won out, even at an idealistic place like Berea."

With that decision made, the board of trustees led a campaign that raised more than $400,000 to create the Lincoln Institute, a new black vocational school near Louisville. Blacks did not rush back to Berea when Kentucky removed its racial barrier in 1950.

In fact, only three enrolled the first year.

The college fell short of Stephenson's 15 percent target for 1993. Thanks considerably to successful recruiting in Alabama, the presence of black students on campus in recent years has hovered at around nine or ten percent. Conditions steadily become more challenging for the rock in the stream. Admissions director John Cook frequently sees young people who are prime Berea material walk away. Many potential students are unwilling to enroll in a college where they cannot have an automobile. They opt for less-restrictive public institutions and for part-time jobs that pay them more than the Berea work program.

Unlike the days when most of those who enrolled at Berea saw it as their only chance for college, higher education has come to be viewed increasingly as an entitlement. "Nowadays [young people] have the option of going to a community college, and most ofthem can get enough assistance to go to a four-year state college," says Cook. "So it is unrealistic for the trustees or the administration to say to us, 'Take only the students who have no other opportunity.' " Is it also unrealistic for the college to stick to its long-standing restrictions on cars and coeducational dorms? While some students believe so, the administration disagrees. The ban on automobiles, it is said, helps to preserve the college's residential character and reassures donors who are asked to contribute to an institution serving the financially disadvantaged.

Years ago, required attendance at Sunday evening convocation was dropped because it smacked of compulsory religion. The student body, with five percent of each new class reserved for international students, now represents nearly 50 countries and includes Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. Although the college still emphasfzes the Christian ethic, there is no longer a firm requirement that faculty members profess a religious belief. One small student residence is even reserved for single mothers and their children.

Nevertheless, the founders' core agenda survives in a declaration of "Great Commitments," which are regarded as the college's Magna Carta. In 1992 the trustees reaffirmed those commitments; but they also acknowledged today's sensibilities by adding a separate pledge to "gender equity." To make sure that the point is not missed, they changed the school seal designed by the founders-a cross encircled by the words "God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Men." It now reads, "God Has Made of One Blood All Peoples of the Earth."

0 About the Author: Rudy Abramson reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

is a Washington. D.C-based

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NO INDUSTRY WILL BE UNTOUCHED In their new book Competing for the Future, Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad argue that American managers should not only be reconceiving their companies, they should be reconceiving their industries as well. They consulted with many of the world's leading companies.

"We must have talked to 10,000 managers before we started to write the book," Prahalad says.

Hamel is professor of strategic and international management at London Business School; Prahalad A.J. VOGL: If someone silting next to you on an airplane asked you what your book was about, how would you respond?

C.K. PRAHALAD: For me, the starting point is that the 1990s are going to be a decade of unprecedented change. Among the changes: Deregulation of critical industries, excess capacity around the world in some industries; significant mergers and acq uisitions and alliances; the changing face of consumerism, where price/ performance concerns are becoming quite dominant and customer expectations are changing very dramatically; the changing face of global competition and the emergence of nontraditional competitors; enormous growth in Southeast Asia; technological discontinuities; and the emergence of information technology as a way of fundamentally changing many business functions.

I daresay there is not a single industry, whether in manufacturing or service, that will be untouched by these changes.

Therefore, for the first time in 20 or 30 years, many of the traditional concepts

is Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration and professor of corporate strategy and international business at the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Michigan. Their 17-year partnership began when Hamel was a doctoral student at Michigan, where Prahalad was an associate professor of strategy.

A.J. Vogl, editor of Across the Board, spoke to Prahalad by telephone at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. that we have used to think about positioning our businesses, as well as protecting our profit engines, are open to question. How do we position our companies for the next round? How do we rethink the assumptions about the role of top management? What does strategic direction mean? How do we regenerate the company? Answering these questions is what Competingforthe Future is about.

How will these changes affect specific companies?

Managers have to look beyond their traditional competitor~. There are new competitors playing by different rules.

These new competitors come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives. Therefore, traditional industry structures are in turmoil.

This has led to new demands on the company. The first and most obviousand one that most American companies have done a good job of addressing-is the performance gap. In benchmarking U.S. performance against the best-ofbreed worldwide, a wide variety of factors-cost, for instance, or cycle time, or logistics, or head count-have been

found to be subpar. All the attempts at downsizing and reengineering during the 1980s, and certainly the attempts at Total Quality Management (TQM), have been focused on closing this gap.

Coincident with this demand is another that calls for rethinking the structural approach to managing the business. For years, for instance, IBM ran a fairly vertically integrated shop-a perfectly good way to run a company in the 1960s and 1970s and even the early 1980s. IBM did not change its approach fast enough, nor did a lot of companies, Japanese firms in particular, that duplicated IBM's approach. They are suddenly finding themselves in trouble. The old recipe on how to compete has become irrelevant. Traditional vertically integrated industry structure is being fragmented by application specialists like Intel and Microsoft. But my question is: Do companies foresee fundamental structural changes and adapt themselves in time? Can they bridge what I call the adaptability gap? If not, they will have massive problems to deal with.

Lastly, the company must have the ability to cope with opportunities.

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would argue that, while there is a lot of change taking place in industries worldwide, there is also unprecedented opportunity for companies to growand not just in high-tech information technology industries, but also in a wide variety of what would be called fairly mature industries, like retailing, broadcasting, and airlines. While some companies in these industries are having tremendous problems, others-Wal-Mart, for instance, and CNN, and British Airwaysare growing dramatically and are very profitable.

Presumably, these companies all managed to bridge your adaptability gap?

Yes, everyone of them changed the recipe. Wal-Mart reinvented retailing through a logistics revolution, British Airways does not compete on the basis of price, and CNN does not compete in the traditional newscasting style of the networks. If growth opportunities are not fully realized, then the company ends up with what I call an opportunity gap.

So, then, we have three fundamental challenges in the future: A performance gap-becoming more efficient; an adaptability gap-reconfiguring existing industries; and an opportunity gapseizing new opportunities and fundamentally creating new businesses.

The interesting problem is that if you want continuous improvement, you must have continuous growth. Let me illustrate this point, because it's counterintuitive. If you ask people to continuously improve quality or productivity, then, as a consequence, you will continuously require fewer people to do the same work.

That is the implication of continuous improvement. In other words, if you're not growing in businesses where the same skills can be transferred, then very soon you are going to find you have no option but to layoff people.

Here you have a very interesting paradox. You're asking workers to become involved, you're asking for their suggestions to improve the productivity of the company; then, when they do, you lay them off. So very few people in their right mind would reach a point where they

These so-called empowered workers who are asked by their employers to suggest ways to improve productivity-are they aware of their dilemma?

Yes, I think this is starting to happen.

They have only to look around at what's happened at other companies. For me, the first example of enormous success in employee empowerment was Xerox.

They got their people to contribute dramatically to improve both the quality of their products and overall competitiveness. The net result: Layoffs. Recently, they announced that they're going to lay off 10,000 people, and I expect to see more of this happening at other companies as well. That's what I mean when I say you can't have continuous improvement without continuous growth. If you don't have growth, employees will catch on and refuse to participate in the improvement process.

My second basic point is that, once you decide to grow, then that growth cannot be in any industry that you choose. For instance, for an automobile manufacturer to buy S&Ls (savings and loan institutions) may appear to be good strategy, but it is of no use to people on the manufacturing floor who have helped improve the productivity of the company. Growth, then, must have some relationship to the skill base of the company, or what we call its core competencies, so that people can be rehabilitated with a little bit of training.

It sounds to me that, if you interpret this too rigidly, you box yourselfin, and if too loosely, you find yourself drifting outside your area of competency. How do you choose a course or option?

If we begin with the premise that opportunity management is essential to value creation, then we have not only to analyze specific emerging opportunities but also to analyze industries whose boundaries are not yet clearly defined. The critical question, then, for top management is: When I cannot predict precisely the boundaries of the business, or the product and service configumtions that I need to have in the future, where do I place my

bets? If I cannot decide on or cannot see the product that will be of value and, therefore, my resource allocation is not product- or service-driven, then what do I plan for? I think those questions take us to thinking about how to get industry foresight, and how to place bets on underlying skills. I argue that you can anticipate the competencies that you'll need, but that you cannot anticipate the specific product or service configuration.

So the foresight that we talk about in Competingfor the Future comes down to asking such questions as: What are the changing consumer or customer expectations? What are the new benefits that will

Here you have an interesting paradox. You're asking workers to become involved, you're asking for their suggestions to improve the productivity of the company; then when they do, you lay them off. be of value? What is the basis for an face with customers? What are the nological discontinuities?

Answer questions, then try to synthesize into your framework.

intertechthese them

It seems to be quite speculative as well as complicated.

Actually, the critical issues that companies have to come to terms with are fairly straightforward-at least they are straightforward after somebody has thought them through. Take telecommunications, for instance. What will telecommunications look like in the next 15 years? There are two or three demographic and customer changes that are obvious. One is that people will demand more mobility: We don't want to be stuck to a plug in the wall. At the same time, while we want to be mobile, we want to be connected. And if you say that mobility and connectedness are two critical elements of the emerging lifestyle and work style, then wireless becomes an obvious way to do this-what some people have called untethered communication.

Once you say it has to be untethered, and it has

to be part of a mobile generation, then obviously you can't have devices that are large and, consequently, unportable. So it has to be light in order to be handheld.

If you start with those two assumptions, then the competencies that are required become obvious. One is miniaturization. You certainly have to understand how to miniaturize your productreduce weight and size, and to develop thc proper ergonomics. The second is you can predict the technologies that are required. You'll need technologies in wireless, in displays, in power sources, in circui t design.

In terms of marketing, you want to sell as many as possible, because the more people who have these instruments, the greater the value to anyone individual because he can call so many more people.

Therefore, you want to have consumermarketing skills, and rethink the channels you're going to go through and how to interface with the customer.

You can also assume that, in order for this technology to work in a seamless way throughout the world, you have to harmonize all the standards. That means forming alliances and negotiating with governments to make sure that standards are compatible and the system is, indeed, seamless for the consumer.

The point I want to make is that foresight is not generalities.

Foresight requires probing for underlying trends and then synthesizing their implications for the set of businesses that you have or the businesses you want to get into. It is not some vague statement like, "We will serve our customers and shareholders and communi ties."

The kind of vision statement that you're particularly critical of in your book.

Yes. Most of them are pure vanilla.

Nobody can argue with them, but they are neither motivating nor directional. In fact, one of the tests that we ask managers to take is to collect vision statements from 20 companies, mix them up overnight, and then try to pick theirs in the morning.

book that the ultimate test of a company's strategic architecture is to ask a random sample of25 senior managers: "How will the future of your industry be different?"

HolV do they usually come through?

Typically, in a company that has not gone through a fairly intense debate on the subject, you'll find 15 versions among 25 people. There may be some very broad aggregate agreement, but just probe a little further and there is tremendous disagreement or lack of clarity.

same thing as asking what if the oil industry itself should change, and in what ways.

What we talk about in the book is, first, to imagine the opportunity horizon. This means top management should think about their companies as a portfolio of core competencies rather than a portfolio of individual units. Second, they must understand the transition process; and, third, they must take actions today that go beyond current industry space to create new industry space in the future.

But answering such questions is what senior managers are paid to do. Why aren't they doing it?

First, there are tremendous pressures in companies to cut costs, improve productivity, and what we call "manage the performance gap." Those things take precedence because that is how managers are judged and rewarded, and that is a more tangible and visible outcome of managerial effort. So all that gets more attention than thinking about the future.

Second, and a more subtle reason: Most companies today are organized as business units. Many of the issues that impact the future cut across many business units. There may be no natural home for thinking about them. So the business units may be thinking about what happens to their business as they see it over the next five to ten years. But they do not see looming, large changes that may totally undercut the businesses as we know them today.

If you look at the strategy literature, you'll see a lot of it has to do with positioning within existing business structures-how do we gain market share, for instance, or how do we segment the market, or how do we gain access to a particular channel. So the existing business framework took dominance over the thinking process, and that limits you to what you currently have rather than what the world can be. Even scenario planners were more concerned with the robustness of strategies, which means they created a wider range of assumptions. Like oil prices: What would happen if oil prices were $40 a barrel and what would happen if they were $3 a barrel. But that is not the

Is this what you mean when you talk in your book about "white spaces"?

One of the truisms of management is

What we talk about in the book is ... (that] top management should think about their companies as a portfolio of core competencies. that what you see depends on where you sit. In most companies, the charters of business units are reasonably fixed, so if you define the company in terms of existing business units, the opportunities are seen through the lenses of each business unit. But many of the opportunities cut across multiple business units-a white space. These typically go unexploited.

But there are exceptions.

Sony's Walkman, which relied on core competencies in both its tape-recorder and headphone businesses, is an example of a white-space opportunity that was effectivelyexploited.

So who has responsibility for the white spaces? You're not talking about a new staff position, are you?

No. And this leads to an important issue in the book. If you want collaboration-that is, collective strategies that go beyond existing industry unitsthen you need three requirements to start. First, an overarching umbrella concept of what it is that we are trying to do as an organization-our destiny.

That's what we have called the strategic architecture, and that provides the intellectual framework to think about

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the opportuni ty space.

Second, we have to realize that if opportunity space is to be captured, then it cannot be captured by fixed-gun positions-the business units of today. If there are opportunities in-between or outside existing business-unit boundaries, we need to find a mechanism for approaching them-an opportunity for Kodak, for instance, between the copier business and the traditional film business. In practice, this means getting together the top 200 or 300 or 400 people in the company, the number depending on company size. Not just the top ten or 15 people, because they do not have direct access to resources. It's the business-unit managers, and those one level above them and one level below, who control the resources, and it is these people who have to understand that they have an obligation to exploit opportunities even though they are not within the framework of their current business charters.

Third, our accounting systems, our recognition systems, must reward contributions that go beyond the traditional profit performance in the business-unit sense. If we're looking for people who will share a competitive agenda, then we should publicly reward and recognize people who do that.

The problem in most companies is a lack of intellectual framework. Therefore, exploiting opportunities tends to be ad hoc. Often opportunities are not exploited. You find tremendous debates on transfer prices, which is somewhat futile because all that we are doing as a company is taking money from one pocket and putting it in the other and pretending we have become rich. There are tremendous debates on who sho\jld pay for corporate advertising, on whether or not we should have common purchasing, on whether or not we should use common modules across businesses.

Creating a system where people work across boundaries is not going to happen overnight. You need to have multiple projects, multiple opportunities for people to learn how to work with each other. And the assumption is that, over a period of time, that becomes the norm, even

though, for administrative business unit still remains.

purposes,

the

What about shared rewards? In your book you say that if there is shared pain, there should be shared gain. and you make the point that top management is often paid 75 or 100 times more than frontline employees. Should that spread be narrowed?

I think one thing is very clear.

Tremendous disparities in income increase the probability of top executives becoming disconnected with front-line employees. It creates a psychological distance and also a lifestyle distance. That is why people at various senior levels sometimes tend to feel out of touch and uncomfortable dealing with people who are on the front line. It's a problem that has to be dealt with.

If compensation practices can't be changed, then companies must find other mechanisms to make sure their senior executives do not get disconnected. For instance, senior people might be forced to spend at least one day a month with sales people, or to visit factories so they understand manufacturing, or to spend a day at the com pany's research labs.

I would ask some simple questions.

How often does a CEO or other senior managers call on a customer with their sales people? How much time do they spend being state-of-the-art briefed by their R&D people? How often do they review the patent portfolio of their competitors?

In some cases, however, where companies have established a w~ll-run quality program, disconnection is becoming less of a problem because the quality process forces a communication in some fashion; at least there's a common commitment to the process, a common concern, a common language that everyone understands. That facilitates the dialogue.

All of this dialogue, of course, leads to rethinking the future of your business and your industry-correct?

Absolutely. And also it leads to rethinking the role of top management.

What is our work? How do we add value

to the company beyond coordination and control? I also believe that the job of senior management is not measuring employee satisfaction-that's a prerequisite-but creating employee excitement. We need to get excitement back into the workplace, so that people feel charged up when they come to work and they want to come to work. It's not about satisfaction, it's aboutfun. frecall that you end your book with a list of 20 questions about the future. The last is: "A re you havingfun?"

Yes, we say that the answers to the first 19 are irrelevant if you don't enjoy the challenge of competing for the future.

What has been the response of managers to your ideas?

Intellectually, it's positive because most of them are frustrated.

The real question is what happens when it comes to implementing these ideas. Here, we get two reactions. The first is that people say they can relate to the ideas and understand the logic behind them, but they're not sure what to do next. We can always help people figure out how to do it. The second reaction is from people who say they're excited about our ideas but don't want to go through the laborious, soulsearching process of making them happen. And, certainly, that's what is required. You have to be willing to open up for dialogue and debate many of the socalled managerial assumptions that are embedded in the company. Some people are not comfortable with that process.

Do these people feel it will create more problems than it will solve?

Most of the time, it has to do with worrying about losing control. It takes a very confident top management to challenge existing ways of doing things, or a very desperate one. The confident ones say: "It is time for us to rethink ourselves and consider the legacy we want to leave behind." When you're top management, you have about ten years to go-maybe five, 15 at the outside. So the legacy question is an importan tone.

We tell people: Take all the time you

need to convince yourself, because once you start the journey you cannot stop it easily. Once you give people the freedom to debate and develop a strategic direction for the company, you cannot take it away.

But you can, consciously or not, allow it to peter out, which has been the case with some quality and reengineering programs. Employees may see what you're suggesting as another in a series of programs that began in enthusiasm and ended as a lame joke.

That's one of the dangers-capturing the words rather than the substanceand, inevitably, some of that is going to

Tremendous disparities in income increase the probability of top executives becoming disconnected with front-line employees. It creates a psychological distance and also a lifestyle distance. happen. One of the things we tell CEOs is that this is a nondelegatable task. You cannot put anybody in charge of the process. You, we tell them, are in charge of the process, and your commitment should be visible to the organization, not just in terms of the amount of time you spend, but in terms of the intellectual energy that you're willing to contribute to the task. There is nothing more important than providing corporate direction and the capacity to regenerate the company. It means fundamentally challenging the organization to very different standards and expecting them to do more with less. And you can't do that overnight.

Speaking of Total Quality Management and reengineering, how do the ideas in Competing for the Future relate to those approaches?

TQM and reengineering are subsetsnecessary but insufficient-of what we're talking about. I began by saying that the first thing that has to be done is to bridge the performance gap-paying the price for past sins, I call it-and that requires a

lot of reengineering.

But you cannot reengineer a company to long-term prosperity because the reengineering process applies to existing businesses; it does not invent new businesses.

Quality is somewhat different. It is partly plugging the gap in performance standards, partly creating a mechanism for problem solving and engaging people in multilevel dialogue. But, again, the quality process does not by itself create new businesses, does not by itself leverage core skills.

Both reengineering and continuous improvement are required in most large companies. You accumulate fat, you accumulate bad practices, and you need to clean them up periodically. Call it spring cleaning, call it routine maintenance.

What we're saying is that you need a broad umbrella under which these things make sense, a unifying idea around which people can rally and a framework for creating the future-and, within that framework, creating new businesses by leveraging skills. What we are presenting in Competing for the Future is the total puzzle, not the individual bits.

Certainly ambitious, but don't you also say in your book that a company's existing managers, because of inbreeding, are often not able to see the total pu::le, and so won't have the foresight that you advocate?

Over time, executives in a company develop a managerial frame, or what you may want to call a dominant logic.

This is the result of experience, of the process of socialization, and accepting the so-called industry wisdom. This process of conditioning tends to make the reflexes of senior managers reasonably predictabie.

When you suddenly want them to change, you're asking them to rip apart the very genetic structure of the company. It's not because these people don't have the skills; it's that they have to learn a fundamentally different way of doing business. If you recall, I began this interview by citing a number of unprecedented changes in the world of business.

Companies and their managers have to

come to terms with their existing dominant logic and understand where it still applies and where it doesn't. And, true, in many cases you're asking the very people who got to the top because they were good at the old way of doing business.

That's very hard, unless you have extremely thoughtful people who are willing to admit: "My accumulated experience, my intellectual capital, has suddenly become devalued. I have to start reinvesting one more time." That's why it can be helpful to have some outsider come in and say, "These unspoken truths in the company need to be challenged." Once the problems are out in the open, you have to deal with them. Problems in companies are like enemies. They don't go away. They just accumulate.

Which may be why a wolf is needed to deal with them. That's the analogy you draw in Competing for the Future, and I suspect that most managers would rather like that image of themselves.

In bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations, employees are often like sheep, without a sense of purpose, who follow but don't think. So it's been said that they should be more like wild ducks. But a duck that flies out of formation, and doesn't benefit from the reduced wind resistance that a formation provides, soon gets left behind. We want people who are, as individuals, very able, very talented, but very different. Think of a pack of wolves: Leadership is always clear, but is often challenged and is based on capability and strength. The pack shares a common agenda that we would call a strategic intent. They want to kill. And they're willing to be extremely flexible; they have to be, depending on where the prey is and what the circumstances are. They have good communication among themselves, and they all understand that the success of the hunt is a collective task.

To successfully compete for the future, we need neither like-minded clones nor self-interested renegades. We need community activists-men and women like wolves, who can hold together the seem- • ingly contradictory ideas of common cause and individual freedom.

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Thanks to an 18th-century law-now bolstered by a 1991 act-it is possible for victims of torture on foreign soil to seek redress in American courts.

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he largest part of the future of torture depends upon the future of torturers," writes Edward Peters, professor of medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania, in his book Torture. The book examines the practice of torture in modern times against its historical background and explains with great insight the psyche of the person who inflicts torture on his victim.

Torturers are "deliberately trained in such a way as to alter their personalities, make them accept a fabricated political reality in which their victims have been set outside the pale of humanity, and sustain this illusion by both coercion and remand." Peters also explains why some sections of society condone the vice as a shortcut to "justice" in extreme cases: Because due process of law is inherently far slower and its outcome far less certain.

The use of torture, however, is as destructive to the values of a free society as it is to the dignity of the victims and the sanity of its practitioner. Peters writes: "So often have the effects of torture on the victims been the focus of discussion that its effects on the torturers have been neglected. Either torturers are written off as sadists, or. .. they are blandly imagined to be loyal officers merely doing an unpleasant duty."

The one sure deterrent is accountability to the law. The torturer will be restrained if he knows for sure that at some time, in some part of the world, if not, indeed, in his own country, the long arm of the law will reach him. Over the years, the United Nations has helped to build up a small nucleus of international criminal law, and torture is among the crimes covered by this growing branch of law.

It is fascinating to note that in the United States a process of legal accountability for torture, wherever practiced, began almost immediately after the nation's birth in the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789. Initially aimed at piracy on the high seas and the illicit slave trade, the statute conferred on the district courts original jurisdiction to hear and decide any civil action by an alien for a tort committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

The great American jurist, Judge John Bassett Moore, set out the established law in his dissenting opinion in the Lotus case (1927) in the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. He wrote: "In the case of what is known as piracy by law of nations, there has been conceded a universaljurisdiction, under which the person charged with the offense may be tried and punished by any nation into whose jurisdiction he may come." This has long been the law. In modern times it is but logical to extend the rule to other crimes such as torture and, one hopes, to drug trafficking.

The Act of 1789 is secured in Article III of the United States Constitution. It gives federal courtsjurisdiction (Section II) in all cases "arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority." A case arises under the "laws of the United States" if it is based on U.S. common law or international law.

A treaty concluded by the authority of the President of the United States becomes, on its ratification by the Senate, "law of the land"like any congressional statute assented by him.

There was a sea change in international opinion on respect for human rights after World War II. The Charter of the United Nations (1945) mentions among its purposes in the very-first Article (1.3) "encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." The U.N. General Assembly is enjoined (Article 13) to "initiate studies and make recommendations"inter alia for this purpose.

The General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. Eighteen years later it adopted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Thus began, as part of this process, a host of international conventions on a variety of topics including the prevention and punishment of genocide and elimination of all forms of racial and genderbased discrimination.

Public opinion within democracies kept pace with interna-

tional public OpinIOn, influencing jurists, journalists, and politicians alike. Until 1980, the Act of 1789 had been invoked only in ten cases. That year the father and sister of Joelito Filartiga, a Paraguayan youth who died in 1976 of alleged torture, brought a civil suit, with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, against Americo N. Pena-Irala, the inspector-general of police in Ascuncion, invoking the 1789 statute.

In a historical decision, Judge Irving Kaufman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote that torture "perpetrated under color of official authority violates accepted norms of the international law of human rights ... [and that] for the purpose of civil liability, the torturer has become-like the pirate and slave trader before him-hostis humanis generis, enemy of all mankind." This was one of those cases that mold the law, where the judge responds to what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the felt necessities of the times" and becomes a guide and educator.

A legal precedent had been set and a broad new avenue for redress opened.

Eight years later, in July 1988, a Federal District Judge in San Francisco, Judge D. Lowell Jensen, decided a civil suit

The Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991...put on a yet more secure legal basis the right of victims of torture to bring civil actions in courts in the United States against those responsible for these human rights violations. brought against Carlos Guillamo Suarez-Mason, a former Argentine general, by Alfredo Forti, who charged that his mother disappeared after being illegally arrested in Argentina. The general was arrested in the United States in 1987 and deported to Argentina later on a fugitive warrant charging him with murder. The New York Times of August 26, 1988, carried an informative report by Katherine Bishop under the headline "Foreign Abductors Held to be Liable in the U.S." She recalled in her report that Suarez-Mason, who was known by prisoners as "el Senor de Vida y Muerte," the Lord of Life and Death, "commanded troops accused of kidnapping and torturing thousands of Argentine civilians, who then disappeared, in seven years of military rule beginning in 1976." The Act of 1789, applied initially to pirates and slave dealers, and then extended to torturers, was now being applied to abductors.

Judge Jensen ruled that officials of foreign governments can be sued in American courts for the abduction and presumed killing of political opponents and that the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 very much applied to such abductions.

As in the 1980 case, the CCR helped to bring this ease. The center's staff attorney, David Cole, aptly remarked of the perpetrators: "They cannot make the U.S. a retirement home be-

cause they will have to answer for their actions."

Thejudge held that the civil wrong, the tort, of "causing disappearances" comprised two elements: Abduction by state officials or their agents, and official refusal to acknowledge the abduction or to disclose the fate of the detainee.

These rulings, publicized in the media, alerted legislators.

They had noted arguments by attorneys for defendants in such cases based on the doctrine of "act of state" and took action to plug any possible loopholes.

In 1983 a bipartisan Congressional Human Rights Caucus was formed in the United States to tackle human rights issues in a nonpartisan spirit. With its support, a bill was introduced in Congress in 1987 that became law four years later as the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991. This law provided an even more secure legal basis for victims of torture to bring civil suits in U.S. courts against those responsible for these crimes.

The bill was passed by the House of Representatives on October 5, 1988, thanks to the dogged efforts of its prime mover, Representative Gus Yatron of Pennsylvania. An ardent supporter, Representative William Broomfield of Michigan, summed up the effect of the proposed law: "This bill declares the United States off-limits as a safe haven for those who would torture their fellow men."

The bill had died in a Senate committee in the waning days of the IOOth Congress but was reintroduced in the House in 1989. After some fine-tuning by three subcommittees, it was passed by the Senate, and received the President's assent to become law on March 12, 1992, as the Torture Victims Protection Act of 1991.

The Act is brief, comprising just three provisions. The first merely states its title. The second lays down the requirements for a legal action, and the last defines torture and "extrajudicial killing."Section 2 says that "an individual who, under actual or apparent authority, or color of law, of any foreign nation-(l) subjects an individual to torture shall, in a civil action, be liable for damages to that individual; or (2) subjects an individual to extrajudicial killing shall, in a civil action, be liable for damages to the individual's legal representative, or to any person who may be a claimant in an action fDr wrongful death."

The action may be brought only after the claimant has exhausted "adequate and available remedies" in the place where the offense took place. Needless to say, if the legal system does not provide remedies that are "adequate and available"to the claimant, as often is the case in a dictatorship, no question of his prior recourse to them can arise. On the other hand, in a democratic society governed by the rule of law the claimant must seek his remedies there before seeking redress in an American court. It is a wisely conceived stipulation, as is the period of limitation of ten years for such actions.

"Extrajudicial killing" is defined as "a deliberated killing not authorized by a previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

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Such term, however, does not incl ude any such killing that, under international law, is lawfully carried out under the authority of a foreign nation." In other words, death sentences imposed by internationally recognized courts of law are not considered to be extrajudicial.

"Torture"likewise is defined as "any act, directed against an individual in the offender's custody or physical control, by which severe pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering arising only from or inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions), whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on that individual for such purposes as obtaining from that individual or a third person information or a confession, punishing that individual for an act that individual or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, intimidating or coercing that individual or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind." The definition is amplified to include mental pain or suffering resulting from actual acts or threats or the administration of "mind altering substances."

While the new American law was still on the anvil, the Act of 1789 was invoked in notable cases. On June 6, 1991, a former Defense Minister of Guatemala, Hector Alejandro Gramajo, was confronted outside the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served with court papers charging him with committing flagrant human rights abuses in his country. He was sued by nine Guatemalans who lived in California. They alleged that "military personnel under his direction and control" had inflicted torture and caused disappearances to "eliminate and intimidate potential opponents of the Government and to cover up army responsibility for these abuses." The summons required Gramajo to appear in U.S. District Court in Boston, Massachusetts, to answer to the charges. This suit also was drafted by the CCR in New York.

The Act of 1991 was invoked along with that of 1789 in dramatic circumstances in 1993 by persons who had suffered at the hands of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia before its ouster in 1991. Ronald Smothers described the circumstances in a report from Atlanta in the New York Times of May 22, 1993: "Three years ago Edgegayehu Taye, 33, an Ethiopian immigrant who works as a waitress at a hotel here, thought she saw a ghost. There, a few feet away, working as a bellman in the same hotel, was a former Ethiopian government official, a man she said she remembered from her nightmarish days in an Addis Ababajail in the late 1970s. Taye said the man, Kelbesso Negewo, had supervised hours of interrogation and torture while she hung upside down from a pole, hands and feet bound." Two other Ethiopians joined Taye as plaintiffs in the suit seeking $10 million each in damages. Negewo worked as a bellman by night and an accounting and computer student by day. He denied the charges.

In fairness to the defendants in all the cases mentioned here, it must be stated that they contested the charges. Unless con-

cluded by a court verdict, the validity of the charges is a matter of evidence. It is the reach of American law that is discussed here, not the validi ty of charges in individ ual cases.

In another such law suit, a Haitian political party with close links to the former military regime, the Front for the Advancement and Progress in Haiti (FRAPH), was sued in a Federal Court in New York last year. The Washington Post reported on March 6, 1994, that "some U.S. officials in Port-auPrince have called FRAPH a terrorist organization."

It was .sued by Alerte Belance, a Haitian housewife living in Newark, New Jersey, who alleged that she was tortured with machetes and left for dead in a killing field near the Haitian capital and that FRAPH was behind the attacks. Her attorney, Michael Ratner of the CCR, said, "We want to shine a spotlight on these people."

The facts of the case as reported by William Booth in the Post were grim. "Belance, who lost an arm and fingers during the machete attack, said she and her husband were awakened in their Port-au-Prince home by gunshots early on the morning of October 16, 1993. Her husband, who had done political work for Jean Bertrand Aristide, jumped out a back window ... four men armed with automatic weapons dragged her into a car and drove her to Titayan, outside Port-au-Prince, where she said bodies frequently are dumped. There, she said, she was attacked with machetes and left for dead. She claims the men identified themselves as members of FRAPH. "Belance today is severely scarred on the neck and face. She lost her right arm below the elbow and a finger on her left hand.

Three months after the attack, she and her husband were granted refugee status by U.S. officials in Port-au-Prince and allowed to immigrate to the United States."

Last year American law acquired yet another weapon in its armory. On September 19, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment after its ratification by the Senate. Article 4 of the U.N. convention enjoins every signatory nation to "ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law" and to make these offenses punishable by appropriate penahies.

Article 8 makes acts of torture extraditable offenses. If the offender is a foreign national, a country on whose territory he is found has a choice either to extradite the offender to the country that seeks his extradition or bring him to trial in its own courts. It cannot ignore the crime and its perpetrator.

Thus, the legal effect of the U.N. convention has been to fortify the U.S. acts of 1789 and 1991.It is only a matter of time before the world community builds up a truly international body of criminal law. The American statutes have been good steps in that direction.

D About the Author: A. G. Noorani, a Bombay-based lawyer and constitutional expert, pro/iled diplomat/historian George Kennan in the February 1994 issue o/SPA N

TESTING

ON TRIAL

DNA fingerprinting faces its most crucial test to date in the O.J. Simpson case, the outcome of which may decide the future course of crime detection in the United States. he cloudy sediment at the bottom of the test tube was all that remained of a blood spot blotted up from the sidewalk outside a Santa Monica, California, condominium.

It had been whirled in a centrifuge at 1,600 rpm to spin off white cells from red cells, and soaked in an enzyme that digested the white cell walls and split open the nucleus. Enzymes attacked the white cell nucleus, freeing microscopic specks of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Coded onto the strands of the DNA molecule lies a story. For 0.1. Simpson (a celebrated former athlete), it could be a story of guilt or innocence-even of life or death. For the public, which will be riveted by intricate details of biotechnology, it is a vignette of how science and society interact-sometimes amicably, sometimes with intense controversy.

DNA is the master molecule of life. In every living creature, from amoebas to zebras, it carries the coded messages of heredity, governing everything from eye color to allergies. It is present in every one of the trillions of cells in the human body, except for those without nuclei, such as mature red blood cells.

Since the molecule's structure was solved 42 years ago by James Watson and

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Francis Crick, DNA research has brought one scientific triumph after another, including the identification of genes for inherited diseases such as Hun tington's and cystic fibrosis.

Nine years ago, DNA research became entwined with the more sensational field of criminal investigation. At first, DNA fingerprinting was used to establish genetic relationships in paternity and immigration cases. It was based on a method British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys and colleagues at the University of Leicester had developed in 1984 in an attempt to identify genetic markers for disease. The method consisted of extracting DNA from a specimen of; blood, semen, or other tissue, slicing it into fragments, and tagging them with a radioactive probe so that they would expose a piece of X-ray film. The resulting pattern of stripes on the film, looking somewhat like a supermarket bar code, is a DNA "fingerprint."

The method is called restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis.

In 1986, British police matched such fingerprints in a watershed forensic triumph. Someone had been preying on girls in the English Midlands, raping and killing two l4-year-olds.

Jeffreys sug-

gested a mass blood screening of the region's males. DNA fingerprinting freed an innocent man. It also led to the real murderer: Colin Pitchfork, the first criminal to be convicted on the basis of DNA evidence. Over the next few years, police in Britain and the United States seized on the new technique to secure a number of convictions.

Within a year, Jeffreys helped found Cell mark Diagnostics, a private DNA lab in England and the United States that has become a premier center for DNA fingerprinting.

It is at Cellmark Diagnostics that blood samples collected for the Simpson murder trial underwen t tests.

At about the same time, the basis for a different kind of DNA analysis was being laid. PCR, which stands for polymerase chain reaction, enables a single strand of DNA to quickly be doubled, and the process can be repeated over and over again. Doubling something just 20 times results in more than a million copies.

The PCR amplification technique, which takes place inside a laboratory desktop machine called the Thermal Cycler, is used worldwide in an extraordi-¡ nary variety of DNA research. It offers

another approach to DNA identification that is less definitive than the Jeffreys, or RFLP, technique. But PCR analysis can yield results in a fraction of the time. And it can use minuscule amounts of a specimen, as few as50white cells that might be found in a nearly invisible speck of blood, rather than the 5,000 to 50,000 needed with RFLP. That can be crucial in cases where the DNA evidence is microscopic.

The basis of all DNA identification techniques rests on its unique coding mechanism, withjust four kinds of chemicals called bases-guamine (G), cystocine (C), adenine (A), and thymine (T)-which are strung like beads along the DNA molecule.

The complete 3,000-million-base sequence for any individual is unique, like no other human being's (except in the case of identical twins). That would seem to make DNA identification ideal and foolproof. But it is impossible to compare two 3,000-million-base sequences, at least with present technology.

Analytical tools in use today deal only with snippets of DNA. The questions are: Which segments of DNA are most useful in sorting out individuals? And which tend to vary the most from person to person?

It wouldn't be much use, for instance, to look for segments that separate blueeyed people from brown-eyed, or blonds from brunettes, or Type A blood from Type O. Too many of us fit into those broad categories. The easiest differences to isolate are elsewhere in the DNA strand. They exist in non-coding pieces where DNA goes into the geneticequivalent of a computer programming loop and repeats itself over and over. This happens at the ends of each chromosome, and perhaps in thousands of other identifiable sites, or loci, along DNA's 1.8meter length.

These repeated patterns are called variable number tandem repeats (VNTRs). One might consist of the bases GGAT on one strand, matched by the complementary sequence CCTA on the other strand. RFLP DNA fingerprinting in laboratories such as Cellmark

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Diagnostics checks the repeat patterns at five different loci.

A particular pattern migHt be repeated 12 times at a specific locus on your DNA, 19 times at that same site on your brother's, and 46 times on your Uncle Harry's. VNTRs can have 100 or so segments, not enough to guarantee uniqueness. While your Uncle Harry may have 46 VNTRs at a given locus, Fred's Uncle Alf might also have 46 at the same place.

The odds against a match occurring through sheer chance multiply as more loci are tested. The odds against matching at all five sites in RFLP analysis are astronomical.

Or are they? A controversial 1992

report by the U.S. National Research Council, "DNA Technology in Forensic Science," endorsed DNA fingerprinting in criminal cases while simultaneously finding problems with the procedure and recommending a series of safeguards. None of those recommendations has been implemented on a national level.

At the same time, DNA evidence is accepted in most courts across the United States. But a series of conflicting rulings in California have confused the issue in that state.

The historic standard for admitting scientific evidence in court requires a consensus in the pertinent scientific

DNA'S GREATEST HITS • In one amazing success, investigators linked the DNA in the saliva used to lick an envelope to one of the World Trade Center bombers. The test is possible because buccal cells from inside the cheek, rich in DNA, are deposited with saliva and can be recovered from stamps, glass rims, or even a killer's deadly kiss.

• DNA matches have kept families united by allowing immigrants to stay in the United States legally when the genetic study proved they were related to a resident.

• DNA studies have freed men wrongfully convicted of murder or rape. The Innocence Project at Yeshiva University in New York, founded by attorney Barry Scheck, has helped release eight prisoners when DNA tests proved they were innocent. Scheck is a member of 0.1. Simpson's defense team.

• Paternity suits are commonly settled by DNA testing. Former Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit agreed to child support payments in 1992 after testing resolved a disputed case.

• University of Minnesota at Duluth researchers performed DNA tests on lung tissue from a I,OOO-year-old mummified Chiribaya Indian, and found an exact match with the DNA of the tuberculosis bacterium, thus exonerating Christopher

community that the technique is valid.

The California Appellate Court has ruled both for and against DNA fingerprinting on that basis, but indicated that it could be acceptable if the NRC's unofficial and unadopted guidelines were followed by test laboratories and prosecutors.

The first question to be answered is whether results from the Cellmark DNA fingerprinting test place Simpson at the scene where his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered.

Cellmark tested blood samples from three sources-the two victims, Simpson, and blood drops on the sidewalk.

Forensic experts also soaked two bloody gloves, one found at the crime scene, the other behind Simpson's guest house, in sterile solutions to collect sam-

Columbus of the charge that his ships had introduced the White Plague to the New World.

• Animal geneticists are tracking DNA in endangered species, such as cheetahs, to find ways to strengthen breeds.

• At the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, DNA has identified remains of at least IS missing Vietnam War fighters returned to the United States two decades after the men died in combat. A massive collection of DNA samples from every member of the U.S. armed services began recently. By late summer of 1994, more than 200,000 individual samples were logged into a computer database and stored in freezers at the nearby DNA Specimen Repository. By the end of 1995, the repository could have more than two million samples.

Cards with blood blots from each member of the armed services are sealed in individual envelopes before freezing. They are subjected to PCR and other tests only if the need arises.

In the system's first two applications, cards were pulled and tested in 1994 to identify a soldier burned to death in a car accident and a pilot killed in a plane crash.

A 0.3-centimeter-hole punch taken from a blood blot the size of a 50-cent piece was enough for the required tests. ~J.S.

pies that Cellmark will seek to identify.

Other samples were collected from Simpson's automobile and from several locations inside his house, including a shower drain.

In late August 1994, during hearings on evidence and before the actual trial had started, the prosecution announced that their tests had found matches between 0.1. Simpson's DNA and DNA A technician matches genetic material at a diagnostic center.

from a variety of evidence collected at the crime scene: Blood from the pavement outside Nicole Simpson's condo; a bloody glove; and a hair snagged in a cap. Defense lawyers immediately attacked the procedures used in collecting, labeling, and testing the evidence and demanded that samples be shared so that defense experts could run their own tests.

In the Simpson case, investigators claim to have collected and preserved samples from a variety of locations before they could deteriorate.

Sometimes the police take no chances: "We've had whole couches delivered to our lab so we could collect and test a sample," says Mark Stolorow, Cell mark's manager of forensic services. "We've had clothing, pieces of sidewalk, you name it, arrive at the door." But most often, he adds, blood samples are blotted up with a neutral fluid and preserved.

On August 26, 1994, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito denied the defense request to obtain a share of the blood samples because, he said, even though the prosecution was "less than exemplary" in dealing with the specimens (one prosecution witness had admitted to mislabeling a sample), Simpson's lawyers had failed to demonstrate bad faith on the prosecution's part.

"DNA tests can absolutely eliminate someone," says Los Angeles public defender Walter Krustjla, who is a DNA chemist as well as a lawyer. If the blood drops on the sidewalk turned out not to be Simpson's, new mysteries would unfold. Science would have proved that the blood was not Simpson's-but not necessarily that he was not there.

But if the samples from the sidewalk and the gloves point to the celebrity, everyone involved will look at how the test was interpreted.

Questions also will be raised if samples from Simpson's automobile are linked to either victim.

The interpretation, not the PCR or RFLP analyses, will become the focus of a new controversy. [Also, the New York Times recently reF~~ted that DNA expert and Nobellatii"eate Kary B. Mullis,

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the inventor of PCR technique, "is expected to argue that the tests should not be relied upon with so much at stake" if he is called to testify in the Simpson tria!.]

DNA fingerprinting bases its conclusions on the probability that segments of genetic material occur randomly across the population, so that the odds against a match at five or more loci through sheer chance are very high. Just how high is the subject of heated controversy because of a number of technical considerations.

One often-cited range of the probabilities for RFLP analysis is one in tens of thousands to one in hundreds of thousands, or even a million. PCR analysis looks at gene sequences, which afford less specificity, so the range is roughly one in 100 to one in 2,000.

These less than totally compelling statistics keep lawyers busy. They argue successfully that one chance in 100 is not good enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Even odds of one in 2,000 might be enough to raise doubt in some jurors' minds. After all, in a city of two million, there would be a thousand other individuals whose PCR tests would provide a match. That makes PCR testing

questionable in criminal cases, except to exclude someone from consideration or to signal the need for the more definitive RFLPtest.

One of the possible complicating factors in DNA testing is the argument that extensive similarities can occur in racial groups, such as blacks, Asians, or American Indians. Such built-in matches would alter the probabilities.

"A big question," says Victor A. McKusick, "is what reference population is selected to calculate the genetic frequencies. This is especially pertinent in the United States, which is §uch a melting pot, so heterogeneous."

McKusick, director of medical genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, chaired the 1-992 N RC committee report, which addressed that issue by recommending that laboratories use a "ceiling"principle to evaluate results.

The principle requires that databases, or sample genetic readings, be taken from I 00 people each in a variety of races and categories. Matches at any locus that spread across five percent of the general population-or less, if

no match hits the five percent levelwould become standards for comparison, or ceilings. By comparing samples against the ceilings, all ethnic biases would be removed.

"This question is still being debated by population geneticists," says McKusick, who adds that a second NRC committee has been convened to address it.

California courts have been allowing DNA fingerprinting into evidence if it follows the 1992 NRC guidelines.

Other NRC recommendations-that national standards be set for which DNA segments to test and how to test them, that a DNA committee review and approve newly developed tests, and that some national agency regulate and approve laboratories-are bogged down in arguments.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI-see following page) is one roadblock. It wants standardized testing but cannot agree with civilian labs on what those standards should be. It also does not want to become a regulatory body, but simultaneously claims that no outside agency is qualified to evaluate FBI labs. A 1991 DNA bill in Congress died because of the FBI's position.

Because there is apparently no other direct evidence to connect Simpson to the double murder, the outcome of the most publicized murder trial in U.S. history will inevitably depend on DNA testing. If any of the tests fails to produce a match between Simpson's specimens and the blood collected at the crime scene, or between the victims' blood and that found in the automobile, the defense will argue that their client's innocence has been automatically proven.

But if there are matches, defense lawyers will assail the DNA results on grounds of uncertain probabilities or mishandled collection, preservation, and testing of specimens.

Along with the once-great football hero, an icon of the American ragsto-riches story, DNA fingerprints are indeed on tria!'

D About the Author: Jim Schefter writer.

is afreelance

Alllerica's National Critne Fighters The terrorist bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, last month put intense pressure on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to solve the crime as quickly as possible.

Established in 1908 to investigate such offenses as illegal business practices and land sales, the FBI has grown to become the principal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, with 24,000 employees, a $2,200 million annual budget, and wide-ranging responsibilities in criminal, civil, and security areas. In addition to counterterrorism, it counts as its priorities organized crime, drugs, white-collar crime, foreign counterintelligence, and violent crime; the types of criminal investigations falling under its jurisdiction have increased by 20 percent in the past decade.

While agents, and their dogged persistence, may be the FB~'s backbone, equally important are the specialized laboratories that continually adapt new technologies to improve the effectiveness of law enforcement. The bureau shares its expertise and coordinates with other law-enforcement agencies worldwide.

For years the FBI basked in the luster of a carefully cultivated image, fostered by its long-time director, 1. Edgar Hoover (who served from 1924 until his death in 1972), and enhanced by movie and television versions of its legendary 1930s crime-fighting activities. In recent years, some of the luster on the legend became tarnished. Hoover's legacy is now seen as decidedly mixed. Researchers. have discovered that many of the investigations Hoover ordered verge on violating the individual rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Another director was fired for ethical lapses. In 1993, the FBI played a major role in a controversial raid on an

armed religious commune in Texas that ended in fire and loss oflife. On the other hand, the FBI, now headed

by Louis J. Freeh (left), received generally high marks for the skill and resourcefulness it showed in quickly apprehending suspects in the February 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center and in the Oklahoma City attack.

Freeh knew when he was ten years old that hI wanted to be with the FBI. In 1975 he entered the FB Academy, embarking on a highly successful career a; an agent. However, frustration with bureaucracy Ie, him to quit in the early 1980s. Work as a federa prosecutor on a number of high-profile cases am eventually, a U.S. district judgeship followed. In 1993, Freeh came fu circle when President Bill Clinton appointed him as director. Welcome with universal praise, he brought to his post firsthand knowledge of th FBI's unmatched technological and investigative prowess, awareness ( its bureaucratic weaknesses, and a thorough understanding of the judicio side of law enforcement.

Photos on the facing page show the FBI headquarters building c Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue and some of its facilities. The~ include the Firearms Reference Collection, where highly trained physica science technicians analyze and evaluate a vast collection of rifles ar handguns. Another important arm of the FBI is its National Crin Information Center, a computer network that enables 70,000 la\ enforcement agencies worldwide to track down missing person outstanding warrants, and stolen goods. In the headquarters' hair and fit unit, investigators often find minuscule bits of evidence among crim scene items, such as this shawl, that can determine the outcome of atCa~

At the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, future agents undergo a rigorous 16-week training program in such areas as crime detection, evidence gathering, constitutional and criminal law, and methods of investigation, plus instruction in self-defense and use of firearms (left).

Applicants must have a university degree, preferably in law or accounting.

The real-life dangers agents will face on the job are simulated at Hogan's Alley, a town modeled after a Hollywood movie set. Here, with amateur actors playing the bad guys, trainees practice such activities as making arrests (below left), cornering drug couriers or extortionists (below right), and diffusing hostage situations (bottom).

Instructors observe and critique each scenario, judging students on leadership, coordination, and arrest techniques. Any agent who uses a gun, for example, must have a very good reason and be able to explain it in detailed paperwork. Agents return every three years for refresher courses.

Police officers from around the United States also train at the FBI Academy, staging their own simulated raids. Shorter courses are held in specific specialties of detective work-for example, training police artists to prepare composite sketches of suspects on the basis of information provided by victims of, or witnesses to, a crime. An FBI artist quickly made composite sketches of two suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing-one of horn was arrested just an hour and a half after the explosion.

In recent years the FBI has established closer ties with foreign governments and stationed agents abroad to fight terrorism, illegal drugs, and other international crimes. Such cooperation was instrumental in the arrest and extradition from Pakistan to the United States this past February of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, considered a master planner in the World Trade Center bombing. Meanwhile, the Clinton Administration recently announced plans for the FBI to set up an international police training academy In Budapest, Hungary.

Research in the rapidly changing field of DNA technology (see page 18) is increasing the efficiency of fingerprint testing and making it possible to analyze a broader range of biological samples. A chemist (above) watches a vertical gel loaded with DNA samples mixed with a buffer; and a biologist

(upper right) extracts mitochondrial DNA from head-hair shafts. FBI files contain fingerprints of more than 200 million individuals; whether positive identification is made by automated search or manually, an examiner verifies it, checking for minute detail in ridges and whorls (left). Comparing evidence

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Light-colored mutant kernels in reflected light (left) and opacity of the same kernels in transmitted light (above).

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hirty years ago three scientists at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, discovered what they thought could be one answer to fighting world hunger: A new variety of com with much higher nutritional value than the standard varieties grown around the world.

Maize, the name commonly used for com outside the United States, is a major food staple in much of Latin America and parts of Africa and Asia. Thus, what the three scientists-Edwin T. Mertz, Oliver E. Nelson, Jr., and Lynn S. Bates-thought they had found was a simple way to improve the diets of millions of people living in those areas.

Three decades and millions of research dollars later, the promise of the new maize remains unfulfilled-even though experts agree the early technical problems have been solved. The challenge now, they say, is how to persuade more developing countries to adapt the new maize to their varied conditions, and how to persuade more farmers to grow it.

The Purdue scientists called their new variety Opaque-2 because its kernels are impermeable to light. Opaque-2 was found to be rich in lysine and tryptophan, two amino acids the human body must have to grow normally and remain healthy. Although the new variety has no more protein than traditional com, it was found to have twice the lysine of common com and much higher levels of tryptophan as well. This made it a far more usable form of protein for human beings and animals.

The discovery of Opaque-2 caused great excitement in scientific circles-particularly after early tests with rats and swine, and later with malnourished children, showed dramatic health improvements when it was used to replace ordinary com in diets.

In country after country, maize breeders began transferring Opaque-2 genes into local varieties. The excitement faded, however, when certain drawbacks of the new varieties appeared.

Crop yields for Opaque-2 were considerably lower than for common varieties. Its softer kernels became gummy when crushed for use in foods such as cornbread and tortillas. The new strain was more vulnerable than traditional varieties to fungal infections and insect infestations during storage.

Because of such problems, efforts to commercialize Opaque-2 quickly ground to a halt. Then the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico entered the picture.

Using the same patient breeding techniques that led to the green revolution in wheat production, three of the center's scientistsErnest Sprague, S.K. Vasal, and Evangelina Villegas-transferred the desirable genes from Opaque-2 into a new type of hard endosperm com.

By 1988 the new strain, called Quality Protein Maize, or QPM, had achieved the same high levels of lysine and tryptophan as Opaque 2. The new varieties had none of the problems that made the earlier soft endosperm com harder to produce and store and less desirable for milling, and the yields of QPM were as high or higher than the best traditional varieties.

With such results, one might have expected a worldwide rush to plant the new maize. To date, however, the hoped-for "golden rev-

olution" hasn't materialized. Although field tests of high-lysine com were undertaken in a number of Latin American countries and in China, farmers in many cases have been hesitant to switch from older, proven varieties to something new and relatively untested.

That hesitancy has been compounded by the decision of CIMMYT in 1992 to curtail research on the com. Magni Bjarnason, the last director of the QPM project, said CIMMYT officials feel that their work is finished; high-lysine com technology is a proven success. He says it is up to those who want to benefit from the com to take over the task of adapting it to their needs.

"CIMMYT is involved in research, not in extension or promotion work," Bjarnason contends.

A shortage of research dollars was the major factor behind the Mexican center's decision to curtail work on high-lysine com, said spokesperson Tiffin Harris. He said the organization's planners regard the com as a bit more risky than some of the center's other projects, and that "when there is only so much money to go around, you have to spend your money where you expect the fastest returns."

Not everyone is happy with the center's decision. One who strongly disagrees is Norman E. Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing the high-yielding wheat hybrids responsible for the green revolution. In an interview, he said much first-rate research has gone into developing high-lysine com, and he believes passionately in the importance of effective extension work. He opposes any effort to limit the center's research role, and is afraid that without the center's active involvement, the QPM program could suffer the same fate as other promising new technologies that haven't made it out of the laboratories and into farmers' fields.

S

ome view CIMMYT's decision as evidence that the center is straying from its original purpose of helping the poorest countries improve their crops. If it is to fulfill that role, they say, it needs to be more than just another research institution-it should provide the kind of services most desperately needed, such as monitoring and evaluating QPM materials to safeguard their stability.

S.K. Vasal, a maize breeder at the center who has devoted years to perfecting the corn, said he feels it is a shame to curtail the efforts in this area when success appears so close. He believes the center should have kept at least a small program going as a sign of continuing support.

Vasal says he and his colleagues will continue to provide information and guidance on the com when requested. He complained that cutting the program to almost nothing has sent the wrong signal, making it harder to persuade Third World countries to experiment with QPM. Supporters of QPM have been encouraged by recent developments in Brazil, where a major effort is under way to win wider acceptance of the corn. First introduced there in 1983, Brazil now has about 80,000 hectares of the crop, more than

any other country in the world.

The program is headed by Ricardo Magnavaca, maize breeding coordinator at Brazil's National Maize and Sorghum Research Center (EMBRAPA). He says the Brazilian government is backing the effort partly out of economic necessity.

Although wheat is hard to grow in Brazil, a government subsidy made it cheaper to buy imported wheat than maize-even though maize grows abundantly in Brazil.

Unable to continue this subsidy, the Brazilian government was forced to look for alternatives. One idea was to cut down on wheat imports by mixing maize and wheat tlours. When the various varieties of maize grown in Brazil were tested, scientists found that the best mixes were obtained by adding QPM.

soybean meal is needed to get the same growth. Soybean meal currently costs three times as much as com, thus the savings to farmers are substantial.

The prospect of big savings has sparked great interest in China, a country that cUlTently has 22 million pigs to feed.

Not only can farmers get by with less feed, but scientists also say animals fed with QPM grow faster.

In collaboration with Ghanaian Crop Research Institute and CIMMYT, the Sasakawa Africa Association, headed

by Norman Borlaug, has stepped up efforts to introduce QPM in Ghana. He says the hope is that the com will become a weapon against kwashiorkor, a proteindeficiency disease that is widespread in Africa.

Before that can happen, however, the problem of streak virus, a disease of maize that reduces plant growth and he private sector is helping to yield, must be dealt with. Because streak get QPM technology to Brazilvirus is not found outside of Africa, the ian fanners. Varieties develhigh-lysine QPM varieties have not been oped by EMBRAPA are produced and bred for resistance to it. Scientists at a marketed by private-sector companies CIMMYT regional station near Harare, under franchise agreements that advertise Zimbabwe, and at the Intemational Instithe advantages of the new varieties.

The Brazilian government also helped tute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria, however, have been working on by launching a mass communications the problem, and have managed to introcampaign aimed at educating the public duce a high degree of streak virus resison the benefits of high-lysine com. For tance in QPM being adapted for Africa. example, when a variety called BR 451 Vasal of CIMMYT hopes that the was released in 1989, the target was not growing interest in QPM in places such only feed companies and farmers but also as the United States, China, Brazil, and otner consumers. The Brazilian program South Africa may yet provide the breakis being watched closely by other Latin through needed to get the program rolling American countries faced with similar The trailblazers: Oliver E. Nelson problems. Ecuador released its own variagain. "Once we get some very good (top, with lab technician), Lynn examples," he said, "things might pick up ety of the com in 1991 and now has about Bates (left), and Edwin T. Mertz. again ...who knows?" Borlaug is confident 30,000 planted hectares. that all the basic problems have been In a report reviewing the extensive solved and that high-lysine com will soon become commercially studies done on the nutritional value of the hybrid, the Pan Amerimportant in many parts of the developing world. ican Health Organization concludes that "data demonstrating the At Purdue University, Edwin Mertz, the biochemist who superiority of QPM over ordinary maize is overwhelming." headed the team that discovered Opaque-2 three decades ago, Among other things, the report states that including QPM in infant has lost none of his original zeal: "It should be in the corncereals would reduce malnourishment in children being weaned, a all the corn-grown in the world .... Whether that will happen, major problem in some Latin American countries.

I don't know. Maybe if some of you got out there and shoved, The com also offers big advantages when used as livestock it would happen."

0 feed. Because ordinary com fed to farm animals is low on usable protein, fanners have had to supplement it with soybeans, which About the Author: Frederick N. Brown writes for The Saturday â&#x20AC;˘ are high in lysine and tryptophan. Tests in the United States have Evening Post. shown that when QPM is used in feed for hogs, 23 percent less

T

s spring advances, and the sun lingers in the sky a bit longer each day, and the buds poke forth like babies' fists from every barren twig, even urbanites may feel the pagan craving to revel in seasonal rhythms.

After all, the lengthening of the day and the warming of the air exert a tremendous influence on virtually every other life form,

A

inspiring migrations, ending hibernations, inciting growth, and exciting lust. Surely people's innate circadian clocks must react to the return of spring, resetting themselves to keep pace with the extra daytime hours.

As it turns out, human biological clocks do

sion that strikes most often in winter.

Time, Women,

a?

Sun

cybersex.

Some of the scientists' results are preliminary, and those describing sex differences in seasonal release of melatonin have yet to be published. Nevertheless, the work suggests that women and men live in slightly different nightly realms, and that women can add to the lunar timetable on which menstrual cycling

change but only in about half of all peoplethe half who are women. In men, however, the songs of the seasons apparently hit a deaf ear.

The contemporary industrialized world, which blazes with artificial illumination, has suppressed men's ability to react to changes in day length.

Women and men may sleep the same number of hours each night, they may spend the same amount of time bathed in a corporate fluorescent glow each day, but in women, at least one essential keeper of internal circadian rhythms heeds only the sun. When the sun rises late and sets with sorry haste, the amount of a key circadian hormone, melatonin, that is secreted in the female brain at night increases. Come summer, nocturnal melatonin release falls off.

The consequences of that seasonal hormonal shift remain unknown for human beings, but in other species, annual changes in melatonin secretion serve as the principal signal orchestrating many of the behaviors that count, including a willingness to fly thousands of miles to one's summering grounds and the desire to breed.

Among modern men, by contrast, though they retain all the machinery to react to seasonal changes, the release of melatonin at the winter solstice is identical to that secreted during a midsummer night's dream.

"Men seem to be more sensitive to artificial lights than women are," said Dr. Thomas A. Wehr of the clinical psychobiology branch of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who made the discovery of the differences in circadian rhythms.

From The lnrernarional

Herald

The New York Times Company.

Tribune.

Š 1995 by by permission.

Copyright

Reprinted

In addition to the study of seasonal shifts, the researchers are attempting to tease apart the details of the body's circadian clock, which operates on a 24-hour schedule and tells a person when to sleep, eat, and be out and about. Through elaborate and demanding studies that require volunteers to be hooked up, prodded, bled, and sampled like astronauts for weeks at a time, the scientists are attempting to determine what the human circadian clock may have behaved like in prehistoric times, before the advent of bright lights, big cities, and all-night

is roughly based a gentle adherence as well to the calendar of the sun.

However, Wehr points out that there may be male cadences as well, perhaps ones operating on a shorter timetable.

The new studies are part of a larger explosion of interest in biological clocks. Some months ago, scientists announced the discovery of a gene in plants that controls such circadian-based rhythms as the morning unfurling of leaves and the timing of pho-

seasonal rhythms in human beings and to see when, why, and how those measures might change over the course of the year.

tosynthesis.

Writing in American Scientist, Joseph S. Takahashi, a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, describes efforts to fish out the genes responsible for timekeeping in animals.

One has been found in fruit flies, called the period gene, which assures that newly mature flies will emerge from their pupal cases in the morning, when the sun can quickly dry their wings. Another gene identicontrols fied in the fungus Neurospora growth spurts.

Takahashi and his coworkers are closing in on a gene called clock, found on both mouse and human chromosomes, that, when mutated, causes the body's clock to think the world works on a 25-hour day.

D

Their work could explain why women suffer disproportionately from seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a type of depres-

About the Author: Natalie Angier. is a science reporterfor the New York Times.

The surprising new finding is part of a larger study that Wehr and his colleagues are carrying out in the relatively unmined field of photoperiodicity in human beings-the impact of day length on hormonal fluxes, sleep patterns, and behavior.

They are seeking to measure key indices of

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bout 80 percent of America's foremost novelists, critics, and poets established their initial reputations on the pages of what are termed "the little magazines," showcases for the avant-garde, and only later came to enjoy the patronage of big commercial publishing houses. That serious fiction, poetry, and belles lettres are alive and well in the United States is due in large measure to these lOa-odd journals of modest circulation (often less than 1,000 copies per issue).

Over the years they have published the work of hundreds of unknown writers, newcomers on whom large-circulation consumer magazines, not to mention book publishers, would not take a chance.

The commercial realities of publishing today offer little cheer to the writer of fiction and poetry. Magazines like McCall's, which once paid handsomely for short stories, can no longer afford to publish fiction at all. More than ever, the

small Iiterary magazines are the last, best hope the unpublished aspirant has for literary recognition, particularly if the work is experimental or avant-garde.

Produced by colleges and universities as well as by independent sources, some of the little magazines have outrageous names like Boing Boing, which proclaims an interest in articles of "high weirdness," or Bad Haircut, which invites writers to "tap into this common future we all share and let your heart guide you along the path to peace."

A staff of one or two is usually all it takes to turn out one of these literary magazines on a quarterly basis. Sales derive as much from the purchase of sample copies by would-be contributors as they do from subscribers and impulse buyers at the few newsstands where they can be found. Writers' "fees" are apt to be several free copies of the issues in which their works appear.

The little magazines are mostly found in specialty bookstores or in public libraries. (Among those available at American Center libraries in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and New Delhi are the Antioch Review, the Hudson Review, the Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Southern Review, the Virginia Quarterly, the African American Review, and the Yale Review. All are college or university publications.

Independent literary magazines available at these libraries include the Paris Review and Poetry.)

These are all well-established journals for which funding is relatively secure. But like a commercial magazine, whose content is often tailored to suit advertisers, a university quarterly may have to reflect a regional bias, a brand of literary criticism currently in favor on its campus, and/or meet the expectations of the school's governing body, alumni association, or English department head. They are less likely to publish works of unknown writers or material that does not fit their particular editorial interests than their financially precarious cousins, some of whom begin publication with a bold philosophical manifesto, only to close down after one or two issues.

There are exceptions, of course. The Paris Review (see SPAN, June 1994) has managed to stay afloat financially because of the imaginative efforts of its indefatigable editor, George Plimpton.

Along with Peter Matthiessen and Donald Hall, whose names still appear on the masthead, Plimpton began the quarterly in Paris in 1953, then moved it to New York in 1972.

Plimpton credits critic Malcolm Cowley with giving the magazine its motto: "Enterprise in the service of art." It's an apt description of the way the publication works

by spinning off sales of T-shirts, back issues, posters, and the like to add to its income from grants and endowments as well as subscribers. It enjoys, for example, the patronage of such donors as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, the Book of the Month Club, MatteI Electronics, the Playboy Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For a strictly literary magazine, its circulation of 11,000 amounts to something of a miracle.

Many journals have resurfaced years after being declared dead. Story, dealing exclusively in fiction, was begun in 1931

by Whit Burnett and his wife Martha Foley. Burnett and Foley shut it down in the mid-1960s, but in 1989 Lois and Richard Rosenthal brought it back to life. In 1993, Story won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Hortense Calisher, Alice Adams, and Joyce Carol Oates are among those who have contributed to it.

Among the most remarkable of the lot was one of the very first, The Dial, which was brought out in 1840 by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A product of the New England transcendentalist movement, it transcended extinction on more than one occasion. Closed in 1844, it reappeared in Chicago as a fortnightly from 1880 to 1916, then rose, phoenix-like, from its ashes to appear in New York as a liberal monthly from 1920 to 1929.

The Dial was practically the only magazine of its kind until the turn of the century when a few new names appeared, including Elbert Hubbard's The Philistine, featuring the work of Stephen Crane, among others. Another was the Sewanee Review. Established in 1892, this journal is still published today by the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and focuses on Southern affairs and Southern culture. It was one of the first to publish Flannery O'Connor, and, under the editorship of poet and critic Allen Tate and his successors, it has been an organ of the New Criticism.

It was not until a literary revolution erupted between 1910 and 1920, however, that little magazines began to appear in large numbers. Though many went out of business after a few issues, they attracted the attention of editors in commercial publishing houses looking for fresh talent. The talent they found included such renowned fiction writers and poets as Sherwood Anderson, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Thomas Wolfe.

Two important journals from the period 1912 to 1929 were The Little Review and Poetry. The latter was launched

by Harriet Monroe in Chicago and has held a unique place in American literary circles since its inception. In refusing to confine itself to a particular school or type, it may thus have ensured its longevity. Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot are just a few whose early works first appeared in Poetry. Even Rabindranath Tagore's work was introduced to the West by Poetry. The journal carried in 1912 selections from his Gitanja/i, which won the poet

the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

During the 1920s, American expatriate writers in Paris and London produced a plethora of publications aimed at the American market and containing primarily fiction and poetry. A decade later they had evolved into two main types: The doctrinaire political-literary review, as exemplified by the New Masses, and the quarterly review of literary criticism. The Prairie Schooner, The Partisan Review, and the Kenyon Review, which all got their start in the I 920s, are examples of the latter.

The quarterly format became the dominant form of the little magazine during the 1940s. Many of the publications were supported by or affiliated with universities and were primarily critical rather than creative. Consequently, professors and critics were more likely to appear in their pages than young, experimental writers. This was all to change after World War II, however, when a new crop of little magazines appeared in reaction to established conventions, giving younger writers an opportunity to explore alternative subjects and styles. It was a time of experimentation, yielding results that were often bizarre and sometimes stunning. Among the various poetry schools associated with the new publications were the Beats in San Francisco and the Black Mountain poets in North Carolina.

Poet Robert Creeley, dissatisfied with what was being published (or rejected) by the more conservative literary magazines, took on the Establishment by launching the influential Black Mountain Review in 1954. Reflecting on the prod uction of its early issues, Creeley says, "Often I, or some friend I could quickly get hold of, had to fill blank pages to manage our length of 64 pages, or subsequently the longer format of 220 plus. I at times had nightmares of having to write the whole thing myself." He never had to do that, of course, and says, "What really now delights me is that a magazine having a usual printing of some 500 to 750 copies, about 200 of which never got distributed, could have made any dent whatsoever. That should cheer us all."

Since the late I 960s, a stream of little magazines representing all shades of ethnic, cultural, racial, and sexual biases, in addition to the already existing regional and literary ones, has sprung up in the United States. A reflection of the fragmentary times, perhaps. It would take a soothsayer to predict what will become of Bellowing Ark, Iowa Woman, Jewish Currents, Sinister Wisdom, Hobo Jungle, Sing Heavenly Muse! Women's Poetry and Prose, and Zy;:;;:;yya, the Last Word: West Coast Writers & Artistsall listed in the latest edition of Writer's Market-but it is a safe bet to expect that they or their successors will continue to dance along the edge of the literary mainstream, occasionally furnishing it with new names, new voices, and new styles.

0 About the Author: Jacquelin short story writer.

Singh is afreelance

writer, novelist, and

orIlla s a teen-ager I was very shy. I always felt so conspicuous that I talked with my head down, walked with my head down and would have slept with my head down if sleeping had demanded a standing position. It was with difficulty that I mustered up courage to ask M r. Castor again and again, "But how do you factor that equation?

I don't understand how it's done."

And he kept pointing to the book and looking upward, as if the combination of those actions would give me the immediate joy of an answer.

A sound from the back of the class made me turn around. It was the "people"-the "people" who sat in the back and talked when they wanted to, ate their lunches when they wanted to, and paid attention when they wanted to. They were paying attention to Mr. Castor and me. And I shook. I always wanted to be inconspicuous around the "people."

Odessa screamed, "Sit down Mr. Castor.

You don't know crap. Norma, go up front and teach that little 'pip-squeak' how to do this Algebra."

As Mr. Castor moved to the sidelines, like some dejected player, Norma got up and began her slow walk up to the blackboard.

Have you ever seen a river curve back on itself? That was Norma as she walked on the edge of the classroom. She was heavy with white petticoats as she questioned.

"Whatcha wanna know Sonia?"

Indeed. What did I want to know? It was all so very simple. Ijust wanted to know how to factor the problems so I could do my homework. Nothingelse. I had a father waiting for me at home who would take no excuses concerning homework. He said, "The teachers are there. If you don't know, ask them. They know the answers." He didn't know Mr. Castor though.

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My Heritage, My History Sonia Sanchez began her writing career in the militant 1960s when, along with Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee, and Etheridge Knight, to whom she was marriedfor several years, sheformed the Broadside Quartet of young revolutionary poets. She is renownedfor using the black idiom in innovative ways to speak out against oppression. She won the 1985 American Book Awardfor Homegirls and Handgrenades and has received numerous other awards and honors. Sanchez has three children and lives in Philadelphia, where she is a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Temple University.

Nornla

continued

As I asked the question, she sighed, and explained the factoring process in such an easy manner. I wrote it all down and closed my math notebook. I could do my homework now. There would be no problem with the family.

Norma was still at the blackboard. She hadn't moved and I knew that she was waiting for Lewis to say something. Lewis was the other brain in the class. They were always discussing some complex math problem. As if on cue, Lewis called out a more difficult question. She smiled. The smile ripened on her mouth like pomegranates.

Her fingers danced across the board. I watched her face. I was transfixed by her face that torpedoed the room with brilliance. She pirouetted problem after problem on the blackboard. We all thought genius. Norma is a mathematical genius.

I used to smile at Norma and sometimes she smiled back. She was the only one in the group who spoke to the "pip-squeaks" sit-

ting up front. The others spoke, but it was usually a command of sorts. Norma would sometimes shake ofTher friends and sit down with the "pip-squeaks" and talk about the South. She was from Mississippi. She ordained us all with her red clay Mississippi talk. Her voice thawed us out from the merciless cold studding the hallways. Most of the time though, she laughed only with her teeth.

One day Norma called out a question in our French class. I understood part of the question. French was my favorite class. Mrs. LeFevebre was startled. She was a hunchback who swallowed her words so it was always difficult to understand her. But Norma's words were clear.

Mrs. LeFevebre spoke her well-digested English, "No rudeness, please Norma. You are being disrespectful. I shall not tolerate this."

Norma continued the conversation in French. Her accent was beautiful. I listened while her words fell like mangoes from her lips. The "people" laughed, "Talk that talk Norma. Go on girl. Keep on doin' it; whatever you're saying."

ASHA S. KANW AR: When did you begin to write? Did you have any training in creative writing?

SONIA SANCHEZ: I started to write when I was a little girl. My grandmother died when I was six years old. I had problems with her death, and I started to write little ditties, poems, and lines that no one paid any attention to. I continued to write, and in high school I was part of a literary club. I went to Hunter College and told a counselor that I wanted to write. She laughed and said, "You people [blacks] don't write." She urged that I prepare myself to be a teacher, a social worker, or a nurse. I remember being very angry with her.

But I did not seriously think about writing until I got out of Hunter and went to New York University where I studied with Louise Bogan, a well-known white poet. She taught us form. I asked her if I had any talent and she said, "You know, lots of people have talent and I could say yes, you have talent, but what are you going to do with it?"I knew I had to support myself with writing. About eight

Mayhem. The smell of mayhem stalked the room. I wondered if the "people"would lock us all in the closet again.

Mrs. LeFevebre screamed, "Silence.

Silence. Savages. How dare you ask me about my affliction. It is none of your business." As she talked, her large owl-head bobbed up and down on her waist. I wondered if she had trouble each night taking off her black dress. Her head was so large.

Norma stood up and started to pack her books. The noise subsided. She walked to the door, turned and said, "I just wanted to talk to Y0U in your own language so you wouldn't be so lonely. You always look so lonely up there behind your desk. But screw you, you old bitch. You can go straight to hell for all I care. Hunchback and all."

She exited; the others followed, dragging their feet and mumbling black mourning words.

Mrs. LeFevebre stood still like a lizard gathering the sun.

1never liked that class after that. I still got good grades, but Norma, when she came to

of us from that workshop at New York University joined together and met in Greenwich Village every Wednesday night for about three years to read each other's poems. Bogan had taught us to write weekly, and for the first time in my life someone had imposed some kind of discipline on me. I was reading a lot of poets-almost every poet I could possibly come across!

Who were the people who influenced you?

One of the main influences in my life was my grandmother who just let me be myself, who didn't put any restrictions on me and gave me an awful lot of love. The other person was my stepmother who was very creative. She came into a household which was dirty and terribly beat up, and she painted murals and pictures on the wall. She created beauty out of chaos. I thought that if this nonpolitical, black woman who's always scared of her shadow could do it, then I as a political woman had to just do it because that's my heritage, my history. I also met Amiri

the French class, just sat and watched us struggle with our accents in amusement.

I wondered what she did after school. I wondered if she ever studied.

George Washington High School was difficult. Our teachers had not prepared us for high school. The first year was catch-up time.

My sister and I spent long nights in our small room. reading and studying our material.

I don't remember who it was. It was announced one day at lunchtime that Norma was pregnant. She had been dismissed from school. I had almost forgotten Norma. The mathematical genius. Norma. The linguist.

The year had demanded so much work and old memories and faces had faded into the background.

I was rushing to the library. The library had become my refuge during the Summer of '55. As I turned the corner of l45th Street, I heard her hello. Her voice was like stale music in barrooms. There she stood. Norma.

Eyelids heavy. Woman of four children, with tracks running on her legs and arms.

Baraka who was editing an anthology of writings by black writers, and he asked me for some of my work. Then I would go to the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture] and read a lot of black literature. I couldn't afford to buy much, but there was a man in Harlem called Mr. Michael who owned a bookshop; he gave me books and he said, "Don't worry, you'll pay us back threefold by always being committed to your community." So when I became famous, I would have book parties in his store to bring people in.

announce in no uncertain terms that I was black. I began to look at the Vietnam War, the police, brutality, and politics. I was always writing about black women. There were issues about black women that were not addressed in this movement. I also tried to work on the theme of love. I've always said that when we're trying to effect change we must always maintain a sense of humanity and a sense of love, because if we don't, then when we get what we want we will bejust like the people we're trying to [change].

When was your revolutionary consciousness forged?

That came from my involvement in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

We began to draw attention to the issues that affected black people. It was a period of ferment, and we were influenced by Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. My poetry began to take a decided change from first saying maybe I was brown, maybe I was a Negro, or maybe I was Afro-American.

Now I began to

You joined the Nation of Islam for a period oftime. Was that because ofMaIcolm X's influence? What was the role of women in the Nation?

I think it was because of Malcolm X.I wanted to be in the Nation and I thought it would certainly continue to do good work. In most political organizations women are relegated to an area of secretary/bed partner. But certainly the Nation had a role for women, and it was women educating women. With the advent of students and women with degrees, the Nation opened up a little more to the ideas of womenwhat they were about and what they intended to do-but not as much as it should have done. I moved beyond the Nation and left it after two and a half years or so.

"How you be doing Norma? You're lookinggood,girl." ''I'm making it Sonia. You really do look good. girl. Heard you went to Hunter College. Glad you made it."

"You should have gone too, Norma. You were the genius. The linguist. You were the brain. We just studied and got good grades.

You were the one who understood it all.'¡ And I started to cry. On that summer afternoon, I heard a voice from v~ry far away paddling me home to a country of incense.

To a country of red clay. I heard her laughter dancing with firenies.

Tongue-tied by time and drugs, she smiled a funny smile and introduced me to her girls.

Four beautiful girls. Norma predicted that they would make it. They wouldn't be like their mother. They would begin with a single step. then they would jump mountains.

I agreed.

She agreed.

We agreed to meet again.

Then I pulled myself up and turned away: never to agree again.

0

You have written poems, plays, children's stories, short stories. Haven't you ever thought of writing a novel?

"After Saturday Night Comes Sunday" [a short story] was the beginning of a novel. It was to cover seven days in a woman's life and what she goes through.

But a novel demands connected time, not just summers, and when I came back to that novel after eight months, the characters would not cooperate.

I've been playing with the idea of a very humorous kind of novel. It's about this woman who discovers her husband is unfaithful and the kinds of things she does-for one thing she studies licenseplate numbers of cars parked outside her apartment.

Is there any new book of poems we should look out for?

Well, I am trying to do this long poem for my brother in rhyme royal. It's a fuIIlength book poem, and has the classic modeof black autobiography. My brother died of AIDS. Coming from the South, he faced alienation, especially from his family. He felt his father had abandoned him when he moved into a black gay lifestyle.

This poem must be understood by the black community which at times tends to be homophobic. I want to open people up to the idea of AIDS, of men being gay, and women being lesbian as nothing that we should be ashamed of or afraid of. The Blues Book was a long autobiographical poem, fuII of anger and fire, that brought a lot of women to the realization of the self.

N ow I'm driven to write about my brother.

I think the time is ripe for this book to be used as a teaching tool so people can become much more humane.

Something that I find very interesting is your use of the black urban idiom and experiments with noncaps, slashes, stretched words, such as "baddDDD." What is the significance ofthese?

It has been done before by others-e.e. cummings, for instance. It also has something to do with being antiestablishment, giving people a guide on how to read things. You also have to use your ear.

Bogan taught us to read your poetry aloud so that you can train your ear to what is good or bad. You won't always have a professor or a friend to tell you whether your poetry works or not, your ear is your best friend. I always read my poetry aloud. The small "i," the noncaps, stretching words out, the indication that the lines are to be sung help bring out the oral quality of our poetry. This is one of the battles I've had with the organized establishment-that oral poetry was not really poetry in the European sense. Read Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Audre Lorde, June Jordan-we all speak in the urban idiom, a tradition that comes from Sterling Brown. If Yeats speaks in his language, it's interesting. The language we learn in the street is equally worthy of study. Black English should be used,

studied, and celebrated. Sterling Brown made dialect smart, sassy, mean. I made my language hard and used words like daggers to pierce anything that I thought needed to be pierced-from imperialism to capitalism.

When I write something in black English, I bring a black consciousness which only a black person can bring to it.

A lot of people read me-my work has been translated into Norwegian and Italian. It can be translated into any language and speak to your experience as

"I made my language hard and used words like daggers to pierce anything that 1thought needed to be pierced-from imperialism to capitalism." well. A translator told me in China that under the British, signs in Shanghai read "No Chinese or Dogs AlIowed."He said, "Professor Sanchez, your poetry speaks to that experience. It has a universal feeling that makes the reader say, 'I've felt that pain, I know that oppression-that's my poem also.'"

Why have you made the complexities of the relationship between black women and black men central to your writings?

Slavery wiped out the whole concept of black familyhood, manhood, and womanhood in this country. One of the things that happened during slavery was this whole process of secondary conscious~ess.

Black women started looking at black men through the eyes of the slave master. They couldn't see the black man as a primary force because the white master could rape the woman, sell her, impregnate her, and the black man could offer no protection. For example, in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Pauline Breedlove began to look at her husband Charlie secondarily through the eyes of her boss (see SPAN, December 1993). He can't give her all the things the white man has given his wife.

When Pauline goes to the meat shop she is given respect as a worker in the

white man's house but not when goes to the same shop representing own family.

she her

Who are the poets and novelists that you enjoy reading?

For poetry, I enjoy June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, the Native American Joy Harjo, and others. For prose I go to Paule Burke Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Rosa Guy, Alice Childress, Kristin Hunter. I like what they're saying and how they're saying it. I also read a lot of black critics-because they help us in understanding what we're saying and what we're not saying. I'm always amused by what critics bring into the whole practice of reading; they too are creative people.

How do you think social commitment can be brought to bear on our classroom teaching?

You can teach students to challenge the professor, the university, the society, and the world. In my literature class, I ask them to read books that have a social commentary so that when they go out they will remain human and challenge injustice.

If I can teach anything in the classroom or through my writing maybe I can teach people to be humane. I'm stricken by people who say I'm Christian, I'm Muslim, I'm Jew, or I'm Buddhist, and they can't get along because they think that their's is the only religion. How can it be? I want to go beyond the notion of institutionalized religion to a higher religion, a kind of spirituality that pervades us. That lives on even when we die. We need to send this spirit out to people who will come after us and who will need it to continue their humanity.

0 About the Interviewer: Asha S. Kanwar, author and proJessor oj English at the Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi, recently edited The Unforgetting Heart-an anthology oj short stories by AJrican-American women Jro1j1 1859 to 1993. She interviewed Sanchez while on a FulbrightJe//owship in the United States.

you

never rid e alone

No man is an island No one lives all by oneself Alone In isolation For every time you go out, into the world, you carry with you moments of the lives of so many who make you what you are Who make your today. And your tomorrow Caring parents. Doting wife. LoYingchildren Trusting friends.

And it shows. In every carefully designed sipe panern.

In every mm of rubber that goes into specially evolyed designs. In every mind-bending hour spent in studying road and climatic conditions.

'J

Pride and concern. That stay with you, all the way.

To make sure that you never fide alone when you are on Apollo tyres.

APOllO' \':;c always

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Jane Kenyon 1947-1995 Jane Kenyon, one of America's leading poets, died of leukemia April 23.

She was the author of four collected works, including her latest, Constance, published in 1993. An earlier collection, Let Evening Come, has been published in India by Affiliated East-West Press under the auspices of the IndoAmerican Cooperative Publishing Program, and is available in bookstores throughout the country.

Kenyon and her husband, poet Donald Hall, made many friends among Indian writers and academics during visits here in November 1991 and September 1993. She is at right in the photo talking with Associate Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, after a program at the American Center Library in New Delhi. The American Center has scheduled programs in Kenyon's memory for May 5 in Bombay and May 23 in New Delhi.

The Very Special Arts, India, an affiliate of Very Special Arts International (VSAI), recently held a four-day exhibition of paintings at the India International Centre in New Delhi.

Called "The Song of Colors," the show was an instant success; almost half of the modestly priced works were sold on

the very first day. The four young artists represented in the show had three things in common: They were students of the Delhi College of Art, they were displaying their works for the first time, and they were all born deaf. Experts say the hearing impaired are capable of deep concentration and develop a J

keen sense of observation.

Color plays a special role in livening up their silent world.

This was evident in the paintings that the students produced.

A private, nonprofit organization, VSAI was founded in 1974

by Eunice Kennedy, sister of President John F.Kennedy, with the express goal of using art to enrich the lives of disabled peopie throughout the world. It has affiliates in 54 countries which work at drawing out the full potential of a million-plus physically and mentally handicapped people. In India, the parent organization has been arranging various international programs in art, music, dance, and drama. VSAI also has been conducting workshops on dance and movement therapy.

-

Kumud Mohan

The four artists, clockwise from far left: Rajesh Maheshwar. Arun Kumar Swami, Navin Kumar. and Amita Sharma.

High--

Three senior U. S. government officials-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs Joan Spero, and Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy New Delhi last E. Wirth-visited month, further evidence-in the wake of First Lady Hillary Clinton's visit in late Marchthat the Clinton Administration attaches great importance to relations between India and the United States.

Rubin, whose four-day visit was the first by a U.S. Treasury Secretary since 1974, had wideranging discussions with Indian ministers and senior government officials. Talks focused on macroeconomic reforms, providing access to markets, and strengthening of economic ties. At a joint press conference with Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, the Treasury Secretary expressed hope that a bilateral investment treaty to promote investment flow between the two countries would be signed soon. "The best protection against financial instability is through a macroeconomic approach, debt management, and use of monetary policy, along with development of deep and effective capital markets," he said.

Finance Minister Singh called for creation of a support mechanism for developing countries to deal with fluctuations in currencies and global interest rates that cause shifts in capital flows.

Rubin said the issue could be taken up at the forthcoming â&#x20AC;˘ summit of developed nations, popularly known as Group of

Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin with R.N. Malhotra, chairman of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

Level Visitors Seven (G-7), in Halifax, Canada, next month. "India should be an important part of the dialogue," he said.

Rubin reiterated the U.S. government's desire that the Indian insurance sector be opened to foreign competition.

He said that deregulation would benefit India through greater mobilization of savings for longterm investments.

Just before he left, Rubin said, "The Clinton Administration wants to give a very strong thrust to relations with developing countries such as India, as it will be an important part of the American economy of the future. My visit which follows the First Lady's, demonstrates the priority we attach to our relationship with India."

Under Secretary Joan Spero also underscored the need for giving greater thrust and depth to Indo-U.S. economic relations, and praised the Indian government's recent steps toward economic liberalization. An important outcome of her visit was the revival of the U.S.-India Economic and Commercial Cooperation Subcommission, which she cochaired with Finance Secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia. The subcommission was set up in 1974 but had been dormant until Prime Minister p.v. Narasimha Rao's Washington visit last May when President Clinton and he decided to revive it as a forum for strengthening economic and commercial ties.

The subcommission will have

two working groups composed of officials from each countryone on finance and investment, and the other on trade and commerce. A bilateral privatesector working group will develop information, analysis, and recommendations for consideration by the subcommission.

In a meeting with economic writers, Spero outlined emerging global economic trends and praised India's growing role in the international trading system. Asked to give America's stand on prospective Indian membership in the AsianPacific Economic Cooperation, she said that India's case would be strengthened with each advance in the opening of the Indian economy.

She also lauded India's efforts with its neighbors on creating an Indian Ocean economic community.

Noting that the U.S. Department of Commerce has identified India as one of the ten biggest emerging markets in the world, Spero said, "Four years of economic reform have proven conclusively what many had long believed-that Indian businesses, entrepreneurs,

scientists, and workers can thrive in an open marketplace."

Spero was also enthusiastic about the newly created U.S.India Commercial Alliance, which was set up during Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown's visit early this year.

"With strong support from both governments, the alliance will bring Indian and U.S. companies together to discuss opportunities in different sectors of the Indian economy," she said.

learn a lot about recycling from India and identified this as an area for mutual cooperation, along with waste disposal and production of electricity from sugarcane waste. A project to reduce pollution at the Taj Mahal in Agra, under a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program, is also under discussion, Wirth said. He also attended the signing of a memorandum of understanding on training and technology between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Iron Foundry Association of Agra, aimed at reducing pollution.

In response to a question on America's concern about pop-

During his tenday visit, Under Secretary Timothy E. Wirth discussed environmental issues with Indian leaders.

He and Minister of State for Environment Kamal Nath signed the Common Agenda for Environment (CAE) which seeks to establish a Under Secretary Timothy E. Wirth with process for greater Minister for Environment Kamal Nath. bilateral cooperation on environmental issues, ulation pressure on environfacilitating scientific and techment Under Secretary Wirth nologieal research and exsaid though the issue did not figure at the 1992 Earth Sumchanges and joint efforts to mit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the address common environmental problems. At a press conferUnited States favors population stabilization for economic ence with Kamal Nath, Wirth said, "We have the responsibilgrowth and environmental ity to preserve and conserve." protection.

The Under Secretary said the Wirth also visited the National United States had eliminated Bureau of Plant Genetics' lead from the air through the Genebank in New Delhi, construction of which is 95 percent introduction of unleaded gasocomplete. The U.S. governline and catalytic convertors for ment has contributed close to automobiles, and said Indian $19 million for the facility deindustry could accomplish the signed to preserve India's rich same thing. He also observed plant genetic resources. that the United States could

Student

Global Network On the eve of the 25th annual Earth Day, celebrated the world over on April 22, Vice President AI Gore invited nations to join in a unique U.S. environmental science and education network aimed at protecting the environment.

Called the Global Learning and ObseNations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE), the program enables students from kindergarten through 12th standard to study and share information on the global environment and to understand its importance in the well-being of the world.

"GLOBE is, by its nature, an international program, and I have invited other nations to join. More than 100 have expressed interest in participating' and leaders of countries all over the world have told me how excited they are to have students in their schools join the GLOBE program," said the Vice President, whose book Earth on the environment, in the Balance, won worldwide ------. acclaim (see SPAN, -----.

March 1994).

About 20 countries have already joined the GLOBE program. Students in some 400 designated GLOBE schools regularly take scientific measurements of local environmental conditions, such as temperature, precipitation, water if

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acidity, soil moisture, and plant growth. They report their data via the international communications network, the Internet, to the central data processing facility in Boulder, Colorado. Helping the students are teachers who have been trained by a team of scientists and educators.

Data are then analyzed and combined with other scientific information to form vivid global images for classroom study and for use by scientists.

"One of the fundamental goals of the GLOBE program is to enhance environmental awareness on the part of students everywhere," Gore said. "I believe it is critically important for students, their teachers, and their parents to see that the global environment is part of their own 'backyard.'" The Vice President concluded: "In monitoring their local environment and in sharing their data with other GLOBE students around the world, young peo/ ple will come to understand that environmental phenomena know no boundaries."

Judy Frater, an assistant curator of the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., recently organized an exhibition of embroidery by Rabari women, such as the woman above, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre forthe Arts (IGNCA) in New Delhi.

The adaptability of the Rabaris during the course of their wanderings in the arid regions of Gujarat and Rajasthan is legendary, and their nomadic lifestyle is reflected in their attire and articles of everyday use. Bold geometric compositions studded with mirrors characterize their clothing. Each pattern has a name and a meaning. The Rabari women even decorate their simple mud huts with Qits of mirror embedded in walls of sculptured clay plaster (right), examples of which were also exhibited.

Frater has been doing comprehensive research in the Kutch region for almost two decades.

Armed with a Ford Foundation grant, Frater recently established a cooperative in Bhuj to enable local women to revive and preserve embroidery traditions dying out in the face of modern textile technology. She now plans to establish a museum for Kutch women to display and thereby preserve their unique heritage of color and pattern.

"Traditional textiles play the role of story cloth, for community members and researchers alike," Frater says. "In a sense, they are history, sociology, and anthropology recorded on fabric with a calligraphy of stitches."

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ccupying a corner of north Columbus, Ohio, the huge conglomerate of buildings and activities of the Battelle Memorial Institute, more commonly known as Battelle, sits across the street from Ohio State University. Begun in 1929, Battelle today is an international organization with an annual business volume of more than $950 million. With 45 locations worldwide, Battelle has a staff of more than 8,500 working on some 6,200 projects each year.

"We're dedicated to developing technology throughout the entire spectrum, from the theoretical to the practical," states Battelle CEO Douglas Olesen. As the world's oldest and biggest independent contract research group of scientists, engineers, and other specialists, "we look at the marketplace without preconceived notions and in a nonbiased manner," Olesen adds.

Battelle clients include industries and government agencies in nearly 50 disciplines, from manufacturing to health sciences to computers to space and environmental research. While some want help in solving a specific problem or developing a product, others may be approached

by Battelle to market a particular invention. Still others may offer their discoveries to Battelle in exchange for a royalty-based license or to form joint ventures. Or Battelle may invest in a product developed by its own sci- • entists. "If someone invents something, the big question is: 'So what?'" observes

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The Battelle Memorial Institute invents products and processes at the behest of clients worldwide, government as well as industry. Golfball coatings, cruise control, and xerography number among the hundreds of its creations.

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Chief Executive Officer Douglas Olesen oversees Battelle's numerous projects like the robotics mannequin lVith"human" physiology (right), designed to test space suits andfire-fighting gear.

Richard Razgaitis, until recently vice president of commercial development.

"We need to find an appropriate use and market for the new product, one its creator might not even consider."

More than half of Battelle's funding comes from U.S. government agencies, ranging from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the departments of energy, defense, and health and human services, as well as from foreign governments. "We make no geographical distinctions among clients," comments Olesen. "We'll do work for them as long as it doesn't conflict with U.S. rules and regulations."

Battelle receives slightly less money from corporate patrons like Mitsubishi, Emerson Electric, and Hewlett-Packard.

Academic and other nonprofit institutions account for the appro five percent remaining.

Although there has been an overall decline in defense spending, it still plays a major role at Battelle.

Clothing to protect against chemical warfare, compute systems to automate an control field artillery fire, and obscurants such as smoke and metallic powders to divert smart bombs and missiles are only a few recent innovations.

According to Olesen, defense technology can benefit everyone. "Products and processes developed in this area can and should be applied to industrial or even environmental research." However, he is quick to add that project confidentiality is guaranteed to both industrial and governmental clients. "Nevertheless, there's a lot more partnering, teaming with someone who has the resources you need, to offer a more competitive package. Or sometimes companies will find a product that's partially completed and work with the other party to get it into the market-

place faster." As many as 20 companies may share research, such as an auto industry study that examined the use of adhesives in bonding metal and plastic parts rather than welding together rivets and screws.

This sense of banding together for the common good is a recurring theme at Battelle. "Some people might call us a technology push organization, one that promotes technology whether or not it's needed," says John Christie, vice president of corporate development. "That's the old. The new is to understand clients' requirements, where they want to go with the prod uct or process over the next five years."

Also being pursued is what Christie calls a "cradle-to-grave" involvement, "from the development of the materials, to the design of the product, to its manufacturing, to its disposal by the ultimate user, all with an eye toward the reduction of environmental problems."

*

*

*

In the past, however, pragmatism was not as much of a byword. In the early 1900s, Gordon Battelle, the son of wealthy industrialist John Gordon Battelle, became interested in establishing a scientific laboratory to benefit industry. Encouraged by the success of a facility he had set up for a university professor to recover val uable chemicals from mine wastes, he visited the few industrial research laboratories then in the United States. In 1920, three years before he died, Gordon Battelle drew up a will to establish his namesake institute to be governed by a self-perpetuating board of trustees.

Because it was a nonprofit organization, there were no stockholders and thus no dividends. His mother donated the rest of the family's holdings when she passed away in 1925, bringing the total to about $3.5 million.

Four years later, Battelle Memorial Institute opened on its present site with a staff of 30. Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, it grew and thrived, concentrating at first on metallurgical studies and eventually broadening to nuclear research. By the early 1950s, Battelle had established the world's first privately owned nuclear research center in West Jefferson, Ohio.

During the 1940s, an inventor named Chester Carlson approached Battelle with an idea for electrophotographic dry copying that had been rejected by more than 20 companies. A decade and hundreds of thousands of Battelle dollars later, the process, better known as xerography, was purchased by the struggling Haloid company. Rather than offering cash, the company, which later became the phenomenally successful Xerox Corporation (see SPAN, November 1993), swapped patents to the process for royalties to Battelle. The institute's investment

paid off in a big way: By the early 1970s, Battelle had a portfolio with a market value of more than $225 million.

This freed Battelle to enhance its established capabilities along with pursuing new areas of research including oceanography, regional planning, health care, ecology, pollution control, and urban programs. "This is a capital-intensive business," observes Christie. "It takes a lot of machinery to produce stateof-the-art technology. And as research progresses, equipment becomes obsolete in a much shorter time, requiring reinvestment of monies."

"We make no geographical distinctions among clients," comments 0 lesen. "We'll do work for them as long as it doesn't conflict with U.S. rules and regulations."

In 1978, Battelle was tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to manage a major program on commercial nuclear waste isolation. By the 1980s, Battelle established a completely equipped hazardous materials laboratory adjacent to its Columbus site. A laser research facility and a $3.75 million computer center soon followed. It also initiated several "partnering" ventures with Emerson Electric to produce lighterweight, lower-cost materials; with Mitsubishi and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) to supply fiber optic components to companies; and with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to assist utilities in advancing the use of electric power, to name a few.

The expansion also extended to Battelle's other facilities. Enlargement of the Richland, Washington, headq\larters at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) increased that site's nuclear research capabilities. The marine research lab in Sequim Bay, Washington, and an ocean sciences facility in Duxbury, Massachusetts, also were improved. In Ohio, Battelle built a medical evaluation

and research structure in West Jefferson.

Battelle labs established during the 1950s in Frankfurt, Germany, and Geneva, Switzerland, basically do the same type of research as Columbus.

Battelle management views technology as borderless. "There was a time when we used European staff and equipment for overseas operations,"comments Olesen. "Now it doesn't matter who's involved. In considering research, geography becomes irrelevant. We can operate from virtually anywhere in the world."

Unlike traditional organizations where the progress of affiliates is monitored through bureaucratic channels,' Battelle's satellites are autonomous, largely because each is so specialized.

Since 1965, Battelle has operated the Pacific Northwest Laboratories for the DOE. With research in applied physics; earth, environmental, molecular, materials, chemical, and life sciences; and waste, engineering, and reactor technology, PNL allows for transfer of most technologies to commercial ventures.

PNL accomplishments are many.

Scientists here, for instance, developed a robotics mannequin with "human" physiology to test clothing, such as space suits and fire-fighting gear, designed for hostile environments. They also devised a biobarrier involving pellets impregnated with a herbicide, permanently bonded to a long-lasting piece of cloth called geotextile. When buried underground, the biobarrier controls the growth of root systems in, for example, gas lines and sewer pipes.

Another PNL innovation, a thermochemical environmental energy system for food-processing plants, converts waste materials such as potato peelings in to methane gas, which can then be recycled to fuel boilers. And, recently, a stateof-the-art environmental and molecular science laboratory was completed to study complex problems related to restoring the environment.

Also part of Battelle's Northwest operations is the Seattle Research Center, an advanced study facility for Battellesponsored workshops and conferences.

The Human Affairs Research Center (HARC) there focuses on analysis of social problems relating to technology.

Areas of study include health, population, technology, and society, as well as human factors in complex systems, aging and retirement in the United States, and heart transplants.

"Because we see a situation from all sides, we can put things together in ways no one else may think of," observes Christie. For instance, a defense project that used lasers to strip paint from airplanes proved to be just the thing a food manufacturer needed to peel potatoes, once the technology was perfected.

"The real key is finding technology that's applicable, affordable, and manufacturable," adds Christie. "A lot of things are fabulous, but they can't be made or used in an economic manner.

The production of the item is as critical as the technology itself."

Along with xerography, Battelle researchers have invented things everybody uses. Among their notable accomplishments are: SnoPake.

In 1955, a Battelle-developed, air-drying whi te opaque correction fluid for typewritten and handwritten errors was commercialized under the brand name SnoPake. Today it comes in a variety of colors and is sold under several brand names.

"Sandwich" coins. Battelle conducted a good portion of a U.S. Treasury Department study concerning the composition of coins. In 1965, the institute came up with a coin that had a copper core with a copper-nickel alloy cladding.

Golf ball coatings. Also in 1965, Battelle researchers played a major role in the early development of abrasion-resistant plastic coatings to reduce splitting on golf balls.

Cruise control. During the 1960s, the institute devised the first cruise control system for cars. [It permits the motorist to set his car at a constant speed and remove his foot from the accelerator, a convenient feature for open-highway driving.]

Universal Product Code (UPC). In the

vations and more were merely a twinkle 1970s, Battelle was part of the creator in some researcher's eye. "At Battelle, of the UPC, a machine-readable bar code symbol. you'll find a high level of cooperation Heads-up display. Developed in 1987 and mutual respect, which is partially why we're so successful," commented with the support of the Ford Motor Company, this holographic system proRazgaitis just before he resigned rejects an image of dashboard instrument cently to accept a job in private indusreadings to a point above the hood of a try. "Unlike some R&D organizations, car. This allows drivers to read key dashwhere people have separate fiefdoms, board information without looking folks here pull together as a team to down and refocusing their eyes. solve problems and implement new Smart Cards. The size of ordinary ideas." credit cards, smart cards incorporate tiny As far as future projects go, "we computers that store sizable amounts of can't say much, because our clients want to retain a competitive edge in information. Throughout the 1980s and even today, Battelle is working on smart introducing products," he added. But a new method of laser shock processcard systems that will, for instance, store ing to improve fatigue life of metal medical records on dog tags, record highway toll collections, and keep track of parts exposed to stress, such as turbine blades in aircraft, medical prostheses, farm crops and animals. and joint implants, is in the works, as Plastic breakdown for easy recycling. are barely visible, infrared bar codes. The Due to a Battelle-developed process, mixed plastics can now be recycled via a latter may be utilized by the U.S. Post chemical reactor, inexpensively producOffice to cut down on workers having ing reusable materials. to read addresses every time they Extended transport of frozen blood. A handle mail.

One wonders what the world would be lightweight, reusable cardboard conlike without Battelle inventions. "If we tainer allows conveyance of frozen blood hadn't been around, someone else would for 48 hours without refrigeration or have come up with it," replies Olesen. dry ice.

"Techn"ology, rather than organizations, Disease-detecting breath analyzer.

This device gives readings of trace breath has been the driving force." constituents every 1.5 seconds compared In 1994, Battelle obtained 37 patents. to the 20-minute average for convenIt developed numerous software packtional analyzers. By providing an almost ages and made particular progress in the continuous flow of undiluted breath, re- areas of environment and electronics. searchers can detect the presence of spe- Along with garnering countless honors for their innovations, Battelle scientists cific chemicals that identify, for instance, and researchers go out into the commucirrhosis of the liver or Iungcancer. nity to help spark interest in math and Gas-driven heat pump. With the lowest science education. The institute also funoperating cost of any existing residential system, this engine-driven pump can renels money into community activities place electric air-conditioners as well as and charities. supply warmer heating than its electric Olesen is optimistic about the future. counterpart.

It greatly reduces electric "Opportunities will enlarge as techpower consumption while easing over- . nology grows," he observes. Because load during peak cooling periods. Enof increased knowledge, "we'll be able gine heat can also be recycled to proto work faster and better. The question victe "spot heating" for certain areas in is not 'What is out there?' but 'Which of the winter and can be used year-round for the things do we want to focus on?' " 0 the hot water system.

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About the Author: Sandra Gurvis is afreelance science writer based in Columbus, Ohio.

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ART

OF

WILLIAM WEGMAN The artist's deadpan humor finds expression in quirky photographs, videos, and drawings as he focuses on the boundary between high art and pop culture.

PERFECT HAIR, PERFECT TEETH, 1975,

pencil and watercolor on paper, 22 x 28 em.

MIGRATORY ARCHITECTURE,

1988,

oil on acrylic ground on canvas, 137 x 112 em.

rtist William Wegman's whimsical photographs of a soulful Weimaraner dog, in poses that satirize other art styles and poke fun at the human condition, long ago won him fans among the public at large and even among art lovers and fellow artists-but not among critics of High Art. Perhaps they felt that work so accessible and humorous could not qualify; perhaps it was Wegman's commercial success. Shouldn't serious artists starve for their art?

In any case, this is changing.

Wegman is receiving serious consideration and appreciation.

Trained originally as a painter, Wegman switched to video art, then to photography. In the early 1970s he acquired the Weimaraner he named Man Ray after the eponymous 1920s' painter-photographer of Dada-school fame. Wegman's Man Ray became the world's most famous canine model. Wegman posed him with all manner of garb and props, and the dog proved to be a most cooperative and even collaborative subject, holding whatever pose the artist required.

Man Ray's death in 1982 devastated Wegman and greatly affected his work. The "nondog" images that followed baffled most observers and ranged from merely undecipherable to macabre. In 1985, however, Wegman returned to painting and launched the most critically rewarding period of his career.

A

"Somehow," he says, "working with the dog changed my heart rate and made me a better painter."

The critics seem to agree. New York magazine writer Michael Gross writes: "Bursting with narrative, steeped in Americana, Wegman's latest canvases ...more than match the power of the 20 years' worth of dog work that first caught the public eye."

His current subject matter draws on his love of illustrated encyclopedias and 1950s grade-school histories of conquest and adventure remembered from his boyhood. He uses a wash of acrylic and paints tiny images in a surrealist haze.

His dog days have not ended, though. Another photogenic Weimaraner came into his life in the late 1980s. Fay Ray (named, with characteristic Wegman wit, after the 1930s' actress who attracted the amorous attention of the giant ape in the film King Kong), has sparked a second series of photographs, one of which appears on our cover. In addition to painting, Wegman plans to continue his dog photo series: "As long as I have one that's willing to do it, I won't deny myself the pleasure."

"Wegman's fame will probably remain with his portraits of Man Ray and Fay Ray," says critic Alice Gray of the ARTnews.

"But his genius is his versatility-he can engage, amuse, and intrigue us in all the media he explores."

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