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PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCE S JULY /AUGUST 1996 $3.95
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WORLDS W ITHIN WORLDS

Delicately Disassembling the Nuclear Universe
by TIMOTHY PAUL SMITH
 THE

Sciences
J U L Y / AU G U S T 1 9 9 6
COLUMNS

On Human Nature . T H E P R I C E O F
For the Martha Stewarts of the world,
P RO P R I E T Y

VOLUME 36/NUMBER 4
life may be so perfect it makes them sick
ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY

ESSAYS & COMMENT

CHUTES AND LADDERS

In an unstable market for new Ph.D.s, success in science
must be redefined to include careers outside the ivory tower
SHEILA TOBIAS, DARYL E. CHUBIN A N D KEVIN AYLESWORTH

FEATURES

T H E P O L L I N AT I O N C R I S I S
The plight of the honey bee and the decline
of other pollinators imperils future harvests
STEPHEN L. BUCHMANN A N D GARY PAUL NABHAN

C O V E R S T O R Y

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

Delicately disassembling the quantum universe
inside the atomic nucleus
TIMOTHY PAUL SMITH

On Common Ground . P R E P O S T E RO U S
What has happened to the rhinoceros
is as hard to fathom as the beast itself
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSAMOND PURCELL
TEXT BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

DEATH WISH
All cells come primed for self-destruction.
The challenge for medicine is to make them die on cue.
MARTIN C. RAFF

REVIEWS

BUSHED
Fieldwork memoirs are a litany of complaints.
So why dont anthropologists just stay home?
DAVID BERREBY

Books in Brief . TO AVO I D A L L U S E L E S S F R I C T I O N

P L U S: The external chemistry of life; a connoisseurs guide to the calculus
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL

DEPARTMENTS

Initial Conditions . Editors Notebook

Peer Review . Letters from Readers
Working Hypotheses . Kelvins Injunction
RODNEY W. NICHOLS

Event Horizon . An arbitrary guide to cultural pursuits in the sciences

Quanta . Dissident Chinese scientists; metallic hydrogen; stellar streamers;
a hand-waving treatment for post-traumatic stress?
ON THE COVER: John Okulick, Wraparound, 1990 Strange Matter . Introducing . . . Magneto-Hair
ROZ CHAST
 On Human Nature
The Price of Propriety
For the Martha Stewarts of the world, life may be so perfect it makes them sick
A
FTER GRADUATE SCHOOL I SPENT a
few years doing research at the Salk
Institute in La Jolla, California, a
famously magnificent structure
perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking
the Pacific. Next door was a hang-gliding
center, the denizens of which would often
glide past the windows of my upper-floor
lab. For some reason, I had decided that
the sport was idiotic, its practitioners a
bunch of irritating cowboys. One morn-
ing, as I glanced up from perhaps my thou-
sandth pipetting of the day, my eyes briefly
locked with those of a passing hang glider.
It occurred to me in that instant that we
both were thinking the same thought:
No way in hell would I like to be in your
shoes, buddy.
One persons pleasure, anothers poi-
son. The fool had paid good money to
glide around the cliffs; I would pay to
spend sixteen hours a day working on my
science (please dont tell NIH; theyre hard
enough to pry funds out of as it is). And
for each of us, the others activity would
probably count as a stressful misery.
As it is with lifes peak experiences, so
it is with the everyday challengestraffic
jams, mortgage payments, deadlines, rela-
tionship problems and the like. Depend-
ing on who you are, such stressors may
represent profound psychological bur-
densor trifles you barely notice. But the
repercussions of those individual differ-
ences in attitude resound far beyond the
borders of your emotional realm. Among
other things, there are good reasons to
think they help determine your patterns of
disease: which illnesses afflict you and
how quickly you recover from them.
In recent decades study after study has
borne out the immensely important fact
that people whose personalities fall into
certain reasonably well established cate-
gories face an unusually high risk of devel-
oping some stress-related diseases. A bur-
geoning cottage industry has grown up in
stress physiology and health psychology,
exploring just what those personality types
are and how they are linked to bodily
health. Surprises abound. On inspection,
correlations that everyone has taken for
granted can change or even vanish over-
night; new ones can appear. Recently an
ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY
unsuspected and paradoxical stress-prone
personality type has turned up in one of
the last places most psychologists would
have thought to look for it.
P disposed to stress-related diseases share a
EOPLE WITH PERSONALITY TYPES PRE-
physiological peculiarity. Their blood-
streams carry higher than normal levels of
chemicals such as glucocorticoids and
adrenalinethe so-called stress hormones.
In a crisis, those hormones mobilize the
fight-or-flight response, a brief but power-
ful reaction that helps you deal with acute
stress. But if something triggers your body
to start secreting them chronically, you can
become prone to a variety of maladies,
some as severe as heart disease or adult-
onset diabetes, with stigmata that include
high blood pressure, irritable bowels, in-
fertility and insomnia. Even your brain can
be affected: a spate of recent research has
shown that long-term exposure to stress
hormones can wither the nerve cells in the
hippocampus, a part of the brain that is key
to learning and memory.
For people with certain personality
types, what triggers that cascade of dam-
age is psychological stressstress to which
they are unusually vulnerable. Why are
their bodies working differently from the
bodies of most people? An important clue
may lie in something else such vulnerable
people tend to have in common: a mis-
match between the stressors that pummel a
person and the style of that persons coping
response, or strategy for regaining physical
or psychological equilibrium.
O among people with depressive, passive
NE MALADAPTIVE STRATEGY, COMmon
personalities, is not to cope at all. Faced
with stressful challenges, many depressives
give up without a struggle; if they happen
to stumble onto an effective coping re-
sponse, they dont recognize it for what it
is. It has been known for decades that de-
pressives are likely to have elevated stress
hormone levels in the bloodstream.
At the other end of the spectrum of
maladaptation lie people with anxiety dis-
orders. For them life is filled with threats
around every corner. Their response is a
constant hypervigilance, an endless, skit-
tering search for safety, a feeling of dread
that the rules are constantly changing.
A similar variety of psychological
overkill turns up, with a twist, in so-called
type A personalities. Type A was first de-
scribed in 1959 by the cardiologists Meyer
Friedman, now director of the Meyer
Friedman Institute, which is affiliated with
the University of California, San Francisco,
and Raymond H. Rosenman, now retired.
It is probably the best-established and most
widely studied disease-prone personality
type. As Friedman and Rosenman de-
scribed them, type A people are immense-
ly competitive, overachieving, time-pres-
sured, impatient and hostile. The key trait
on the list is hostility. Give type A people
an unsolvable puzzle, have them role-play
an interpersonal conflict, team them up on
a task with a research confederate who (un-
beknownst to them) deliberately botches
the job, and they quickly come to a boil.
They see every frustration as a malevolent
affront. Their bloodstreams fill with stress
hormones; their blood pressure soars. Over
a lifetime such a corrosive discrepancy be-
tween stressor and response can exact a
hefty cardiovascular price.
Hypertension also stalks a lesser-known
personality type, one driven by what
Sherman A. James, an epidemiologist at
the University of MichiganAnn Arbor,
calls John Henryism. The name refers to
the hero of an American folk song, who,
hammering a six-foot-long steel drill,
tried to outrace a steam drill tunneling
through a mountain. John Henry beat the
machine, only to fall dead from the super-
human effort. As James defines it, John
Henryism involves a predisposition to
take the hard way out, to approach high-
ly stressful circumstances with a maximum
amount of personal effort. On question-
naires, people rated as John Henrys
strongly agree with statements such as
When things dont go the way I want
them to, it just makes me work even hard-
er or Once I make up my mind to do
something, I stay with it until the job is
completely done. In psychological jar-
gon, such people are said to have an in-
ternal locus of control: they think that,
with enough effort and determination,
they can regulate all outcomes.

What is wrong with that? Nothing at
all, if you live in the privileged, merito-
cratic world in which effort is rewarded.
But in the world inhabited by people born
into poverty, with limited educational or
occupational opportunities, where preju-
dice and racism reign, it can be a disaster to
be a John Henryto decide that those in-
surmountable odds could have been sur-
mounted if only you had worked even
harder. Stress physiologists have long
known the dangers of trying to control the
uncontrollable, a classic case of a mis-
matched coping response. Strikingly,
Jamess pioneering work has shown that
the cardiovascular risks of John Henryism
are most severe among the people who
most resemble the mythical John Henry
himself, working-class African-Americans.
S and
UCHLINKSBETWEEN PERSONALITY type
overactive stress responses have
been known for years. Yet recent studies
reveal that the same kind of physiological
problem shows up in an additional, un-
likely kind of personality. The people
who fit that profile do not deal with their
stressors too passively, too persistently, too
vigilantly or with too much hostility.
They dont even appear to have many
stressors. They say they are not depressed
or anxious, and psychological tests con-
firm it. They describe themselves as rea-
sonably happy, successful and accom-
plished, and according to personality tests
conducted by the psychologist Dirk Hell-
hammer and his colleagues at the Univer-
sity of Trier in Germany, they really are.
Yet such people (about 5 percent of the
population) have chronically activated
stress responses. What is their problem?
Their problem, I think, is one that gives
insight into an unexpected vulnerability of
the human psyche. The people in question
are said to have repressive personalities, and
everyone has met someone like them. In
fact, other people frequently regard such
folks with a tinge of envy: I wish I had
their discipline. Everything seems to come
so easily to them. How do they do it?
They are the archetypal people who dot
all their is and cross all their ts. They de-
scribe themselves as planners who dont
like surprises, who live structured, rule-
bound lives, walking to work the same way
each day, always wearing the same style of
clothesthe kinds of people who can tell
you what they are having for lunch two
weeks from Wednesday. Not surprisingly,
they dislike ambiguity, and they strive to
set up their world in black and white, filled
with good or bad people, behaviors that are
permitted or strictly forbidden. And they
keep a tight lid on their emotions. In short,
they are stoic, regimented, hardworking,
productive, solid folks who never stand out
in a crowd (unless you begin to wonder at
the unconventional nature of their extreme
conventionality).
P pressive
ERSONALITY TESTS THAT IDENTIFY RE-
individuals have been pio-
neered by Richard J. Davidson and his
colleagues at the University of Wisconsin
Madison. As I noted earlier, the tests indi-
cate that such people are not depressed or
anxious. What the tests show instead is a
strong personal need for social conformity,
a dread of social disapproval and a discom-
fort with ambiguity. Such people show
extremely high rates of agreement with
statements framed as absolutes, statements
loaded with the words never and always. No
gray tones here.
Intertwined with those characteristics is
TH E Y A R E H A P P Y,
h a rdw o r k i n g, productive,
in control of their live s.
Yet, their blood teems
with stress horm o n e s.
W h a t s going on?
a peculiar lack of emotional expression.
The tests reveal how repressive people in-
hibit negative affectno messy, compli-
cated emotions for them either. One study
demonstrated that finding with particular
sensitivity. Repressive and nonrepressive
people were asked to recall a time when
they had experienced a strong emotion
such as anger, sadness or joy. The two
groups reported the emotion with equal
intensity. But when asked what else they
had felt, the nonrepressors typically report-
ed an array of additional, nondominant
feelings: Well, it mostly made me angry,
but also a little sad, and a little disgusted,
too. The repressors steadfastly reported no
secondary emotions: black-and-white feel-
ings, with little tolerance for subtle blends.
Other studies have shown that repressors
are less likely to report observing a blend of
dominant and nondominant emotions in
the facial expressions of other people.
A
RE THESE PEOPLE FOR REAL? MAYBE
not. Maybe, beneath their tranquil ex-
teriors, they are anxious messes who
assiduously cover up their frailties. And
indeed, careful study indicates that some
repressors are mostly concerned about
keeping up appearances. (One clue is that
they tend to give less repressed answers
on personality questionnaires when they
can be anonymous.) And so their physio-
logical symptoms of stress are easy to ex-
plain: cross them off the list.
But what about the rest? Could they be
deceiving themselvesroiling with anxi -
ety of which they are unaware? Even
careful questionnaires cannot detect self-
deception; to ferret it out, psychologists
traditionally rely on less structured, more
open-ended tests that ask such questions as
What do you see in this picture? Those
so-called projective tests show that, yes,
some repressors are far more anxious than
they realize; their physiological stress too
is readily explained.
Yet even after you cross the anxious re-
pressors off the list, there remains a group
of people with tight, constrained person-
alities who are truly just fine: mentally
healthy, happy, productive, socially inter-
active. But they have overactive stress
responses. A 1996 paper by the psycholo-
gists Laurel L. Brown, Andrew J. To-
marken and their colleagues at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, Tennessee, shows
that members of this residual group of re-
pressors have levels of cortisol (a gluco-
corticoid) as high as the levels in people
with highly anxious personalities. Earlier
work by Davidson showed that the fight-
or-flight component of the nervous sys-
tem (the source of adrenaline) is also over-
active in such people. When exposed to a
cognitive challenge, repressors show un-
usually large increases in heart rate, blood
pressure, sweating and muscle tension.
And their overaroused stress responses
may exact a price. A number of studies
have shown that coronary-disease patients
who have repressive personalities are
more vulnerable to cardiac complications
than nonrepressors are.
O sponsesyet
VERACTIVE, ENDANGERING STRESS re-
the people harboring
them are not stressed, depressed or anx-
ious. Back to the envious thought: I wish
I had their discipline. . . . How do they do
it? Knowing the cost of that self-disci-
pline only makes the final question all the
more perplexing. How do repressors do it?
The answer, I suspect, is that they work
like maniacs to generate their structured,
repressed world. They do it not to keep up
appearances but out of a powerful need to
control ambiguity and novel challenges.
And that effort takes a physiological toll.
Nothing brings home the material na-
ture of the mind as dramatically as the
study of the brain with a positron emission
tomography (PET) scanner. The instru-
ment simply measures the consumption of
glucose or oxygen in different parts of the
brain. Give someone a row of figures to
add, and the PET scan shows that metabol-
ic demand increases in certain areas of the
brain. Have that person recall a happy
memory, and a different anatomical pat-
tern lights up. Evoke an anxious memory,
and yet another pattern activates. In short,
it takes energy to think. And apparently it
takes a lot of energy to think, plan, avoid
and deny all the time, as a repressor does.
Davidson and Tomarken have applied
electroencephalographic techniques to
show that repressors have higher activity
than other people do in part of the frontal
cortex of the left hemisphere, compared
with the activity in the corresponding part
of the right hemisphere. The left hemi-
sphere of the frontal cortex is a region of
the brain involved in inhibiting impulsive
emotion and cognitionthe nearest neuro-
anatomical equivalent to a superego.
A similar theme emerges from the
work of the psychologist James J. Gross of
Stanford University. Show people film
clips that evoke strong emotions (such as
graphic footage of an amputation), and
you trigger a pretty strong arousal of the
sympathetic nervous system. Show people
the same film but now instruct them to try
to hide their emotions, and the response is
even strongerjust as it is for a repressor.
It begins to seem plausible that there is a
physiological cost for going about with all
those psychic sphincter muscles holding
on for dear life.

T ality is an emerging field, and much re-

HE STUDY OF THE REPRESSIVE PERSON-

mains unknown. For example, how read-

ily can therapy help repressors become less
repressive? If they change, does their phys-
iology change as well? Will it ever be pos-
sible to identify a repressive person from
brain scans and blood chemistry alone?
Regardless of the eventual answers, the
study of the physiology of the repressive
personality is leading to fascinating and un-
expected conclusions right now.
It can be a frightening world out there,
and the body may well bear the scars of
the effort needed to thread a path through
the dark, menacing forests of stress. How
much better it would be to relax on the
sun-drenched porch of a villa, far, far away
from the wild things baying. Yet take a
closer look at the person sprawling on a
chaise longue on the terrace. What looks
like relaxation could well be exhaustion
exhaustion from the labor of building a
wall around that villa, the effort of keep-
ing out the unsettling, challenging, vi-
brant world. One lesson to draw from
repressive personality types and their in-
visible burdens is that, sometimes, it can
be enormously stressful to construct a
world without stressors.
ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY is a MacArthur
Fellow and a professor of biological sciences
and neuroscience at Stanford University. His
most recent book, WHY ZEBRAS DONT
GET ULCERS: A GUIDE TO STRESS,
STRESS-RELATED D ISEASES, AND COP-
ING, was published in 1994 by W. H.
Freeman and Company.

Robert Goodenough, Figure Walking in a Landscape, 1991

 E s sa y s & C om m en t
CHUTES AND LADDERS
In an unstable market for new Ph.D.s, success in science
must be redefined to include careers outside the ivory tower
BY SHEILA TOBIAS, DARYL E. CHUBIN AND KEVIN AYLESWORTH
V
IEWED THROUGHTHE lenses of history and
macroeconomics, the problems facing
American science are those of the United
States at large: an imposing deficit that is
shrinking discretionary funding; the end of the cold war,
which has refocused spending for national security; and a ro-
bust workforce that can no longer expand [see Fall from
Grace, by Robert L. Park, May/
June]. All that change cannot fail to frustrate the career plans
of many young scientists and put the brakes on technologi-
cal development. Ironically, in the waning days of the twen-
tieth centurya century of scientific advances without
equalscience is in search of a mantra, a rationale, even a
job-corps program.
How did science in the U.S. reach such an agonizing state
of affairs? Partly through its own success: the yield of each
new crop of trained scientists has increased, on average, by
more than 4 percent a year since 1977. Since 1987 alone the
science workforce has grown at three times the rate of the
general labor supply. Temporary positions for postdoctoral
scientists have grown even fastermore than 5 percent a
year since 1989and those who hold them have been
called the migrant workers of todays high-tech society. To
compound the hiring squeeze, the 1990 Immigration Re-
form Act caused the number of job-based visas to triple, and
scientists represented nearly a third of the total. In 1979 two
of every three postdocs were U.S.-born; by 1992 the ratio
had dropped to about one in two. In the same period the
total cadre of postdocs grew from 18,000 to 33,000.
That convergence of eventsthe slackening demand for
a still-growing supply of scientists, government budget cut-
ting and industry downsizinghas stressed the research and
development system as scientists have come to know it. As
Daniel E. Koshland Jr., then editor of Science, noted in an ed-
itorial four years ago, To be a scientist involves extensive
training, an insatiable curiosity, and a job. If jobs do not ex-
ist or are not adequately supported, the science community
and society as a whole will pay the penalties of training wast-
ed, opportunities foreclosed and productivity forgone.
On the basis of surveys we have conducted of hundreds of
people at various levels of science training and experience
from academic and industrial research scientists in midcareer,
to young scientists looking for work, to bachelors-degree
graduates in physics and chemistrywe have concluded that
the supply of science-trained professionals must be restruc-
tured. By that we mean that human capital must be made
more versatile and more employable in tomorrows world.
The new generation of physical scientists cannot be created
only in the image of the older one: highly specialized prac-
titioners who rose as protgs through apprenticeship pro-
grams to continue the narrow traditions of their scientific
forebears. That is a prescription for obsolescence and betray-
al. Nowadays mentors must also be willing to chart a course
for their charges even if there is no accurate road map. And
those who allocate funds for the support of science should
regard that support as serving two related purposes: provid-
ing the nation with the human capital it requires, and offer-
ing scientists the job security and career satisfaction they need
to thrive. To achieve those ends, U.S. science and the uni-
versities that act as the caretakers of supply must have a co-
herent plan for maintaining the careers of science-trained
professionals even if some of those careers are, strictly speak-
ing, outside science. Otherwise, the scientific enterprise will
continue to be buffeted by economic turbulence and
changes in priorities like a cork in an uncertain sea.
IFTY-ONE YEARS AGO VANNEVAR BUSH, THE
F science adviser to President Roosevelt during
the Second World War, delivered to his new
president, Harry S. Truman, a set of prescriptions for post-
war science. Bush was concerned that career interruptions
caused by the war would lead to a postwar shortfall in sci-
ence workers. In his report to Truman, ScienceThe End -
less Frontier, Bush paved the way for two of the three ele-
ments essential for a healthy science infrastructure: federal
support for research and federal funds for graduate training.
Bushs genius was to marry the two by recommending that
funding to university professors be structured in part as ap-
prenticeship grants to young people. As long as the National
Science Foundation; NASA; the Departments of Defense,
Agriculture and Energy; and the National Institutes of
Health (on the government side) and technology-intensive
industries (on the commercial side) grew in mission and
size, the third essential elementsustaining the demand for
science-trained professionalscould take care of itself.
As recently as 1987 sustaining that demand was no prob-
lem at all: the National Science Foundation (NSF) was
forecasting a cumulative shortfall of between 675,000 and
692,000 science and engineering bachelors degrees by
2006, followed by a proportionate shortage of Ph.D.s. In
1990 Richard C. Atkinson, the incoming president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science,
called the supply shortage of scientists and engineers a na-
tional crisis in the making.
Yet in less than four years the shortfall all but evaporated.
Employment data for scientists vary from survey to survey,
and so comparison is difficult, but the overall trends are
clear. By 1991 colleges, universities, industrial laboratories
and even the national laboratories began to report stagger-
ing increases in the numbers of Ph.D.s in physical science
and mathematics seeking employment: 200 on average for
every academic job opening in physics or astronomy be-
tween 1990 and 1995; 1,000 for every opening in the
mathematical sciences in the same period. A 1993 survey
by the American Chemical Society called it the worst em-
ployment situation for chemists in the past 20 years, after
a whopping 1,300 candidates registered at the ACS Em-
ployment Clearinghouse for only 250 posted positions.
The absolute number of unemployed scientists is not yet
BEAR MARKETS FOR SCIENTISTS
h a ve come and gone.
But the current imbalance of demand
and supply could be here for good.
high. But as scientists and mathematicians know well, it is
often the rate and direction of the change that is significant.
Only 3 percent of previously trained physical scientists are
unemployed, but that percentage doubled between 1992
and 1995. The American Chemical Societys annual survey
of starting salaries shows that new Ph.D. unemployment
climbed from 4.9 percent in 1985 to 11.4 percent in 1991
and 21.0 percent in 1995. Newly minted Ph.D.s in all fields
of science, even from prestigious institutions, are graduat-
ing without job offers. And those figures do not include the
rampant underemployment: the thousands of recent Ph.D.s
who cycle through a string of postdoctoral appointments,
unable to find career positions in academe or industry.
C
ERTAINLY THERE HAVE BEEN BEAR MARKETS
for scientists in the past. A surplus of physi -
cal scientists in the early 1970s melted away
later that decade. But the current circumstances, we be-
lieve, are different. The career options for traditionally
trained Ph.D. scientists are not likely to expand, and the de-
mand within such traditional niches as the university and
the industrial research laboratory will grow only slowly, if
at all. The two institutions have become more responsive
to the needs of the short-term marketplace, and it seems to
us unlikely that they will commit substantial resources to
the growth of their long-term research. Moreover, federal
support of science has declined precipitously in recent
decades, and, barring a new cold war, it will probably not
return to its former levels. Thus, what were once transito-
ry discontinuities have become chronic imbalances be-
tween demand and supply.
Restructuring Supply
ONE REASON THE CAREER OPTIONS FOR SCIENCE-TRAINED
professionals outside science will not expand by themselves
is that managers tend to hire in their own image. Govern-
ment and industrial leaders in the U.S., many of whom are
lawyers and M.B.A.s, prefer (other things being equal) to
recruit lawyers and M.B.A.s.
But limits on career options can also be self-imposed.
John A. Armstrong, a retired IBM vice-president for sci-
ence and technology and a visiting lecturer in physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asks, provocatively,
What is a science or engineering Ph.D. for? Students at
the Ph.D. level in the physical sciences, Armstrong asserts,
are more broadly educated than they realize: One thinks
one has mastered a very narrow field; in fact, one has been
trained as an advanced technical generalist. The tragedy is
that most Ph.D.s do not value the wide range of their
capabilities because their professors seldom do either. To
change such attitudes, Armstrong would require scientif-
ic and technical breadth in the graduate curriculum as
well as time spent off campus in a setting where technical
knowledge is actually used.
Responsible senior academics are understandably reluc-
tant to train scientists for positions not yet fully defined. But
that, in our view, is exactly what must be done. A science
education combined with training to produce what Francis
Slakey, associate director for public affairs at the American
Physical Society, calls a commercially oriented workforce
with relevant scientific skills is the best chance for giving
the next generation of science professionals an edge in prov-
ing its worth to a wide variety of employers. And as that gen-
eration succeeds, it will help build more-realistic expecta-
tions about what a scientist can contribute in the workplace.
As Slakey has written in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The bachelor of science and master of science degrees in the
physical sciences should prepare students to move smoothly into
industrial, commercial, or even entrepreneurial activities, in-
stead of just preparing them for further academic study. Our na-
tions high-tech industries are looking for technically trained
employees, and undergraduates in the physical sciences could be
contenders. But in many universities, the B.S. is just a one-way
ticket to gradschoolsville. And a masters is like getting an in-
complete on a report card.
PH.D. ITSELF HAS LONG BEEN THE TOPIC
T
HE
of discussion: Could it be redesigned? Could
universities offer alternative degrees in inter-
disciplinary areas, such as materials science or chemical
biology? What about programs leading to a general doc-
tor of science?
Innovative advanced-degree programs do exist. One of
them, designed to prepare industrial chemists, is the doc-
tor of chemistry (D. Chem.), offered by the University of
Texas at Dallas since 1983. Modeled on the doctor of
medicine degree, the program trains problem solvers:
clinicians who apply knowledge, rather than investiga-
tors who extend it. So far twenty-five students have
completed the D. Chem., and all hold good research-and-
development positions in industry.
At the University of Maryland in College Park, Robert
Yuan, a professor of microbiology, plans to combine the
Ph.D. in molecular biology (including dissertation) with an
M.S. in technology management. As Yuan and his colleagues
envision it, the basic course work for the Ph.D. is to be a plat-
form from which students can select three career tracks: re-
search, teaching or management and administration. The
course work will take a nontraditional, case-study approach.
In the management-and-administration track, for instance,
students will study in detail an active research program and
discuss questions such as how the principal investigator could
locate funds for a continuing line of inquiry, or how the re-
search might eventually be commercialized.
But for all the talk about redesigning the Ph.D. degree
in science, most of the innovations we studied were but
ad hoc readjustments of old doctoral programs. Professors
still need to be convinced of their obligation to further the
ambitions of students who do not wantor realistically
cannot expectto pursue academic careers.
Restructuring Demand
T HE SCIENCE BOOM OF THE 1960S WAS DRIVEN not by de-
mand in the private sector or by changing demographics
but by federal dollars. From 1957 until the Apollo program
was scaled back, in 1970, federal support for academic re-
search and development increased by 20 percent a year in
constant dollars, swelling the number of graduate students
on federal fellowships and traineeships. Ph.D. awards de-
clined only after fellowships were cut back in 1969. The
boom subsided, as booms must, when the demand for more
research and development and supporting infrastructure
(faculty expansion and university development) had been
met. In engineering and physical science, the number of
fellowships and traineeships plummeted by 90 percent,
from 13,600 in 1969 to 1,500 in 1975. The demand spiral
reversed itself again in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, when
computer, semiconductor and energy markets surged, but
the number of graduate students with federal support con-
tinued to decline.
Historically, the federal role has been to target research
problems and protect scientists by insulating them from
short-term market forces. Yet the government is damned at
every turn: If it rescues declining fields by supporting grad-
uate students, it is accused of mindlessly investing in a supply
that will overwhelm demand. If it responds too vigorously to
market signals in new fields, it can amplify the shortsighted-
ness of employers and rob science of a base of new graduates
that is well distributed by discipline. And if it does nothing
in fields in which the U.S. appears to be losing its lead, it is
accused of undermining economic competitiveness.
There are several ways of revising the government mech-
anisms for responding to changes in demand. If (as several
authorities advocate) federally supported graduate research
assistants and postdocs could be made more independent of
the senior investigators who sponsor and employ them, they
could pursue productive lines of inquiry on their own and
perhaps become employable immediately on graduation.
Fellowships shift control of graduate studies to students;
traineeships vest such control in institutions, departments
and collective judgments. Neither kind of support is fun-
neled through single faculty sponsors, and each could be
reinvigorated, probably at the expense of the autonomy and
discretion of senior investigators and their research programs.
Another government mechanism for maintaining science
and scientists has been the national laboratories. With the
end of the cold war, some of the laboratories supporters are
eager to redefine the missions of the labs as being in the ser-
vice of dual-use technologies: innovations purported to ful-
fill defense and civilian needs simultaneously. But another
approach is to view the laboratories as a reservoir (albeit an
expensive one) of talent and experiencein other words, a
long-term labor-support system. Is it worth doing? How
many scientists are enough? As the funding of the na-
tional laboratories and federal research facilities continues to
be reviewed, such questions are timely. If entering into
partnerships with corporations to bring civilian technolo-
gies to fruition is seen as a legitimate federal role, the labs
may flourish. If accelerating the movement of innovations
to the marketplace is deemed politically taboo, the niche of
the national labs may evaporate.
Restructuring Career Paths
ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS AND YOUNG SCIENTISTS THEM-
selves have a number of underused options to consider
before opting out of science altogether. Here are a few
possibilities:
Self-employment. In other professions a period of self-
employmenta private legal practice for a lawyer, for in-
stance, or a consulting business for an educatorcan help a
person survive downtimes or career disruptions. With a few
exceptions, though (mainly senior scientists who decide to
capitalize on spillover technology from their research), part-
time or self-generated employment tends not to be valued in
science. The science community needs to change that stance
and recognize self-employment as legitimate and valuable.
Cr eating clear inghouses. In the U.S. only ad hoc sys-
tems (essentially no systems) are in place for matching jobs
with people. A national matching and placement system
might resemble the one that assigns medical school graduates
to their residencies. Each graduate lists five residencies in or-
der of preference. The hospital programs select five graduates
in order of preference. Then, in a monstrous one-day num-
ber crunching, the matching is done. Something like that sys-
tem might be explored for filling postdoctoral openings.
Placement r esponsibility . Some responsibility for
placement should shift to graduate faculties. In 1990 Harley
A. Thronson Jr., a professor of astronomy at the University
of Wyoming in Laramie, concluded that for fifteen years
there had been a twofold to threefold overproduction of as-
tronomers annually. Thronsons remedy, which he proposed
in the January 1991 issue of the Publication of the Astronomi -
cal Society of the Pacific, included a recommendation that fun-
ders use the fate of a departments past graduates, rather
than the training of new ones, as one factor in evaluation of
grant proposals from any of its faculty members.
Postdocs for teaching. With an oversupply of Ph.D. sci-
entists and an undersupply of instructors at large state uni-
versities (particularly in lower-division physics and chemistry
courses), one-year to three-year teaching apprenticeships HY DOES OUR SCENARIO SEEM IMPROBA-
might be a worthy program for NSF or other federal agen-
cies to support. Since 1988 the Camille and Henry Dreyfus
Foundation has been supporting about ten doctoral scien-
W ble? Scientists commonly pin the blame on
the science illiteracy of the population at
large, coupled with virulent antiscientism of a vocal few. Yet
tists a year as teaching postdocs at undergraduate colleges. there is some evidence that scientists may be squandering
Each postdoc is teamed with a scholar who directs, inspires support that already exists. In 1981 the political scientist
and supervises the new instructor. The cost to the founda- Jon D. Miller of the Chicago Academy of Sciences studied
tion is $60,000 to $65,000 for two years of work, plus an ad- 287 science-policy leaders and noted a woeful lack of in-
ditional research startup grant at the end if the recipient de- terest in mobilizing the science-attentive public a group
cides to pursue a career in teaching and research at an he calculates to number about 30 million. Indeed, between
undergraduate college. A group of colleges in the Midwest 1979 and 1981 only 5 percent of Millers self-identified sci-
developed a similar program with funding from the Pew ence-attentive public reported contacting a public official
Charitable Trust in the late 1980s to match postdocs with on a science-related matter in the preceding year. The inac-
participating institutions. The desperate need for dynamic tion of the rest, Miller insists, was the result not of a lack of
science instructors, especially in state universities, is reason concern but of a lack of leadership from the science com-
enough to consider expanding the Dreyfus and Pew models munity about what it would have them do. If Miller is cor-
with other sources of funding. rect, perhaps our ideal scenario need not be so far-fetched as
Par t-time work and time off. The scientist whose ca- it first appears, and the current job crunch may be not so
reer is interrupted either by family responsibilities (volun-
tary) or by years-long inability to get a permanent job (in-
much a problem as an opportunity.
voluntary) must struggle to stay active in science. Some kind This essay has been adapted from the book RETHINKING SCIENCE
AS A CAREER: PERCEPTIONS AND REALITIES IN THE PHYSICAL
of support program is sorely needed to make it possible for SCIENCES by SH E I L A TO B I A S, DA R Y L E. CH U B I N and KE V I N
part-time scientists to maintain membership in the profes- . Tobias has been on a long-term research and writing
AY L E S W O R T H
sional community for periods of from two to five years. assignment for the Research Corporation of Tucson, Arizona, a foun -
Otherwise, the eight-year to ten-year investment in science dation for the advancement of science. She is also the author of
may be sacrificed to temporary family or financial needs. THEYRE NOT DUMB, THEYRE DIFFERENT; REVITALIZING
UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE; and WHY SOME THINGS WORK
Vision and Opportunity AND MOST DONT. Chubin, a science-policy analyst, is the division
director for research, evaluation and dissemination in the education and
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, THE FUTURE FOR SCIENCE-TRAINED human resources directorate of the National Science Foundation.
professionals in the U.S. might look something like this: Aylesworth is a cofounder of the Young Scientists Network and is an
Young people, regardless of race, ethnic background, sex or American Physical Society Congressional Fellow in the office of Sen -
disability, would be recruited to study science in significant- ator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Copyright 1995 by Research Corporation.
ly larger numbers than they are today. Like todays candidates
for ROTC and the military academies, they would be
supported by tuition waivers, monthly stipends and paid
summer-work experience. Those who chose to terminate
their schooling with the two-year associates degree would
become technicians. Those who continued through the
bachelors degree would not have to repay their tuition
waivers, because the public would understand that science
literacy is valuable in all sectors of the economy. Those earn-
ing degrees at the masters level would have opportunities to
do meaningful science-related work. Those earning the
doctorate would be employed at the bench or in the man-
agement of basic or applied research.
Extending the military-training model still further,
graduates in science (at all levels) would be expected to re-
pay their fellowships with some form of science-related
service in public institutions (schools, museums, hospitals,
national laboratories) or in the private sector (industry,
commerce, banks, environmental-cleanup companies, law
firms, media organizations).
Such a scenario presumes a public that is sympathetic to
science, made up of both ordinary people and powerful
decision makers willing to pay for a science infrastructure.
Just as the public willingly pays for readiness in the in-
terest of national security, so it would greet scientific
investigation (scientific maneuvers, as it were) and a sci-
ence corps of young graduates as investments in long-
term national well-being.
 the

Sciences
J U L Y/ A U G U S T 1 9 9 6

THE
POLLINATION
CRISIS
The plight of the honey bee
and the decline of other pollinators
imperils future harvests

BY STEPHEN L. BUCHMANN
AND GARY PAUL NABHAN

I
T WAS A COOL MORNING IN MID-NOVEMBER,
and the Santa Catalina Mountains of Arizona
were streaming with miniature aircraft. Near
their hives, thousands of worker bees filled the
air with wingbeats, as they do at least eleven months of the
year, giving every sign of a good pollen harvest. For ten
years one of us (Buchmann) had been coming to visit these
honey bees every week, collecting pollen from each of five
managed hives. The work was physically painless (unlike
honey gathering, it left the bees homes, and good temper,
intact), but lately it had taken a psychological toll. Here, as
elsewhere, natures most productive workers were slowly
being put out of business.
The Sonoran Desert, of which the Santa Catalinas are a
part, is a bee paradise, the most bee-rich piece of real es-
tate in the world. Some 1,500 bee species live within an
hours drive of Tucson, biologists estimate, and they visit
close to half as many kinds of native plants. That diversity,
like many bee traits, flies in the face of an ecological rule
of thumb: the farther you travel from the tropical zones,
the fewer species of animals and plants you encounter. Yet
bees are no where so abundant as in savannas and deserts,
and no desert is as hospitable to them as the Sonoran.
Hiking up Pima Canyon with Buchmann on his week-
ly rounds, you might not see many wildflowers. But the
bees have eyes for wildflowers beyond human sight, and
they forage over an area of sixty square miles. (If bees were
the size of people, the Harvard University biologist Edward
O. Wilson once remarked, a single colony could collect
nectar and pollen from half the state of Texas.) And these
bees knew intimately what was in bloom at any time of day,
on any day of the year, throughout their range. In each hive
Buchmann visited, one small wooden drawer held the
fruits of the bees labors: thousands of pollen pellets, the
grains glued together by bee saliva or regurgitated honey,
heaped in low, rainbow-colored moundsa veritable por-
trait of the landscape in miniature.
That portrait, with all its hues, was just about to change.
On the November morning in question, earthmoving
equipment sprawled below the bajada, or gravelly slope, on
which the hives stood. Within a few weeks the machines
would strip away all of the sites native vegetation, thereby
transforming the shape and color of the bees pollen as
surely as the shape and color of the larger landscape. But
changes in the pollen were only a hint of the changes tak-
ing place, on a massive scale, in the surrounding country-
side and beyond. Bulldozers and builders have replaced the
local cactus forest with 500 new luxury homes, leaving on-
ly a few showy saguaros and prickly pears. Elsewhere in the
Sonoran Desert 930,000 acres have been converted to non-
native pasture, which has destroyed crucial pit stops for mi-
gratory pollinators such as bats and butterflies. In southern
Arizona ranchers spray their mesquite-covered ranges with
herbicides that also kill valuable nectar plants. In the Sier-
ra Madre, bootleggers harvest 1,200,000 wild agaves every
year to make mescal, depriving bats of more nectar. In the
southern reaches of the state of Sonora, Mexico, moths and
butterflies are being decimated by paraquat, a herbicide
sprayed on fields of marijuana. And it is widely known that
populations of the honey bee, the poster child of all polli-
nators, are in decline.
Twelve years ago we began a scientific collaboration to
study pollination in the Sonoran Desert. In those years we
have criss-crossed the desert countless times, documenting
a great deal of scientific evidence of the disastrous effects of
habitat fragmentation. We have noted disrupted relations
between plants and pollinators, diminished numbers of
seeds per fruit among rare plants as well as commercial
crops, and declining populations of animal pollinators. In
our studies along the Mexican border with the United
States, only 27 percent of cereus cactuses were pollinated.
In one area sprayed with pesticides, only 5 percent pro-
duced fruit. In areas free of agrichemicals, between 60 and
100 percent of the plants would have been pollinated, and
between 75 and 100 percent would have borne fruit.
Those findings have been echoed the world over, in habi-
tats as dissimilar as the tallgrass prairies of Iowa and the dry
Chaco Serrano scrublands of Argentina.
By now many readers may be inured to such dire reck-
onings. But the truth of the matter is this: a pollination cri-
sis is flaring in rural as well as urban settings, in North
America as well as on other continents. It threatens rare,
endangered plants as well as the common ones that keep
people clothed and fed. Of course, the pollination crisis is
just one aspect of the familiar refrain that biodiversity is un-
der siege. Yet too often the biodiversity crisis sounds as if
it is taking place far away, in some exotic rain forest. For
many people, pollination may be the most concrete mani-
festation of the value of the network to which biodiversi-
ty gives rise. Plants, after all, depend on pollination to re-
produce, and one in three mouthfuls of the food people eat
is prepared from plants pollinated by animals. When the
pollination network is disrupted, the effect on human pop-
ulations is direct and potentially disastrous.
ANY PEOPLE, WHEN THEY THINK OF POL-
M linators at all, think of honey bees. Yet
bees alone are astonishingly diverse, and
the full range of pollinators is nothing short of bewilder-
ing. There are male mosquitoes that pollinate rare orchids
in Wisconsin peat bogs and scarab beetles that visit water
lilies in Amazonia. Flying foxes connect island plants in the
South Pacific and pygmy gliding possums pollinate the
forests of Australia. Hawaiian ieie vines depend on
Japanese white-eye birds, and only lemurs can pollinate the
travelers trees of Madagascar.
Fishes, amphibians and reptiles generally show little in-
terest in flowers. In New Zealand, however, Duvaucels
geckos have been seen prying open flax blossoms, inserting
their tongues to suck up the nectar. As the geckos feed, their
chins and throats often get coated with pollen. In fact, their
throat scales are modified to hold on to flax pollen grains
much like the elaborate hairs of the lesser long-nosed bat in
Arizona. The geckos then move on, carrying the pollen to
other flowers, sometimes over substantial distances.
Viewed from an ecological point of view, perhaps none of
that variety ought to be surprising: pollinators are the unseen
Kit Williams, The Death of Spring, 1980
engines driving an ecosystem. They couple plant to plant
and plant to animal, spinning the verdant world through
endless cycles and feedback loops, providing fuel and fuses
and safety valves. In exchange for carrying pollen from one
plant to another, mutualistic pollinators receive food, shelter,
chemicals or mating ground in and around the flowers.
All told, we conservatively estimate, there are between
130,000 and 200,000 pollinator species in the worldon
the same order of magnitude as the number of flowering
plants. Of those species, as many as 40,000 may be bees.
Other animals may dispense pollen indifferently, or acciden-
tally, but bees devote their lives to the task. Except for a few
parasitic varieties and a few so-called vulture bee scavengers,
all bees are true herbivores. They are herbivores, moreover,
of a peculiar variety: eons of evolution have shaped them to
run on nectar and pollen alonenectar as flight fuel and
pollen as food for their broods. The result has been some of
the strangest, most useful devices in the animal world.
Take bee tongues. Depending on where bees live, they
may have to draw nectar from floral cups, bowls or vases.
As a result, their tongues can be sorted into two discrete
groups. Bees with broad, often bi-lobed tongues probably
began to appear 140 million years ago. Millions of years lat-
er, when flowers with deep, tubular corollas arrived on the
scene, bees with longer tongues grew more abundant.
Both kinds of tongue are marvelous multipurpose tools.
Their tips have a fringed, spoonlike flapthe flabellum
that can reach into hidden pools and crevices to lap up nec-
tar. Back at the hive, the same tongue converts to a trow-
el, plastering saliva and other, waxy or oily secretions on
burrow walls, protecting underground cell walls from
moisture, fungi and collapse.
Bee specialists jokingly call their subjects flying Swiss
Army knivesand with good reason. A bees front legs
may have crescent-shaped bottle openers. Its hind legs may
have tibial spurs, pollen rakes, brushes or baskets. The hair
on the hind legs may vary dramatically in its arrangement,
size or texture. Bees that buzz flowers in a hurry have thin
hairs that can capture small, dry pollen grains. Squash and
gourd bees have coarser, widely spaced hairs that can gather
massive, oily grains from cultivated crops. Male Panama-
nian bees, with modified forelegs, mop up orchid perfumes
that attract females. And bees in Costa Rica use their
forelegs to squeegee nutritious oils from yellow flowers and
then carry the oils back to the brood on the stout bristles
of their hind legs.
I
N SPITE OF THE OVERWHELMING DIVERSITY AND
the marvelous specificity of the pollinating mech-
anisms within the worlds ecosystems, there is a
sense in which the honey bees popular reputation as the
queen of pollinators is justified. Consider the natural histo-
ry of the honey bee in the 375 years since the insect was in-
troduced into North America at Jamestown, Virginia. In
that time Native Americans greeted Europeans, then suc-
cumbed to their diseases. Jamestown and Williamsburg fell
into decay, then became national historical sites. Red
wolves were driven into extinction on the Eastern seaboard,
only to be reintroduced into North Carolina in 1987.
Until recently, honey bees suffered no such setbacks. In
the same period they spread into every conceivable terres-
trial environment in North America. They are more com-
mon than cows, horseflies, tumbleweeds and tax collectors.
They number in the billions.
In the past few years a war has raged between wilderness
advocates and western cattlemen. The cattlemen say they
make productive use of land that is too dry, too stony or
too steep for crop farming. Wilderness advocates say that
cattle are not native to the Americas, that they unfairly
compete with wildlife, exiling or endangering native
species. Someday, we believe, beekeeping will arouse sim-
ilar debate in the U.S. and Mexicoas it already has in
Australia. Honey bees are, after all, lilliputian livestock
fuzzy herbivores with wingsjust as capable of taming a
landscape as is any herd of cattle, sheep or goats. Their
grazing on pollen and nectar simply goes unnoticed.
IOLOGISTS CAN only wonder how many na-
B tive bee species the honey bee has routed
since its arrival. Today it is virtually impossi-
ble to find an area free of feral or managed honey bees,
one that might allow a controlled study of their collisions
with native pollinators. Nevertheless, studying the impact
of honey bees on New World species has been the con-
suming passion of several scholars. They suggest that Apis
mellifera often can outcompete
native bees, ants, wasps and other ONE IN THREE MOUTHFULS
species. The honey bee can scout
out even the most ephemeral of the food people eat
patch of flowers, quickly assessing is prepared from plants
whether it is worth visiting. If so,
the bee can direct its peers to the pollinated by animals.
target with the language of the
bee dance; they then can harvest
the pollen and nectar before other species have a chance
to challenge them.
Native pollinators are creatures of habit: they depend on
finding certain plants in certain places. But honey bees
seem to thrive on disruption, like scavengers following no-
mads from camp to camp. They are the most undiscrimi-
nating of pollinators as well as the hardest-working. In the
Santa Catalina Mountains, when homeowners replaced
cactuses with eucalyptus and African sumac, the honey
bees simply changed diets. In a single year the Santa Catali-
na colonies Buchmann studied each yield between fifty
and eighty-five pounds of pollen (a massive harvest com-
pared with the ounce-size quantities solitary bees can
muster). That pollen represents fifty-five species of flower-
ing plantsa quarter of the species blooming within the
bees range. Pollen from daisies, lilies, mesquite, mustard,
mistletoe, jojoba, creosote bush and triangular leaf bursage
have wound up in the pollen pellets. And stranger materi-
als often joined them: flour, mold spores, cheese mites, coal
dust and sawdust.
HE HONEY BEES ADAPTABILITY HAS ENABLED
T it to spread across the New World, and
moreacross the face of the planet. But it is
no panacea for pollination. Honey bees pack their pollen wet
with nectar and saliva, rendering it inviable or at least much
less likely to be rubbed on a flowers waiting stigma. Because
they are less faithful to specific plants, they also waste pollen ized bees in the U.S. alone is likely around $160 million a
from one species on plants from another. In many cases pol-
linators outcompeted by honey bees could put the same
pollen to better use. In such circumstances, according to the
ecologist James D. Thomson of the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, honey bees are ugly pollinators.
Our studies of wild gourds in the Sonoran Desert re-
vealed a case in point. Native squash and gourd bees and
carpenter bees, we learned, are much better than honey
bees at harvesting and depositing pollen on receptive stig-
mas. On average, a honey bee must visit a female squash or
gourd fl ower 3.3 times to set all the seeds of the plant.
Squash and gourd bees need only 1.3 visits, carpenter bees
only 1.1. Furthermore, native squash and gourd bees visit
gourd flowers more often than other bees do, and their vis-
its coincide with the highest availability of pollen and nec-
tar. And they are strong fliers, frequently moving pollen
between far-flung plants of the same species, thereby pro-
moting genetic diversity.
Honey bees, then, are far from perfect substitutes for
native pollinators. And even if they were, the pollination
crisis would continue. Honey bee populations have been
declining for decades. In the U.S. the number of honey bee
colonies peaked in 1947, at 5.9 million. The postwar rise
in the use of organochlorine pes-
ticides reduced that number to 4.1
million by 1972. Although fruit
growers have since switched to
organophosphate pesticides and
beekeepers have striven to manage
their colonies better in order to
prevent honey bee poisoning, the
beekeeping industry has never ful-
ly recovered.
Several threats to U.S. honey bees will be difficult or im-
possible to dispel. Tracheal mites, which infect the adult
bees respiratory system, first appeared in managed colonies
in Florida in 1984. In the years since, the mites have spread
throughout the country, killing as many as half the bees in
many colonies. Another threat, an external parasite known
as the Varroa mite, arrived in Wisconsin in 1987 and now
infests bee colonies in more than thirty states. Nosema
disease afflicts 60 percent of U.S. bee colonies. Altogether,
beekeepers lose $192 million to such pests and diseases
every year. The damages, moreover, are not limited to bee
colonies in the field. Bee combs stored in warehouses are
under constant attack from gallerine-moth caterpillars,
which have an unflagging appetite for beeswax.
By the end of the 1980s such losses had already crippled
the U.S. bee industr y. Then the Africanized bees arrived
[see Honey, Theyre Here! Learning to Cope with
Africanized Bees, by Mark L. Winston, March/April
1992]. After more than a decade of isolated visits they took
up permanent residence in the continental U.S. in 1990.
Since then they have helped carry mites into wildland and
cropland populations of honey bees, destroying 85 percent
of the feral honey bees in one part of Arizona alone. Once
Africanized bees arrive in an area, the cost of insuring
against their attacks may drive out as many as four-fifths of
the amateur beekeepers. The loss attributable to African-
year. That estimate, like the ones we cited earlier, does not
include the value of the crops pollinated by honey bees. In
fact, the honey bees shortcomings notwithstanding, the
pollination they provide is estimated to be between fifty
and sixty times more valuable than their honey, wax, pollen
and other hive products put together.
T
HE DECLINE OF EUROPEAN HONEY BEES, UN-
like the demise of native bees, has made
headline news. Yet few people have asked the
critical follow-up question: If honey bees continue to dis-
appear, what will the costs be in diminished crop yield?
Two brothersthe economist Lawrence Southwick Jr.
at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the late
apiculturist Edward E. Southwicksought to answer that
question in 1992. They began with two assumptions: First,
in the northern U.S., half of the managed European hon-
ey bee population would succumb to various parasites and
diseases. Second, in the southern states managed honey bee
colonies would be abandoned, as aggressive Africanized
bees increased beekeepers liabilities. Under those two
assumptions, the Southwicks estimated, a fifth of the U.S.
alfalfa crop could be lost, at a social cost of $40.5 million a
year. Furthermore, if other pollinators were not recruited
to fill the void, the social costs in alfalfa losses would come
to $315 million a year.
Many people do not see their lives as being inextricably
tied to the fate of alfalfa. But by the same token, many
people are only vaguely aware that a host of other crops
are fundamental to current earnings and ways of living:
crops that are pollinated primarily by wild animals. In
1986 Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen, two Canadian
consultants specializing in sustainable-development issues,
surveyed sixty agricultural crops critical to the North
American economy. They found that seven crops, grown
in or imported into the U.S., currently worth about $1.25
billion annually, are pollinated primarily by wild insects.
They include squash, cacao, cashews, mangoes, car-
damom, cranberries and highbush blueberries.
In spite of the apparent precision of such estimates, pol-
lination remains poorly understood and inadequately
monitored. In one region of the U.S. the pollinators are
known for only one of every fifteen officially endangered
plants. Without such knowledge, of course, a plants pri-
mary means of propagation could disappear before anyone
could lift a finger to preserve it. And the economic impact
of the loss of a pollinator not as well documented as the
honey bee remains virtually impossible to assess.
N
OW THAT THE AMERICAN HONEY BEE IN-
dustry has gone into a veritable tailspin, the
U.S. is finally learning some hard-won
lessons from Western Europe. Habitats in Europe have long
been cut to pieces. And farmers have spent decades assess-
ing the ecological needs of native pollinators. According to
the German wild-bee conservationist Paul Westrich of the
Institute for the Study of Wild Bees in Tbingen:
The entire habitat complex of a bee species very often consists of
several partial habitats, [and] each partial habitat contains only one
of the required resources. The nest site can lie several hundred
meters away from the foraging site. . . . Therefore, protecting bees
in many cases requires more than conserving just one site.
Westrich and his German colleagues emphasize the need
to protect cliffs, marshes, fens, riverbanks, sand dunes, lev-
ees, lowland heaths, deciduous woodlands and landslide-
prone slopes adjacent to farmlands. Wildlands, the Euro-
pean Community has discovered, are essential to keeping
farms productive.
That message has finally taken root in American soil, on
Staten Island, New York. There, at the Fresh Kills Landfill,
more than 100 million tons of garbage have been dumped
since 1948, and thus was created one of the largest human-
made structures in North America.
In the past few years the plant ecologists Mary E. Yurli-
na and Steven N. Handel of Rutgers University have mon-
itored pollinators as part of an effort to revegetate Fresh
Kills. Small patches of native trees and shrubs, including
wild cherry, elderberry and silky dogwoods, have already
been planted, some of them more than a thousand feet
from the nearest native woodland on Staten Island. Even
the most distant plantings, Yurlina and Handel noted, were
visited by several species of native beesan encouraging
sign. But the study also showed that the flowers farthest
from the woodlands received the fewest visits from the bees.
The lesson is clear: the farther fields and orchards are re-
moved from wildlands, the more their yields will suffer.
One must begin to see the world through the eyes of a bee
or a butterfly, to smell out its fragrances as a moth would,
to taste the mix of sugars as a hummingbird might taste
them. Above all, one must not let wildness become too re-
mote from the lives of the pollinators, or from ones own
life. The risk is too highperhaps even higher than the
mountain of garbage at the Fresh Kills Landfill.
ST E P H E NL. BU C H M A N Nis a research associate at the Arizona
Sonora Desert Museum and associate professor of entomology at the
University of Arizona in Tucson. GA R YPA U L NA B H A Nis director
of science at the ArizonaSonora Desert Museum. He is the author
of eight books, including THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD, THE
DESERT SMELLS LIKE RAIN and GATHERING THE DESERT (win -
ner of the John Burroughs medal). THE FORGOTTEN POLLINA-
TORS, from which this article is adapted, is being published in July by
Island Press. The book is the centerpiece of a nationwide campaign
sponsored by the ArizonaSonora Desert Museum designed to raise
awareness of pollinators and threatened plants dependent on them.
 WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
Delicately disassembling the quantum universe inside the atomic nucleus
BY TIMOTHY PAUL SMITH
I
F SOMEONE ASKED YOU TO GRAPH THE PROGRESS
of science in the past hundred years, what
would you plot? The number of doctorates
earned? Journals started? Articles cited? Grants
awarded? The answers vary from discipline to discipline,
from decade to decade and, of course, from analyst to an-
alyst. But not all the answers are arbitrar y. Some of them
stare you in the face. For much of the twentieth century
the obvious measure of the health of subatomic physics was
a number expressed in electron volts: the energy of a class
of machines known as particle accelerators.
By that standard subatomic physics was a flourishing en-
terprise indeed. From the cathode-ray tube with which, in
1897, the English physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the
electron, to a palm-size cyclotron the American physicist
Ernest O. Lawrence built in 1931, the energy increased
about 200 timesfrom hundreds of electron volts to al-
most 100,000. In 1952 the Brookhaven National Labora-
tory on Long Island, New York, broke the billion mark
with its three-billionelectron-volt (3 GeV) Cosmotron.
Two decades later, the four-mile-long protonantiproton
collider at Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, reached 400 GeV;
since then, superconducting magnets have raised its ener -
gy to 1.8 trillion electron volts (TeV), the highest of any
particle accelerator in the world.
The big numbers are not empty status symbols, like the
heights of skyscrapers. Rather, they measure the capabilities
of research tools built for a well-defined purpose: to create
a beam of charged particles (electrons, protons, helium nu-
clei or something more exotic), shoot it at a target and
record the results. Because any target, whether another
beam or a solid object, is mostly empty space, almost all the
particles in the beam hurtle through the target unobstruct-
ed. But a few strike other particles, with results that can be
much more interesting than a mere collision: the matter and
energy of the particles in the smashup can recombine, con-
strained by appropriate conservation laws, to create un-
heard-of or even outlandish assemblages of matter.
Those assemblagesnew elementary particlesare what
physicists sought in their accelerators. At first they were al-
most embarrassingly successful: new particles seemed to turn
up virtually every week. Some of them were fleeting, lasting
barely long enough to move away from the collision site be-
fore they disintegrated into showers of decay products. The-
orists such as Murray Gell-Mann, then at the California In-
stitute of Technology, and Yuval Neeman, then at Imperial
College, London, discovered order in the growing menag-
erie of particles. In 1964 they and George Zweig, also of Cal-
tech, independently proposed what became known as the
theory of quarksa system that tied the known particles to-
gether in an elegant mathematical web and predicted addi-
tional particles that should exist. Experimenters, eager to fill
the empty cages, made even deeper forays into the high-
energy wilderness and brought back ever more exotic beasts.
Today the particle zoo numbers in the hundreds. The
roster of quarks has grown from a trio to a sextet: up, down,
strange, charm, bottom (or beauty) andafter long search-
ing and several false startstop (or truth) [see Quanta:
Now We Are Six, by Ted Anton, July/August 1994]. The
push toward higher energies continues, despite the recent
budgetary demise of the most ambitious particle accelera-
tor of all, the Superconducting Super Collider. At
Brookhaven workers are building the Relativistic Heavy-
Ion Collider, a machine that will push gold nuclei to ener-
gies of twenty trillion electron volts each. At CERN, the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics outside Geneva,
Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider, a fourteen-TeV
protonproton collider, is scheduled to go on-line by 2005.
Yet in the stampede toward higher energies, the up and
down quarks that make up the protons and neutrons of or-
dinary atoms came to seem humdrum. Next to their four
glamorous cousins, the up and down quarks looked some-
how mundane, commoneven boring.
That is a shame, for ordinary matter has a lot to recom-
mend it as an object of study. First, it is durable; that is why
it is ordinary matter. Exotic particles may flash into exis-
tence for a few quadrillionths of a second or less; the pro-
ton, depending on whose theory you accept, lasts either
forever or effectively foreverone experimentally deter-
mined lower limit on its lifetime is 1032 years. Secondnot
a trivial pointordinary matter makes up almost all of the
observable universe. And third, it gives rise to a tremendous
variety of permutations. Chemists have not even come
close to synthesizing all the compounds possible with the
naturally occurring elements in the periodic table.
But the fascination goes much deeper. From the point of
view of atomic theory, chemistry is just a complicated dance
of clouds of electrons, wrapping, spreading, morphing and
merging in accordance with physical law. In the middle of
the electron swarm, occupying only one-quadrillionth the
volume of a typical atom, is the nucleus. That nuclear fly-
speck is made of protons and neutrons, particles collective-
ly known as nucleons. The nucleons, in turn, enclose an-
other world: a world almost cut off from the atomic world,
ruled by its own forces, subject to its own laws and harbor-
ing its own chemistry: the chemistry of quarks.
Thirty-five years ago the richness of the nucleonic world
was entirely unsuspected. Since then theorists have sketched
a good general outline of what ought to be its general
features. The details of its topography, however, are only
beginning to be glimpsed. For mapping them, the violent
techniques of high-energy physics are all but useless. Instead
of blasting their way in, physicists must take a subtler ap-
proach: tickling a proton or a neutron with a beam finely
tuned to nudge its quarks into new configurations.
T
HE FLAGSHIP OF THE GENTLE APPROACH TO
particle physics is a new laboratory, which
the physics community has had under design
and construction since the early 1980s. For most of that
time the laboratory, located in Newport News, Virginia,
has been known as CEBAF, the Continuous Electron Beam
Accelerator Facility. On May 23, 1996, the facility was
officially opened for business, and at its ribbon-cutting
ceremony it was renamed the Thomas Jefferson National
Accelerator Facilityinformally, the Jefferson Lab.
The Jefferson Lab is designed to investigate the structure
of the nucleus and its nucleons at a scale at which quarks
become important. It is made up mainly of an electron
accelerator shaped like a racetrack seven-eighths of a mile
around, buried in a tunnel twenty-five feet underg round.
The electrons are accelerated by a rapid series of electro-
magnetic pulses as they make as many as five passes around
the racetrack. The process imparts as much as four billion
electron volts of energy to the electronsonly one-half of
one percent the energy of the nucleon-vaporizing beams
generated by the big accelerators at Fermilab or CERN, but
ideal for the job the Jefferson Lab was designed to do.
Electrons, according to quantum mechanics, act some-
times as particles and sometimes as waves. A billion elec-
tron volts (1 GeV) of energy give rise to electrons whose
quantum-mechanical wavelengths are a little less than 1015
meter. Such waves in effect become the illuminating
light of a giant microscope with just enough resolving
power to probe nucleons and the quarks that make them
up. One feature that makes the Jefferson Lab unique is the
high intensity and quality (that is, the precisely controlled
energy) of the electron beam.
In a typical experiment, physicists aim the beam at a
fixed target, often a thin film of carbon or iron, or a tube
of hydrogen or helium the size of a fat crayon. When the
electrons strike a nucleon or a constituent quark of a nu-
cleon, the collision can give rise to both short-lived and
long-lived particles, moving in all directions much like the
shards of glass from a light bulb struck by a bullet. By trac-
ing the trajectories of the particles backward, often through
several stages of decay, one can then draw conclusions
about the original interaction at the collision site, as well as
the cascade of subsequent reactions.
E
ASILY THE MOST COMPLICATED PIECES OF
equipment at the Jefferson Lab are the detec-
tors that surround the collision sites. The de-
vices, which are called spectrometers, have been built by
collaborations of more than a hundred universities and in-
stitutions in more than twenty countries worldwide. The
instruments reside in three cavernous underground cham-
bers at the end of the racetrack.
Halls A and C contain a total of four spectrometers, each
the size of a house. The two machines in Hall C can mea-
sure the energy of a particle to within one part in a thou-
sand; their counterparts in Hall A are ten times as precise.
The resolution of those machines comes at a price: they are
positioned to detect particles only in the directions around
the collision site in which physicists most expect particles
of interest to emerge. Thus there is a fifth spectrometer, in
Hall B, which has a resolution of only one percent but can
catch particles emerging in almost any direction. That ca-
pability makes it ideal for monitoring high coincidence
reactionscollisions that can send particles spraying out
in many directions.
T
O SEE HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO TALK OF QUARK
chemistry, think about conventional chem-
istry. One of the signal successes of twentieth-
century science has been to show how chemical properties
of substances and reactions between substances result from
the structure and activity of atoms. The key is energy: the
heat that reactions release or absorb, the light that atoms
and molecules can emit in excited states, the strength of
chemical bonds. Early in this century the Danish physicist
Niels Bohr related that energy to the energy of the elec-
trons in an atom. Bohr suggested, presciently, that electrons
literally orbit the atomic nucleusmaking the atom a solar
system in miniature. But in one crucial respect Bohrs
miniature solar system was quite unlike our sun and its nine
planets: the electrons could move from one orbit to an-
other, but they could not wander anywhere in between.
The orbits were said to be quantized.
The success of Bohrs ideaone of the earliest manifes-
tations of quantum mechanicswas its immediate applica-
tion to the emission lines in the electromagnetic spectrum
of an atom: pure, bright colors given off when an element
is heated. The discrete colors of the spectrum were ex-
plained as the discrete quantity of energy released by the
atoms of the substance as the electrons orbiting the atoms
dropped from a relatively high energy orbit to a relatively
low energy one. The shorter the wavelength of the spectral
line, or in other words the more its color tended toward the
blue end of the spectrum, the longer the drop of the elec-
trons and the greater the energy released by the atoms; that
effect, among others, is what makes a blue flame much hot-
ter than a yellow one. The color of the emitted spectral line
is a precise measure of the difference in energy between the
higher-energy and the lower-energy electronic orbits.
Later, Bohrs idea of discrete electronic orbits gave way to
more abstract, mathematical descriptions of the energy states
of atoms. Those states are harder to imagine than Bohrs sim-
ple picture (sometimes the states are described as the shape
of a probability cloud of electrons that surround the atom-
ic nucleus), but the central idea that spectral lines are signals
of transitions among the various energy states has remained
unchanged. When you couple that idea with the principle
that physical systems always tend to assume their lowest avail-
able energy state, most of chemistry is laid out before you.

T P
HE ATOMIC WORLD IS GOVERNED BY THE
force of electromagnetism. The cast of char-
acters is made up primarily of three particles:
the electrons and the protons, which respond to the force,
and the photons, which carry it. (Neutrons, though they
share the nucleus with protons, are unaffected by the force
and play only a token role in the drama.) Atoms are held to-
gether by the attractive electromagnetic force between the
two kinds of electric charge: positive on the protons, neg-
ative on the electrons. Atoms can become excited when
their electrons assume various energy states higher than
their lowest, or ground, state. And atoms can combine in-
to molecules when their electrons can assume a state of low-
er total energy by intertwining with several nuclei than they
can by remaining bound to one nucleus.
Each of those features has a counterpart in the world in-
side a nucleon. Electromagnetism holds negligible sway
here; although the quarks inside the nucleon do carry elec-
tric charge, the electromagnetic force between them is
overwhelmed by the much more powerful color force, al-
so known as the strong nuclear force. (The electromagnet-
ic force still dominates outside the atomic nucleus, because
the color force acts only over an extremely short range.)
The particles corresponding to the electron and the proton
are the quarks. As I noted earlier, the quarks of primary in-
terest here are the ones having what physicists call the up
and down flavors. The particles corresponding to the pho-
ton are gluons, which carry the color force.
Corresponding to the color force is the so-called color
charge, which is the analogue of electric charge. But un-
like electric chargewhich comes in two varieties, pos-
itive or negativecolor charge comes in three funda-
mental forms, generally called red, blue and green.
Quarks also have antiparticle partnersantiquarkswith
negative color charge: antired, antiblue and antigreen. A
final complication is that there are eight kinds of gluon,
which convey the color force from quark to quark. Most
gluons are themselves color charged. That too is in con-
trast to the single kind of photon, which is electrically
neutral. One should not be misled into thinking that the
names of the color charges are anything but whimsical la-
bels; quarks and gluons have no colors, nor do they give
rise to spectrums of visible colors in any ordinary sense.
The colors interact according to rules about as compli-
cated as the instructions for a moderately challenging game
of solitaire: Like colors repel. Opposite colors (such as red
and antired) attract. And other pairs of colors (such as red
and blue) also attract, but more weakly. Perhaps the most
important rule is that the quarks must combine to make
particles that are colorless or white. For example, a color
and its anticolor can combine to make a two-quark assem-
bly called a meson. Or by analogy with the rules for color
addition among ordinary primary colors, a particle can be
made up of three quarks of three colors or three anticolors.
A proton, for instance is made of two up quarks and a down
quark (uud); one quark (any of the three) must be red, one
must be blue and the third must be green. Similarly, the
neutron is made of two down quarks and an up quark (ddu),
and again all three primary color charges must be present.
ROBABLY THE GREATEST CONCEPTUAL BARRI-
er to the study of quarks stems from that
requirement of color neutrality. As usual, the
best way of explaining the matter is through analogy with
electromagnetism. A neutral atom or a neutral molecule
bears no net electric charge. Yet many of the constituents
of those particles are electrically charged, and they can ex-
ist as independent particles (think of the electrons in a cur-
rent or the ions created in an electric storm). But bare net
color charge is never observed.
That fact raises curious questions about the nature of
quarks themselves: Since they carry a net color charge, how
can they themselves be observed? And if they cannot be sin-
gled out, what status do they have as real particles? The ques-
tions highlight the changing nature of scientific evidence.
Throughout the history of the study of matter we physicists
have been able to confirm our hypotheses about the basic
constituents of matter by distilling and isolating those con-
stituent particles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
chemists were busy isolating the elements before the English
chemist John Dalton could articulate his atomic theory or
the Russian chemist Dmitry I. Mendeleyev could organize
the elements into his periodic table. To confirm our ideas
about the structure of the atom, J. J. Thomson observed the
electron, and the New Zealandborn English physicist
Ernest Rutherford observed the nucleus. Likewise, when
the nucleus was first pulled apart, Rutherford was able to ob-
serve the proton and the English physicist James Chadwick
was able to observe the neutron.
But no one has ever seen a free quark. In colliders, physi-
cists have created fireballs with a thousand times more en-
ergy than is necessary to create or destroy a proton, yet a
free quark, whose mass is less than a third that of the pro-
ton, has never been created. There are many good reasons
to think one never will be.
One way of understanding such quark confinement is
to picture the gluons as springs that always pull the quarks
back together, no matter how far apart they stretch. The
springstechnically, flux tubesnever tangle and never
break. But what would happen if two quarks were some-
how pulled, say, a centimeter apart? Could they not then be
observed as discrete particles, the color-charge analogues of
an ionized atom or a free electron? According to the quark
model, the energy needed to pull quarks a centimeter apart
is so large that new quark matter would materialize out of
that energy long before the separation reached a centimeter.
In accordance with Einsteins famous formula that equates
mass with energy, the new quark matter would combine
with the original quarks, and one would observe new,
colorless particles flying off in various directions.
Thus, in searching for evidence of the existence of
quarks, and for the ways they interact, one must be content
with indirect, albeit persuasive, evidence. At the Jefferson
Lab our strategy will be to build models of the proton and
the neutron out of quarks and then design experiments that
should give rise to the phenomena the models predict. But
more than just seeing whether the models work to describe
the proton and neutron, it will also be important to exam-
ine the other ways quarks can combine, to see to what ex-
tent our models really can explain those systems.

G
IVEN THE QUARKS AS BUILDING BLOCKS, AND
given that they are bound by gluons, what
combinations and per mutations might they
take on? It will come as no surprise that allowed combina-
tions are rather straightforward analogues of excited atom-
ic energy states or the molecules into which the various
atoms can combine.
For example, there is a quark analogue, inside the nu-
cleon, to the orbital energy levels of the electrons in an
atom. Think of the three quarks in a nucleon as whirling
around one another like a system of three stars in space.
Then, just as energy impinging on an electron orbiting an
atomic nucleus can knock the electron into a higher orbit,
so energy impinging on a nucleon can knock one or more
of the quarks into a higher orbit, a higher energy state.
Such an excitation may account for a particle that has al-
ready been detected, the Roper. Named after the physicist
L. David Roper, who discovered it in 1964 at the Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California, the Roper
[also called the P11(1440)] is a heavy particle whose mass is
more than one and a half times that of the proton. Techni-
cally, it is an excited state of the proton. But something
even odder may be going on. Some physicists think that
what has been excited is not the quarks but the gluons. Re-
call that in the model the gluons act as springs connecting
the quarks. But springs store energy in more than one way:
they can flex, but they can also vibrate. Gluons may play a
similar role here. If so, the Roper could be made up of
three quarks still in their low-energy configuration, but
with the springs between them plucked and excited.
Whatever accounts for the Roper, at least twenty distinct
energy excitations for both the proton and the neutron have
been resolved, all probably analogous to the electronic en-
ergy levels of the atom. Many others may be observable in
principle, though they may be too short-lived to be seen in
practice. In one respect, though, the spectrum of excited
states of a nucleon is quite different from the corresponding
spectrum of the atom. As with the Roper particle, the ex-
cited nucleonic states are much more energetic than the
ground statethe ordinary neutron and proton. Indeed,
the energy differences are so great that the masses of excit-
ed states are substantially larger than the mass of the ground
state. That is decidedly not the case for the electromagnet-
ic analogue. The primary reason is that the color force is so
much stronger than the electromagnetic force.
T
O UNDERSTAND TWO OTHER IMPORTANT
kinds of particle we will search for at the Jef-
ferson Lab, one must go beyond the analogue
of the Bohr atom and consider more subtle quantum-
mechanical states. One kind of state depends on a proper-
ty known as spin.
To a first approximation, the spin of a particle is like the
English on a billiard ball. And like a rotating ball, in colli-
sions a particle with spin rebounds differently from a par-
ticle without spin (that is how the spin of a particle is usu-
ally detected). A quantum-mechanical rule known as the
Pauli exclusion principle dictates that no two quarks or
electrons with identical spins can occupy the same space
such as an atomic orbit or energy level. (Strange as it may
sound, particles with spins of zero or onephotons or glu-
ons, for instancecan pile up without limit.) I once saw a
bumper sticker that said Time is what keeps everything
from happening all at once. In a sense, spin is what keeps
everything from happening in the same place.
Now think about the quark structure of a neutron, name-
ly, two down quarks and one up quark. At first glance, it
would seem that the gluonic springs all would pull with the
Q UA R K S M AY S O U N D E X OT I C,
but they are gove rned by rules
about as complicated as
those for a game of solitaire.
same force. After all, the strong force between two down
quarks is the same as that between an up quark and a down
quark. In that case, on average, the quarks would form an
equilateral triangle. As the triangle pivoted and the springs
wiggled, the negative electric charges of the two down
quarks (each negative 1/3) would exactly cancel the positive
2/3 electric charge of the up quark. Every spot inside the
neutron would be left with an average charge of zero.
But the world is not quite so simple. It turns out that
quarks with parallel spins repel each other faintly, slightly
weakening the strong force between them. The spins of the
two down quarks in the neutron are parallel. The spin of
the up quark, however, flip-flops at random, spending only
half its time parallel to each of the down quarks. Thus you
can think of the springs that bind it to them as being rela-
tively taut, compared with the spring that connects the two
down quarks. The three quarks therefore form a distorted
isosceles triangle, in which the up quark is pulled toward the
midpoint of the spring connecting the two down quarks.
The result is an asymmetric charge distribution: positive at
the center of the neutron, negative farther out. Just how
powerfully the spin affects the strong force, and thus how
much the charge is distorted, is one of the big questions the
Jefferson Lab hopes to settle.
Probing that asymmetry is an ideal job for the Jefferson
Labs electron beam. Energetic electrons penetrate deep
into the neutron, and so their deflection is largely a matter
of scattering off the positively charged up quark. Less en-
ergetic electrons bounce off the negatively charged down
quarks at the surface of the neutron. By plotting energies
against scattering angles, physicists can get crucial infor-
mation about how the forces inside the neutron interact.
A
SECOND KIND OF EXCITED NUCLEON WE WILL
study at the Jefferson Lab is the analogue of a
simple hydrogen atom whose nuclear proton
and orbiting electron have parallel spins. Such a hydrogen
atom is slightly more energetic than one whose spins are
antiparallel. The difference in energy between the two states
is so small, however, that it amounts to only about a billionth
the difference between the two lowest electronic orbits.
For that reason the process is known as hyperfine splitting.
 Inside the nucleon, the effects of such spin flips are
much more dramatic. The three quarks inside a nucleon
each can have a component of spin parallel or antiparallel
to some arbitrary direction. Thus there are two possibili-
ties: either the quarks all are parallel, or one quark is dif-
ferent. The latter case holds for the ground state of the
proton or the neutron: not all the quarks have parallel spin.
Suppose the antiparallel quark inside a neutron flips its
spin to match those of its neighbors. The neutron meta-
morphoses into a new particlea delta particlewith
significantly more energy than a proton or
a neutron has. The hyperfine transition between the delta
and the neutron releases energy equivalent to roughly 30
percent of the mass of the neutron in the ground state.
Can other, even more exotic assemblages of quarks be
created? For example, can one create the analogues of var-
ious neutral atoms with many electrons? No one has ever
detected particles with four, five, six or more quarks, but
nothing in the quark model forbids them. At present, col-
leagues of mine at the University of New Hampshire are
working with Russian physicists at the synchrophasotron
accelerator at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in
Dubna, north of Moscow, in a search for such unusual mul-
tiple-quark particles. If they succeed, the particles will be
analogous to the synthetic chemical elements nuclear
physicists create in reactors: heavy, short-lived and un-
known in nature.
What about quark molecules? The most straightforward
analogue is the atomic nucleus, in which the nucleons are
regarded as the atoms, and the permitted nuclei are re-
garded as the molecules. That, of course, is the phe-
nomenon that has been studied in atomic physics for the
past fifty years. But neutrons and protons might, if pushed
together closely enough, also form a new kind of matter, a
quarkgluon plasma. How would such a plasma evolve?
What new particles might condense out of it? All those
ideas, and many more, will serve to guide us as we prod the
quarks and gluons in nucleons and try to coax from them
the secrets of their interactions.
TI M O T H Y PA U L SM I T H is a research scientist in the nuclear
physics group at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He
is currently working on software to control the data flow in Hall A
of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
 On Common Ground

PREPOSTEROUS
What has happened to the rhinoceros is as hard to fathom as the beast itself

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSAMOND PURCELL

TEXT BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD

F ROM NUMEROUS VERSIFICATIONS IN BOOKS FOR CHILDREN, RHINOCEROSES HAVE AC-

quired a one-word definition in a near rhyme: preposterous. The five living species of
rhinoceroses, viewed as tanklike vestiges of a prehistoric past, and barely hanging on
as threatened populations in their African and Asian homes, do convey an image of superannuated
heavyweights from a lost world where brawn could overcome stupidity and ensure survival.
Modern rhinoceroses do represent a remnant of past glory: they were once maximally pros-
perous, rather than preposterous. Their enormously successful fossil forebears included
Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal of all timeeighteen feet high at the shoulder and a
browser of treetops. Their extensive ecological range included small and lithe running forms no
bigger than a goat (the hyracodontines), and rotund river dwellers that looked like hippopota-
muses (the teleoceratines). Moreover, modern rhinoceroses are a vestige within a vestige. The
formerly dominant order of odd-toed hoofed mammals has now dwindled to three groups: the
rhinoceroses and the tapirs, each barely hanging on, and the horses, given an artificial boost and
a new lease on life by human needs for transport and human foibles for warfare and wagering.
A dilemma, in technical terms, is a problem with two logical solutions, each untenable or un-
pleasant. We speak of being caught on the horns of a dilemma, in reference, I suppose, to the
crescent moon with its two points, or horns (or perhaps to the devil himself ). The dilemma of
the rhinoceroses also rests upon two aspects of their distinctive and defining horns. On one point,
horns mark the rhinoceross fascination as both preposterous and alluringa sign of fame and
therefore a desired trophy for Western hunters. On the other point, horns inspire legends of util-
ity for alleviating various human ills, particularly sexual impotence in malesand the few re-
maining horns have therefore become a prize for poachers and a substance nearly beyond price
in Eastern pharmaceuticals.
We all have a personal breaking point, where moral indignation swamps dispassionate analysis.
I can read about human desecration of animals with reasonable equanimity in the face of great
sadness, but I fall into predominant anger when I encounter the numerous stories of magnificent
creatures slaughtered in vast numbers for single parts deemed desirable (often so frivolously) or
useful (often so fallaciously) to humans: elephants only for their tusks, buffaloes for their tongues,
nightingales for the same organ (for use in Roman banquets) and gorillas because some people
will buy ashtrays made of large primate paws. Rhinoceroses, sadly, are victims of this same out-
rage: their most distinctive evolutionary markers become the brands of their destruction.
I wish I could portray naturalists as perennial opponents of such exploitation. We certainly
function in this manner today, but our past does not always measure up to current practices. In
a former age, one that viewed nature as an unlimited bounty and men as masters of all, natu-
ralists often collected in a wanton manneras though scientific study demanded a mass trans-
port from live in the field to dead in a museum drawer. Rosamond Purcells photograph depicts
just some of the specimens in a miscellaneous bin of rhinoceros horns in the collection of my
own institution, the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. These specimens range from
horns bought by the museum director Alexander Agassiz from Wards of London in 1877 to
animals shot by hunters on safari and donated to the museum as late as 1936. Detached horns,
often severed with pieces of surrounding skin. The part that dooms the whole. A strangely beau-
tiful picture of elegance separated from a symbol of ungainliness. Do we not witness here the
moral equivalent of preposterous?
ROSAMOND PURCELL is an artist and photographer who lives in Boston. STEPHEN JAY GOULD is Agassiz
professor of zoology at Harvard University.
 DEATH WISH
All cells come primed for self-destruction.
The challenge for medicine is to make them die on cue.
BY MARTIN C. RAFF
HERE IS BUT ONE TRULY SERIOUS PHILO-
T sophical problem, Albert Camus wrote
in The Myth of Sisyphus, and that is sui-
cide. . . . All the restwhether or not the
world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or
twelve categoriescomes afterwards. Fifty years later,
philosophers have abandoned Sisyphus to his toils, and ex-
istentialism is deeply out of fashion. But Camuss cosmic
vision has found a new, microcosmic expression. Today
one might substitute biological for philosophical in those f a-
mous opening lines and still preser ve both their truth and
exaggeration. Camuss characters struggled with existence
on bare beaches and in sun-seared Algerian towns, but this
new existential drama is more elemental still. Its stage is the
body itself; its antihero, the cell.
In the animal world, death by suicide is the normthe
inevitable complement to cell division. Until recently,
however, little was known about it. In the 150 years since
cell theory was established, biologists have focused on the
sunnier side of cellular life. All living things, they have dis-
covered, from unicellular bacteria to multicellular people,
are the products of cell divisions, extending back, it is be-
lieved, to the first cell division on the primitive earth more
than 3.5 billion years ago.
Cell division is the central process of life, but too often
in people it also leads to death. Left unchecked, dividing
cells can turn into cancers, invading the hosts they helped
create. Because one in five of us will die of cancer, it is not
surprising that biologists have devoted tremendous efforts
to the study of cell division. They have begun to pinpoint
the genes and proteins that trigger cell division, as well as
the ones that suppress it. In a sense, that effort has paid off
handsomely, g iving investigators a reasonable, albeit in-
complete, understanding of how cell division is regulated
and how that regulation can go awry. Yet the discoveries so
far have yielded few cures: in 1994 cancer killed twice as
many Americans as were lost in the Second World War,
and the numbers continue to rise.
Perhaps by paying more attention to cell death, biolo-
gists can save more lives. Biologists have known for more
than a century that some cells die during normal animal
development. But workers have just begun to appreciate
the massive amount of cell death that takes place during the
lifetime of an animal. It is estimated, for instance, that in
the developing brain about half the nerve cells die soon af-
ter they are formed, and many other developing organs are
thought to undergo similar rates of cell death. Those sui-
cides help shape the body as well as the mind.
Large-scale cell death, which begins in the early embryo,
continues throughout human life. In the time it takes you to
read this article, hundreds of millions of the 100 trillion cells
that make up your body will die. Why then do people not
shrink to nothing in the face of such massive, continual cell
death? The reason is simple but nonetheless profound: for
every cell that dies, another cell divides to replace it.
In the past few years, drawn by the mystery of that proc-
ess as well as its potential use in treating serious diseases,
biologists have moved studies of cell suicide to center stage.
On a microscopic scale, they are finding, cell suicide raises
some of the questions that haunted Camus and Sartre. To
what extent is cell suicide an individual decision, and to
what degree a social one?
P
ERHAPS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT AD-
vance in understanding normal cell death
was made in the early 1970s by the patholo-
gists John Kerr, Andrew Wyllie and Alistair Cur rie at the
University of Aberdeen in Scotland. (Kerr, now at the
University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and Wyl-
lie, now at Edinburgh University, are still studying cell
death; sadly, Currie, the senior member of the trio, died
last year.) The three pathologists were examining tissues
under a microscope when they made a striking discovery:
normal cell deaths look quite different from the cell deaths
caused by acute injuries. Injured cells tend to swell up and
burst, spilling their contents and inflaming neighboring
tissuea process the team called necrosis. In contrast,
when normal cells die, they rapidly shrink and condense,
forming shriveled corpses. Those remains are immediately
devoured by neighboring cells, well before the dead cells
have a chance to spill their contents.
Kerr and his colleagues called normal cell death apopto-
sis, from the Greek word for fallingas in the falling of
withered leaves. Because the process appeared to be so sim-
ilar in different tissues and in different kinds of animals, they
proposed that it is a form of suicide, in which the cells acti-
vate an internal program for self-destruction. That was a
brilliant insight, one that helped illuminate how cells work
and how animals develop and maintain themselves, as well
how some diseases progress. Yet at first it had little impact on
biologists. Like the suicide program itself, apoptosis research
lay dormant for many years. Only lately has programmed
cell death gained widespread interest. Now it is one of the
most active and competitive areas in cell biology.
Why was cell death ignored for so long? One reason is
that when cells commit suicide they leave few traces be-
hind. Neighboring cells eat and degrade the dead cells so
quickly that even large-scale programmed cell deaths can
easily be missed under a microscope. Most normal cell
deaths therefore long went unrecognized, and even now
their frequency is almost certainly underestimated. It may
also be that biologists have been put off by cell death be-
cause it is too intimately tied to their own mortality. As
Woody Allen once said, Its not that Im afraid to die, I
just dont want to be around when it happens.
Many biologists were reluctant to believe cell death was
widespread, simply because it seemed so wasteful. Why
should so many perfectly healthy cells kill themselves dur-
ing ones lifetime? What useful purpose does their suicide
serve? In some cases the answer is clear. Certain body parts,
for instance, are sculpted by cell death. The hands start out
as spade-like structures; the fingers emerge only as the cells
between them die. In other cases, cells die when they are
no longer needed: After a lymphocyte has helped destroy
an invading microorganism, for example, its neighbors sig-
nal it to commit suicide. Programmed cell death helps pro-
tect people from infection. If a cell is invaded by a virus,
the cell often kills itself, thereby preventing the virus from
spreading. In many other cases, however, it is still not clear
what purpose, if any, the cell death serves.
I
BECAME INTERESTED IN CELL DEATH SEVERAL
years ago, while attending a meeting of neurobi-
ologists in Berlin. At the time it was already clear
that suicide among some cells is a social phenomenon. Many
developing nerve cells, for instance, kill themselves unless
they get signals from the cells they contact. Listening to the
discussions in Berlin, I began to wonder whether all cells de-
pend on similar signals. What if all cells are programmed to
kill themselves unless their neighbors continually tell them
to stay alive? It was an extreme proposal, one that seemed
counterintuitive, but I decided to put it to the test.
Back in our laboratory at University College London,
my team began by studying what it is that oligodendro-
cytes need to survive. Oligodendrocytes are cells that are
wrapped around nerve cells in the brain, insulating the
nerve cells much the way tape insulates a wire. (The im-
portance of that insulation is demonstrated by the devas-
tating effects of multiple sclerosis, in which oligodendro-
cytes are destroyed by an unknown mechanism.) When
purified oligodendrocytes are placed in a culture dish, we
learned, they die of apoptosis within a day or two, even
when given the nutrients required for their survival. In
contrast, if cells that are next to oligodendrocytes in the
brain are added to the dish, the oligodendrocytes survive.
In fact, they survive even if the signaling molecules that
neighboring cells normally make are added to the dish in-
stead of the neighboring cells themselves.
Our lab and others went on to test many other cell types.
In every case the cells committed suicide unless signaled by
other cells, confirming our extreme hypothesis. So far,
there is only one exception to that rule, and that one has
been known for years. Individual blastomeresthe first
cells generated by a fertilized eggcan survive and even
divide without being encouraged by other cells. That abil-
ity makes some sense, given that there are no other cells in
the organism at the time.
Other factors besides isolation can also drive cells to sui-
cide. The enzyme inhibitor staurosporine, for instance, has
been shown to trigger apoptosis in almost every kind of
cell exposed to it. Moreover, if the cells are first treated
with a drug that keeps them from making new proteins,
they respond suicidally to staurosporine even more readi-
ly. Until recently, biologists thought that cells have to first
manufacture killer proteins in order to commit suicide. But
the staurosporine studies suggest that cells already contain
all the proteins needed for the task. Their poison pill, so to
speak, is already embedded under the skin, poised to re-
lease its deadly works unless something actively interferes.
W
HAT SELECTIVE ADVANTAGE COULDTHERE
be for cells to balance on the edge of sui-
cide? For one thing, such a mechanism
could ensure that any cell that ends up in the wrong place
is automatically eliminated: isolated from its life-affirming
partners, it quickly dispatches itself. A default setting for
suicide would also help maintain the balance between cell
division and cell death. If the level of survival signals in a
tissue were set at a particular value, the number of cells
that could survive would be determined. If too many cells
were generated by cell division, some would not receive
enough signals to resist suicide, which would bring the
population back to its proper size. Such a system, in short,
would ensure that cells survive only when and where they
are needed.
Cell division is controlled in a similar way: normally a
cell divides only when signaled by other cells. The value
of such social controls is best illustrated by circumstances
in which they fail. Thus, when cancer cells proliferate
unchecked, they eventually kill their hosts.
Cellular neighborhoods seem to be more conformist
than any middle-class suburb. As long as the cells repro-
duce and behave according to local norms, they are al-
lowed to go on living. Unless, that is, they are deemed ob-
solete. When a tadpole turns into a frog, for instance, its
thyroid gland secretes a hormone into the bloodstream. In
most of the tadpole, the hormone encourages cells to di-
vide, but in the tail it orchestrates a mass cell suicide. The
tail, now useless, withers and disappears.
U
NTIL FAIRLY RECENTLY THE WORKINGS OF
the suicide mechanism were a mystery. In
the past year or two, however, the cell-death
machinery has begun to come into view, largely as a result
of work by the developmental biologist H. Robert Horvitz
and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy.
Horvitz studies the nematode. Only one millimeter
long, a nematode is made up of about 1,000 cells, exactly
131 of which commit suicide as the worm develops. Be-
cause it is physiologically simple and fast-growing (it can
develop from fertilized egg to maturity in only three and a
half days), the nematode is an ideal candidate for genetic
study. As an animal model, the worm enables biologists to
identify genes involved in complex processes such as apop-
tosis in a way impossible with humans or even mice.
Horvitzs team first treated nematodes with a chemical
that causes random mutations in some genes. Then the
workers looked for mutant worms with a defective cell-
death program. Two genes, they discovered, are involved
in all 131 cell suicides; if mutations deactivate either gene,
no cell deaths take place. One of those genes encodes a
protein similar to a human proteolytic enzyme that cuts a
specific protein in cells. In people, that process produces a
smaller protein that promotes tissue inflammation.
That was a crucial clue, one that implicated proteolytic
enzymes as key components in the machinery of cell death.
Studies of human cells went on to show that a number of
related proteolytic enzymes are also involved in human cell
suicide. They destroy particular intracellular proteins,
thereby killing the cell. In worms, in humans and presum-
ably in all other animals, the cell-death program seems to
work in essentially the same way.
Another gene identified by the nematode studies sup-
presses the cell-death program instead of executing it. If a
mutation deactivates the gene, most of the cellsnot just
the usual 131in the developing worm commit suicide,
and the worm dies prematurely. That one gene, it seems,
prevents apoptosis in virtually all the worms cells. It too
encodes a protein similar to a human one, a protein already
known to suppress programmed cell death in humans.
Remarkably enough, if that human gene is put into a
worm, it directs the production of a human protein that
suppresses programmed cell death in the worm. In each
creature, therefore, the cell-death machinery is regulated in
a similar fashion. But exactly how cell-death-suppressing
proteins work is a problem that remains to be solved.
Such molecular similarities are turning up all over the
place and are among the wonders of modern biology. It is
remarkable that yeast, worms, flies and people work in such
similar ways. No one ever suspected that evolution is so
conservative, and the practical implications of that conser-
vation are profound. By describing the molecular mecha-
nisms in yeast, worms and flies, biologists are also teasing
apart the inner workings of human beings [see Chain of
Being, by Howard Bussey, March/April]. Such work is
hurtling forward at an astonishing rate, and it will only ac-
celerate in coming years.
G
ENETIC STUDIES OF NEMATODES HELPED
bring apoptosis out of the wilderness. But
though the sudden interest in cell death has
reaped great rewards, much remains to be learned. How
many proteolytic enzymes are implicated in cell suicide,
and how are they activated? Which proteins do those en-
zymes destroy in order to kill the cell? How do suppressor
proteins jam the death machinery? Given the large num-
ber of biologists working on such problems, answers
should soon emerge.
Those discoveries, in turn, may help transform the treat-
ment of some diseases. Many common conditions are
marked by cell death: heart-muscle cells die during heart
attacks, and brain cells die during strokes, head injuries and
neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsons and
Alzheimers. Just how many cells kill themselves under
those circumstances is not clear. But given that suicide is
the cleanest, fastest way for a cell to die, many cells proba-
bly opt for it when they have severe injuries. Assuming that
is the case, imagine being able to suppress apoptosis in vic-
tims of heart attacks, strokes or head injuries. By stalling
cell death for just a day or two, physicians might be able to
save cells that can recover, thereby limiting tissue damage.
In treating cancer, physicians have the opposite goal. In-
stead of blocking the death program, they would try to ac-
tivate it in cancer cells. It is now known that most drugs
used in chemotherapy do just that, but many cancer cells
become resistant to those drugs. Fortunately, the cells nev-
er lose their death program; they just become reluctant to
activate it. In some cases cancer cells make more death-
suppressing proteins than normal cells do. In other cases
cancer cells deactivate the gene p53, which promotes cell
death. (The name comes from the fact that the gene en-
codes a protein with a molecular mass of 53,000.)
The p53 gene has been called the guardian of the
genome. It helps organisms cope with DNA damage by ei-
ther stalling cell division or inducing cell death. When mu-
tations accumulate in a cells DNA, they can activate or de-
activate specific genes, causing the cell to behave in
antisocial ways; cancer is one result. The p53 protein can
keep a cell with damaged DNA from dividing, giving the
cell time to repair the DNA before replicating it. If the
damage is too great, p53 induces the cell to kill itself. In
mice, if the gene that codes for p53 is deactivated, the cells
undergo unusually high mutation rates. As a result, the
mice usually develop cancer within three months. By the
same token, mutations in the p53 gene are the most com-
mon genetic defect in human cancers, occurring in more
than half of all cases.
Biologists are now trying to find ways of reactivating the
p53 gene in those cancer cells. The main challenge in can-
cer treatment, however, is to develop drugs that are better
at inducing apoptosis in cancer cells. The next step will be
to deliver those drugs to cancer cells alone, while leaving
normal cells unaffected.
HE SEARCH FOR CURES TO DISEASES INVARI-
T ably claims the limelight in genetic studies.
And when the disease in question is cancer,
that light can blind observers to anything else of interest.
Yet research on apoptosis per se touches on questions deep-
er than the origins and treatment of illness. What deter-
mines the size and shape of an organism or organ? How
does a kidney or a nervous system know how many cells it
should have? What would we look like if programmed cell
death were blocked altogether? Does programmed cell
death take place in unicellular organisms, or did it evolve
only with multicellular organisms?
The answers may not be as obvious as they seem. In ne-
matodes, for instance, genetic blocking of cell death has
surprisingly little effect, at least in a laboratory setting. The
mutant worms behave normally and live full lives. They die
of old age after a few weeks, just as normal worms do, de-
spite carrying around 131 surplus cells. Fruit flies, on the
other hand, die prematurely if their cells are kept from
killing themselves. And people, who are genetically much
closer to flies than to worms, would probably die in the
womb without programmed cell death.
Where such fundamental research is concerned, new
questions will arise quickly to replace any we biologists
might answer. Programmed cell death may not readily give
up all its secrets. But it has emerged from the shadows of
biology with discernible features, main contours that can
be held fast as biologists probe its more subtle details.
There is good reason to hope that those details will offer
vital benefits to patients and provide continuing nourish-
ment for the curiosity of scientists.
MARTIN C. R AFF is a professor of biology in the Medical Research
Council Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology and the biology
department at University College London. He is a fellow of the Roy -
al Society and was president of the British Society for Cell Biology
from 1991 until 1995. He thanks Burkhard Bilger for editorial
assistance in preparing this article.
 Reviews

BUSHED
Fieldwork memoirs are a litany of complaints. So why dont anthropologists just stay home?

BY DAVID BERREBY

NURTURING DOUBT: FROM MENNONITE guishes anthropology from all other disciplines, is hard, and
MISSIONARY TO ANTHROPOLOGIST its hardship is part of its mystic charm. Looking back over
an enormously influential career, Clifford Geertz of the In-
IN THE ARGENTINE CHACO stitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, notes
by Elmer S. Miller that he enjoyed the defining cachet of fieldwork even be-
University of Illinois Press, 1995 fore he had gone anywhere, when he was just a graduate
225 pages; $44.95, hardcover; $17.50, softcover student in the social relations department at Harvard Uni-
versity: Unlike the others, mere academicians, he writes
in After the Fact, we had a testing ahead, a place we had to
go and a rite we had to go through.
SAUDADES DO BRASIL: It is a strange initiation: traveling arduously to some re-
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMOIR mote place, settling among a group of ordinary people try-
by Claude Lvi-Strauss ing to mind their own business, mispronouncing their lan-
University of Washington Press, 1995 guage, pestering them with the kinds of question only a dim
child would ask and writing down the mundane replies. Ex-
221 pages; $39.95
plorers and missionaries have done the same kind of thing
for centuries, but only since the Polish-born English an-
AFTER THE FACT: TWO COUNTRIES, thropologist Bronislaw Malinowski invented fieldwork,
around the turn of the century, has anyone done it for the
FOUR DECADES, ONE ANTHROPOLOGIST sole purpose of making and testing ideas about culture.
by Clifford Geertz
HAT ODD OFFSHOOT OF WESTERN EUROPEAN
Harvard University Press, 1995
198 pages; $22.95
THE INNOCENT ANTHROPOLOGIST:
T social thought, though, has had immense in-
fluence. The fruits of fieldwork have shaped
the Western understanding of what it means to confront
NOTES FROM A MUD HUT other societiesof how to cope with what Geertz has iden-
by Nigel Barley tified as the awkward fact that other people are as real as
Henry Holt and Company, 1983 you are. Fieldwork gave popular appeal and intellectual au-
thority to books such as Margaret Meads Coming of Age in
190 pages; out of print
Samoa, Colin Turnbulls Mountain People and Geertzs own
Interpretation of Cultures. And such books placed what Geertz
Ah, youre back. calls the anthropological numberculture is learned;
Yes. customs vary; it takes all kinds to make a worldat the
Was it boring? heart of intellectual life and popular culture.
Yes. The four volumes under review belong to a related but
Did you get very sick? less familiar genre: the fieldwork memoir, a kind of back-
Yes. stage narrative in which the emphasis is not on what-I-now-
Did you bring back notes you cant make head know but on how-I-found-out. Elmer Millers Nurturing
or tail of and forget to ask all the important questions? Doubt is a workmanlike account of the first-this, then-that
Yes. variety by a respected scholar. Saudades do Brasil (Fond mem-
When are you going back? ories of Brazil) is a collection of photographs and reflections

S
O WITH MUMBLED YESES THE ENGLISH CUL-
tural anthropologist Nigel Barley concisely
sums up the enterprise known as fieldwork
on the last page of The Innocent Anthropolo -
gist. Fieldwork, the journey into exotic culture that distin-
by Claude Lvi-Strauss, one of the most famous anthropol-
ogistsand anthropological memoiristsof all time. The
photos naturally send you back to Tristes Tropiques, the mag-
isterial account Lvi-Strauss published in 1955. However
different their sensibilities, however different their rendition
of what-I-now-know, their accounts of how-I-found-out
are strikingly similar. And they jibe with both the brief allu-
sions Geertz makes to the job in After the Fact and the point-
ed, brilliantly observed and often hilarious rendition of the
anthropologists predicament given in Barleys Innocent An -
thropologist. Fieldwork, it seems, is fieldwork.
U
NTIL RECENTLY THE FIELDWORK MEMOIR
was seldom a separate book. Instead, the
travelers tale was folded into the broader
work, giving the latter some Indiana Jones appeal. No
book has done this with more finesse than Tristes Tropiques,
in which Lvi-Strauss lures the public into the tent with
exotic tales, even as he adamantly protests that he despises
the genre. I hate traveling and explorers, the book be-
gins, and it goes on, interweaving sharp sketches of unfor-
gettable characters and hairbreadth escapes from the Nazi
terror machine with pious declarations that how-I-did-it is
scarcely worthy of comparison with what-I-think. The
truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when
they have been separated from this dross.
But if an older generation of anthropologists drew on the
appeal of travel writing mainly to pull in the crowd, some
in the succeeding generation have taken a greater interest
in the how-I-did-it memoir. In 1967 Malinowskis diary
was published, and it proved to be a portrait not of an in-
trepid philosophe but of a homesick, troubled, self-regard-
ing man whoto put it mildlydid not enjoy the com-
pany of his people. The diary was hardly the kind of
T H E F I E L DWO R K M E M O I R
can serve as exhibit A
in turning the spy-glass
of Anthropology on fieldwork itself.
appealing memoir that would sell the reader on anthropol-
ogy (Malinowski had never intended it for publication);
but it was a document that could serve as exhibit A in turn-
ing what the writer Zora Neale Hurston calls the spy-
glass of Anthropology on fieldwork itself, to examine its
pretensions and contradictions. The two genres are as
mixed as ever in cultural anthropology today, not because
the Indiana Jones stuff pulls in readers but because the
younger anthropologists want to undermine the old cate-
gories of Us and Them, Science and Chat. Instead of hid-
ing how-I-did-it, their books showcase the process
sometimes to the point of navel gazing.
Still, it is useful to think of what-I-think and how-I-did-
it as different genres. Do so, and you realize that, in the
fieldwork experience, the similarity of sensibility and inci-
dent tells something important about who does anthropol-
ogy, and whyhowever different the styles and theories
the fieldwork later yields.
Miller, a professor of anthropology at Temple Universi-
ty in Philadelphia, has a unique tale to tell. He was a Men-
nonite missionary before he was an anthropologist, which
is kind of like spending a few years as a cat before becom-
ing a dog. Young anthropologists know all about mis-
sionaries before theyve met any, Barley explains. They
play a large role in the demonology of the subject. . . . Mis-
sions destroy traditional culture and self-respect, reducing
peoples all over the globe to the state of helpless, baffled
morons living on charity and in economic and cultural
thralldom to the West. Thus, in addition to shuttling be-
tween their Pennsylvania home and the land of the Toba
Indians in northern Argentina, Miller and his wife had to
bridge the supposedly incommensurate worlds of evange-
list and anthropologist.
The stresses and loneliness of the intellectual trip, Miller
tells us, have given his life a thematic unity. As a Mennonite
he was raised to think of himself as a pilgrimin the world
but not of itand he finds the pilgrim feeling coming back
to him as a fieldworker and anthropologist. The book does
not tell the reader nearly enough about the Toba or Mrs.
Miller or even the internal life of the professor. Its prose is
bland at best. But never mind; in telling his story of having
been first a religious traveler and then an anthropological
one, Miller suggests a way of understanding what anthro-
pologists are up to when they go into the field. Whatever
else it may be, fieldwork is indeed like a pilgrimage.
M
ANY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SEEM TO BE AN-
thropologists avant la lettre. Anthropology
is one of the few genuine vocations, as
Lvi-Strauss puts it in Tristes Tropiques. One can discover
it in oneself, even though one may have been taught noth-
ing about it. So the fieldwork memoir begins with a
thoughtful soul who stands somewhat apart from the soci-
ety into which he or she was born.
Certainly that was the case for Miller. He is unusual
merely in that he grew up not only as an alienated indi-
vidual but also as a member of a community that consid-
ered itself apart. He was raised to dress plain, to avoid
movies, smoking and politics, to refuse army service and
the other things of this world. By the time Miller entered
college, he was already shoring up his doubts about the
Mennonite doctrine of separation from this world, already
experiencing anthropological alienation.
The sense of excited confidence that my conclusion was neces-
sarily the only logical one, mixed with the lonely awareness that
the implications could undermine ties with family and closest
friends, was an emotion that is difficult to explain to anyone who
has not experienced a sense of alienation from his or her roots.
Knowledge can be bittersweet.
The Lvi-Strauss of Tristes Tropiques is a bright young
French intellectual who could not be more different from
Miller, but he describes a similar kind of disaffection. He
dislikes the choice of joining either a profession or a faculty.
Anthropology provides a kind of liberation: My mind
was able to escape from the claustrophobic, Turkish-bath
atmosphere in which it was being imprisoned by the prac-
tice of philosophical reflection. Another generation, oth-
er intellectual heroes, but the same discontent.
The traveler takes up anthropology. He (until recently
the hero of an anthropological memoir was usually a he)
needs a place to stand outside the usual order. He wants
out. To use Millers useful comparison, he wants to be in
this world but not of it. He finds himself signing up, with
a haphazardness that amuses him in retrospect, for a trip to
some locale he can barely find on a map.
The mission is suddenly crystallized by an almost offhand
summons from a superior, who defines the task and whose
sudden offer of direction, like Obi-Wan Kenobis advice to
Luke Skywalker in the movie Star Wars, is not to be denied.
Lvi-Strauss gets a telephone call one day in 1934 from the
head of the school where he is teaching. If he wants to pur-
sue anthropology, the caller tells him, he should apply for a
teaching post at the University of So Paulo and study Indi-
ans on the weekends. Geertz receives a similarly abrupt sum-
mons from a professor who asks if Geertz and his wife want
to go to Indonesia. Geertz agrees, then goes home to figure
out what I had gotten us into. Barley thinks he might go
to Indonesia or some other part of Asia, but every place that
interests him seems preoccupied with massacre and may-
hem. A colleague suggests the Dowayo people of northern
Cameroon. Feeling a little like a ball in a pinball machine,
Barley reads up on the Dowayo and decides they would do,
what with their skull cults, circumcision rites, mummies and
bad reputation with their neighbors.
T
HE TRAVELER SETS OFF. HE PACKS ALL THE
wrong supplies. Everything goes awry. Turn-
bulls book on the Ik, The Mountain People,
offers a typical passage:
A stopover in Egypt was a near-disaster, and in Kenya I found
that the Land Rover which had been specially ordered did not
conform to the given specifications, and on the first night out,
near Kilimanjaro, a rainstorm showed how effectively the roof
leaked, right over the beds.
Bureaucrats in the country that holds sway over the target
people are obtuse and slow, and they cannot understand
why anyone would spend time bothering with such prim-
itives. The first time the Millers fly to Argentina, for in-
stance, in the course of three months of collecting bureau-
cratic stamps, Miller is told by a customs official, We no
longer have Indians in Argentina, they have all been civi-
lized and incorporated into national life. Often the an-
thropological traveler is treated as a spy or a subversive until
he convinces enough people that he is, in Barleys words,
a harmless idiot who knows no better. He almost invari-
ably spends a lot of time in line.
When he finally reaches his village, the traveler finds
the people are also uncomprehending, maybe even hos-
tile. His equipment rots, collapses or otherwise falls apart.
(One of the first things I looked for on turning to Lvi-
Strausss haunting, endearingly amateurish black-and-
white photographs was the inevitable broken-down truck.
I found it on page 113.) Barley reports that lizards ran
about his roof beams, defecating on his head. Goats
sneaked in and kicked his pots and pans. Termites ate his
notes. Mice chewed through hoses, gnawed his camera
and tried to eat his dentures.
B
UT NONE OF THOSE TRIBULATIONSIS AS HARD
to bear as the sudden weightlessness of being
an utterly pointless alien. Geertz has famously
described what it was like for him and his wife and colleague,
Hildred Geertz, in his essay on the Balinese cockfight:
As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, peo-
ple seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several
yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost no-
body greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleas-
ant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.
All the social markersdress, looks, customs, language
conspire to remind the fieldworker that he does not be-
long. Barley, one of the ablest writers on the experience,
renders its painful absurdity:
My rather wobbly control of the language was also a grave dan-
ger. Obscenity is never very far in Dowayo. A shift of tone
changes the interrogative particle, attached to a sentence to con-
vert it into a question, into the lewdest word in the language,
something like cunt. I would, therefore, baffle and amuse
Dowayos by greeting them, Is the sky clear for you, cunt?
Once, he writes, he told the village chief and another im-
portant contact that he had to end their meeting and get
back to his hut because I am cooking some meat. At least
that was what I had intended to say; owing to a tonal error
I declared to an astonished audience, Excuse me, I am
copulating with the blacksmith.
Naturally, illness and mishap dog the fieldworker. While
I was in Dowayoland, many people and dogs availed them-
selves of the opportunity to vomit over me, Barley writes.
Disaster piles on disaster. His jaw hurting after a bad road
accident, Barley goes to a dentists office in the nearest
town. Inside he explains his problem to a big man.
Without more ado, he seized a pair of pliers and pulled out my
two front teeth. . . . It is not easy to argue in a foreign tongue in
the absence of two front teeth; I made little progress. Finally, he
understood that I was a difficult patient. Very well, he declared
huffily, if I was not content with his treatment, he would bring
the dentist himself.
The big man turned out to be the dentists mechanic.
UTCAST, ON AN ILL-DEFINED MISSION, THE
O anthropologist settles into the central spiri-
tual task of fieldwork: the experience of
anthropological loneliness, what the French call dpayse -
mentdecountrification. Malinowskis yearning in his di-
ary is telegraphic and raw: I often long for culturePaul
and Hedy and their home (almost brings tears to my eyes);
E.R.M. and M.H.W. and that atmosphere. Will those hap-
py days in E. Malvern ever come back? The anthropolo-
gist feels he is not very good at his mission, which is per-
haps impossible, if not downright absurd.
People turn out to be disappointing. As trackers they
could tell motorbike tracks from human footprints but that
was about the pinnacle of their achievement, Barley writes
of the Dowayo. They believed, like most Africans, that
chameleons were poisonous. They assured me that cobras
were harmless. Missionaries have the same experience.
Before Miller went to Argentina for the first time, in 1959,
he received a letter from a friend: You havent met the
Toba Indians yet. They will tax your credulity to the lim-
it, and even beyond. You will think that it is impossible that
human beings be like this.
Miller experienced the shock twice. First as a mission-
ary, from 1959 until 1963, and then as an anthropologist,
when he returned to the field in the late 1960s. At least the
Toba understood what a missionary is for, and they appre-
ciated his access to supplies and a Jeep. The Toba simply
saw no central purpose or value in anthropology, Miller
writes. Indeed, as an anthropologist Miller was now lone-
ly in all directions. Alienated from the Toba, alienated from
his former missionary colleagues, and not feeling at home
among anthropologists,
I was soon to discover that I had better rapport and probably gained
more genuine ethnographic insights while a missionary, . . .
This observation was difficult to share with professional col-
leagues who found it incredible given their impressions of mis-
sionaries. Such awareness only reinforced my image as a pilgrim
that I had hoped to shed when joining the profession.
Of course, such loneliness is shared by other kinds of trav-
elermissionary, relief worker, migrant, diplomat. But the
anthropologist differs in that he actively seeks dpaysement,
endures it not as a means to sermon giving or tree planting,
child supporting or spying, but as an end in itself. To judge
by these books, loneliness is the peyote of fieldwork. Psy-
chic weightlessness and social invisibility accompanied by
what Barley sums up as mental and physical disintegra-
tion make up the royal road to enlightenment.
The goal, the gift of fieldwork is, as Miller puts it, doubt.
Anthropological thought, the master fieldworkers tell us,
seeks not an answer but a condition of mind, not a desti-
nation but a way of journeying.
In his missionary days, Miller tells us, he experienced in-
creasing doubts about the validity of the Christian mis-
sion in todays world, and he was attracted to anthropolo-
gy precisely because it eschewed the notion of absolute
truth in any exclusive sense. Indeed, he seems to be a stur-
dy, faithful man who has exchanged his faith in the Chris-
tian mission for a new faith. He makes even radical doubt
sound like something the Fraternal Order of Elks gets to-
gether to do on Wednesday nights in its dingy but service-
able hall. Miller is still pious, as when he tells us that doubt-
ing must become a way of life that tempers response to
conflicting as well as contradictory discourses in a multi-
cultural world. This attitude should govern all knowledge
L I Z A R D S D E F E CAT E D O N H I S H E A D.
Te rmites ate his notes.
Mice gnawed his camera
and tried to eat his dentures.
held with regard to people and ideas constituted as Other.
IME PASSES IN THE VILLAGE. THE FIELDWORK-
T er begins to establish a place for himself in the
society of the people he is studying. He
makes friends. Fieldwork memoirs give peeks at people of
great importance, who often disappear from theoretical
works: the native guide and assistant, the local missionary
(who may or may not be the expected ogre), the trusted
friend in the village who smooths things out. It would be
interesting to see a comparative study of those hidden
helpers in the enterprise of cross-cultural understanding
especially if it included not only anthropologists helpers
but also the local fixers depended on by journalists who
drop into a crisis-torn country with an urgent need for a
place to stay, a contact at the ministry of defense, a car and
an interpreter.
In any event, the anthropologist begins to find that life
is getting better. His work on kinship systems or symbolic
action begins to make some sense. He begins enjoying
himself. One of the photographs in Saudades do Brasil is of
six dusty and naked villagers about to hop into a stream for
their morning bath. In their midst, looking back at the
camera, scratching his neck with an expression of amused
and slight embarrassment, is the white body of the anthro-
pologist himself.
Eventually, the fieldworker goes back home. And he
finds that the place he longed for in the field is not what he
thought it would be. Conventions and traditions invisible to
his fellows shock his sight and get in his way. You find
yourself discussing the things that seem important to your
friends with the same detached seriousness that you used to
discuss witchcraft with your villagers, Barley writes. The
result of this lack of fit is a brooding sense of insecurity on-
ly heightened by the vast numbers of rushing white people
you meet everywhere. Indeed, the anthropologist ac-
quires a kind of chronic rootlessness, writes Lvi-Strauss in
Tristes Tropiques. Eventually, he comes to feel at home
nowhere, and he remains psychologically maimed.
The distance he feels, though, is not merely a conse-
quence of his having seen other ways of living. The re-
turned fieldworker also feels something elsea sensation
familiar to journalists and explorers, and indeed to anyone
who has come through a trial with the sense of having
earned a kind of wisdom: the blunt force of peoples indif-
ference. How does one present ethnographic experience,
Miller sighs, to those who have not lived in a radically dif-
ferent culture? Barley captures the tensions succinctly:
While the traveler has been away questioning his most basic as-
sumptions, life has continued sweetly unruffled. . . . An hour af-
ter my arrival, I was phoned by one friend who merely remarked
tersely, look, I dont know where youve been but you left a
pullover at my place nearly two years ago. When are you com-
ing to collect it? In vain one feels that such questions are beneath
the concern of a returning prophet.
ILGRIM. PROPHET. IT IS STRIKING HOW OFTEN,
P looking back on fieldwork, the anthropologist
evokes religious imagery. Barley says of field-
workers, The reek of sanctity and divine irrelevance hangs
about them. They are saints of the English church of ec-
centricity for its own sake. Geertz calls himself one of
anthropologys more determined pilgrims. Lvi-Strauss
writes of travels that sanctify.
Like the missionaries of whom they disapprove, anthro-
pologists who have been through fieldwork feel them-
selves called apart. As Miller notes, they are modern par-
takers in the ancient tradition of a journey made for the
sake of knowledge, self-testing and the improvement of the
sorry benighted worldand that is indeed the tradition of
the pilgrim. For pilgrim and anthropologist, travel confers
authority. The pilgrim has paid the price of knowledge, Chomskys linguistics.
the sicknesses and the scrapes. He was there, and now he
stands outside the narrow corridors of received opinion.
You cannot deny his experience. You had to be there. But
where the pilgrim could attain grace and look back down
on a sinful world, the anthropologist attains cultural
sophistication and looks down on a nave world, a world
of people who do not know enough to be decentered.
The question begged, of course, is why the rest of us
should care. Subtract armchair adventure, gee-whiz facts,
the particular charm of this writer or that, and there remain
the questions: What do we need from these eccentric peo-
ple and their quarrelsome discipline, and are we getting it?
What is the value to the rest of us of implicit or explicit
cultural critique? Are we getting anything more than
what the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based literary critic Tzve-
tan Todorov calls flabby tolerancethe capacity to love
everything a little, . . . flaccidly sympathizing with each op-
tion without ever embracing any?
The answer can be found in the final photograph in
Saudades do Brasil, made many years after Lvi-Strauss pub-
lished his first writings about that country. It shows three
Cashinaua Indian boys sitting side by side. Two are intent-
ly examining a battered paperbound copy of Tristes
Tropiques. Lvi-Strausss clear sense of Us and Them, the
basis for his furious diatribe against our civilization in
Tristes Tropiques, has broken down. The world is now a jum-
ble. Inupiat hunters buy snowmobiles and like them just
fine; Inupiat art is sold by galleries in Santa Fe. All the
boundaries between ones skin and ones membership in a
vast sea of global humanity are beginning to wobble.

RESEARCH, GEERTZ

A
NTHROPOLOGICAL
writes in After the Fact, requires learning to
exist in a world quite different from that
which formed you. In that, anthropological research be-
gins to sound like everyones life in the late-twentieth cen-
tury. In a passage Miller uses to preface his book, Lvi-
Strauss observes that
anthropological doubt does not only consist of knowing that
one knows nothing, but of resolutely exposing what one thought
one knewand ones very ignoranceto the buffetings and de-
nials directed at ones most cherished ideas and habits by other
ideas and habits best able to rebut them.
That, too, sounds like life in the big city. The United Na-
tions reports that for the first time in history more people
now live among the crowds of strangers and the clashing
folkways of cities than live in the small groups of familiar
people that make up rural towns and villages. Before too
long, whites will make up only half the population of the
United States, down from the present three-quarters. Mass
migration is increasing. We need the malcontented and
slightly absurd figure of the anthropological pilgrim more
than ever; we need examples of how to know other people,
how to empathize without losing ourselves. Hence the val-
ue of the fieldwork memoir: we are all anthropologists now.
So ask not for what fieldwork trolls. It trolls for thee.
DAVID BERREBYis a freelance writer living in New York. He wrote
most recently for THE SCIENCES on the rise, fall and rise of Noam

To Avoid All Useless Friction
A clockwork odyssey with a lifelong horologist
MY OWN RIGHT T IME:
AN EXPLORATION
OF CLOCKWORK DESIGN
by Philip Woodward
Oxford University Press, 1995
166 pages; $49.95
W
ATCHING LONGITUDE RISE TO
best-seller lists last year, many an
obsessive horologist must have
smiled as broadly as the neigh-
borhood nerd who saved his Mickey
Mantle rookie cards. The hero of Dava
Sobels slim volume of scientific history
was John Harrison, an eighteenth-
century craftsman. Inventor of the preci-
sion marine chronometer, Harrison en-
abled merchants and explorers to keep
regular time at sea, thereby making precise
navigation possible far beyond the sight of
land. That his fame should be renewed
two centuries later attests to an abiding
fascination with the mystery of time and
its central role in human affairsa fasci-
nation that seizes many more than the de-
voted few who know a deadbeat from a
grasshopper escapement.
Longitude describes part of Harrisons se-
cret in glowing prose, but it carries not a
single illustration. For a deeper look at the
mysteries that lie behind the clockface,
therefore, let us welcome this years horo-
logical treat: Philip Woodwards person-
alized discussion of what makes mechani-
cal clocks tick and what one can do to
make them tick more accurately. Richly
detailed and illustrated with drawings and
photographs, Woodwards account covers
a wide range of technical issues. It will give
the general reader an even greater appreci-
ation of those dogged perfectionists whose
chief labor is, as he puts it, to avoid all
useless friction.
Instead of laying out a systematic theo-
ry of clockmaking, Woodward, a mathe-
matician who has also received the Barrett
Silver Medal of the British Horological
Institute, tells the story of how he came to
build his first clock from a kit. As he tried
to improve the kit design, he rediscov-
ered, one by one, the ingenious artifices of
Books in Brief
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL
his predecessors. That effective literary
device enables Woodward to show read-
ers what works and what doesnt, much as
a master craftsman would lead an appren-
tice, through trial and error, to a progres-
sively higher level of understanding.
As mechanically diverse as they are, all
clocks perform the same two principal
functions. First, they regularly mark off
time: the periodic swings of a pendulum,
for instance, would be clock enough in
principle, though for convenience the os-
cillations are counted and accumulated by
gears and levers for display on the familiar
face of the clock. Second, because friction
is unavoidable, every clock must recharge
itselfgive its pendulum an extra nudge
now and then. Toward that end, Wood-
ward and others have invented mechani-
cal linkages, cams and ratchet wheels so
clever and varied that one cant help ad-
miring their genius for gadgetry.
No mechanical, gravity-driven clock,
Woodward believes, can be off by less
than a second or two each year. That fig-
ure, in turn, makes one wonder at his in-
fatuation with clocks that tick. The forty-
dollar digital watch on my wrist can give
the average mechanical chronometer a
run for its money. Similarly, midpriced
receivers for the Global Positioning Sys-
tem tell time much more accuratelyby
orders of magnitudethan the best me-
chanical clocks, at lower cost and with less
engineering effort. Yet the attraction of
clockwork is unmistakable. Reading this
book, one comes to share Woodwards
folly: in a fine clock, his story shows, the
clockmakers pulse beats as strongly as the
impersonal drumbeat of time.
BOMBARDIER BEETLES AND
FEVER TREES
by William Agosta
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,
1996
224 pages; $25.00
A their
S BIOLOGISTS TURN
attentions increasingly inward,
focusing on molecules, genes and the life
of the cell, the study of zoology and
botany might seem a quaint, nineteenth-
century anachronism. Yet neither of the
fields has been idle or backward-looking.
Zoologists and botanists still take nets and
notebooks into the field, but they also
avail themselves of gas chromatographs,
mass spectrometers and electron micro-
scopes back at the laboratory. Over the
years, their work has shown that the ex-
ternal chemistry of living thingsthe
ways plants and animals coordinate rela-
tions with one another and with their en-
vironmentcan be as subtle and refined
as their internal chemistry. Life, it seems,
is bound by a chemical web that connects
all its structures from the gene to the or-
ganism and, further, from the organism to
the ecosystem.
William Agosta, an organic chemist at
Rockefeller University, explores some of
the more bizarre and exotic strands of that
web. Among the most surprising is the
creature of his books title. The bom-
bardier beetle has developed a chemical
defense, Agosta explains, reminiscent of
the medieval technique of hurling boiling
oil at an attacking enemy. Unassuming in
appearance and only a centimeter long, a
bombardier gets steamed when pushed
too far. Its abdomen has two glands, each
including two chambers. One chamber
contains hydrogen peroxide and phenols;
the second contains organic catalysts: the
two parts of what military tacticians
would call a binary chemical weapon.
When the beetle is attacked, it opens a
valve in each gland, thereby enabling the
chemicals to mix in a thick-walled reac-
tion chamber. The reaction generates an
explosive burst, heating the liquid nearly
to its boiling point and forcing it out,
with a loud pop, through a nozzle on the
beetles belly. The average bombardier,
investigators have observed, is an excel-
lent shot. It can fire more than a dozen
rounds of hot liquid in a few minutes be-
fore fleeing to the lee side of a log to rest
and reload.
Most chemical communication, how-
ever, enacts a more discreet exchange: for
instance, animals emit pheromones, the
molecules Agosta studies, to signal others
of their species. Lepidopterists have
known for decades that female moths can
titillate their male counterparts for several
miles around by spritzing pheromones
into the air. Adolf F. J. Butenandt, the
German chemist and Nobel laureate who
first isolated the moth pheromone, in
1959, worked for twenty years on the
project, collecting glands from more than
a half-million females to get a working
sample of the substance.
In the meantime, new analytical tech-
niques have enabled workers to identify
countless molecular communication chan-
nels both within and between species.
Lima bean plants, for instance, cry out
pheromonically when attacked by spider
mites. The chemical they emit seems to act
as an alarm for other bean plants nearby:
even if those plants are not under attack,
they respond by releasing other chemicals
that, within a matter of hours, protect
against infestation. At the same time, the
alarm pheromone seems to attract a species
of carnivorous mite, which feeds on the
marauding bugs. Thus the bean plant de-
fends itself even as it calls in the cavalry.
Among higher animals, too, chemistry
may play a role in communication. Most
vertebrates, other than fishes, possess a
structure called the vomeronasal organ,
which is usually attached to the nasal cav-
ity. The VNOs sole known function is to
receive pheromonal messages. Of course,
complex creatures such as reptiles, birds
and mammals communicate through ges-
tures and sounds as well as by puffing out
molecules, and so pheromonal commu-
nication among those animals is not yet
fully understood. Double that assessment
for the human animal: people do indeed
possess VNOs, biologists discovered in
1991, and according to some reports,
people tend to relax in the presence of
certain odorless chemicals extracted from
human skin. But investigators disagree
about the reliability and significance of
those findings.
As natures chemical messages come to
be better understood, they could one day
become an important weapon for con-
trolling pests. Because the chemicals of
communication are generally less toxic
than pesticides areand because they can
be more precisely targetedAgosta holds
out the promise that crop and forest man-
agement will become less environmental-
ly destructive than it is today. And because
pheromones can be readily synthesized,
the pheromone business should not entail
sacrificing billions of beetles or opening
up a vast trade in human skin. Whether it
will also mean big business for Chanel,
Coty and Charles of the Ritz remains a
speculation for Wall Street to enjoy.
A TOUR OF THE CALCULUS
by David Berlinski
Pantheon Books, 1995
331 pages; $27.50 low Berlinski's tour, to keep up with his
breathless intensity, it helps to know cal-
culus in the first place. After all, Adams
and Lawrence credited their readers with
H Pantheon Books (one of those people
AD I BEEN AN ACQUISITIONS EDITOR at a certain sophistication, which made it
possible for them to add their own pecu-
who send out letters that begin, We re- liar insights to themes they could assume
gret that your fine effort does not fit our were understood by every educated lay-
current publishing needs), David Berlin- man. Why should readers be surprised
skis proposal to write a popular that Berlinski expects the same? Is not
appreciation of calculus would have re- mathematics as worthy of a place in the
ceived about one second of my time. Ap- essential education of the literate person
preciate calculus? That paradigm of math- as are art, history and religion? That the
ematical obscurity? That boulder on the average reader may find Berlinski a de-
road to sciencethe one most high manding guide says more, perhaps, about
school students avoid in the junior or se- our cultural dilemma than about his skills
nior year? Sounds about as appealing as a
coffee-table book on the history of the
as a writer.
iron lung. LA U R E N C EA. MA R S C H A L,L author of THE
A glance beyond the title to Berlinskis SUPERNOVA STORY , is a professor of physics
prose would not have been much more at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
assuring, for he approaches writing the
way Cecil B. DeMille approached movie-
making. His metaphors begin with the
melodramatic, and given their context, all
too often rise to self-parody: There sus-
pended before the mind, like an arm of
the great god Vishnu, is the symbol P(t).
Only William F. Buckley could applaud
Berlinskis ability to smuggle the adjec-
tive rebarbative twice into the text in less
than a hundred pages, but even that great
word master might hesitate to describe an
equation as a moist mystery or to write
that historical events explode like can-
non shots.
Had I sent Berlinski, a writer trained in
mathematics and molecular biology, a
boilerplate rejection, though, I would
soon have regretted it. For all his excesses
of style, he has written a book of unusual
insight, a book worthy not just of reading
but of rereading: quite simply, a delight.
As his title implies, Berlinski takes read-
ers on a journey from basic number theo-
ry through the idea of a function to a pre-
sentation of the elementary concepts of
the calculus. His account is neither a text-
book nor a dumbed-down trot; it is a truly
literate travelogue. Like D. H. Lawrence
hiking through Italy or Henry Adams
sightseeing at Chartres, Berlinski pauses
along the path to muse on historical and
intellectual landmarks of note. He visual -
izes Galileo in his tower, dropping balls to
clarify the laws of motion. He imagines
Leibniz in his study, contemplating the
mystery of infinitesimal intervals. He
strolls the old quarter of Prague, ponder-
ing issues of boundedness and continuity.
Gradually he builds toward his climax, the
journeys end, in which he develops an
understanding of the fundamental theo-
rem of the calculus.
Having finished the book, I realized
how my first impressions had gone astray.
Berlinskis prose may be overblown, but
the unique nature of his popularization
overshadows its failings. This is a book for
the numerically literate layperson. To fol-
 Initial Conditions
EDITORS NOTEBOOK

W HEN YOU MEET SOMEONE WHO DOUBTS THE REALITY OF EVO-

lution, ask the doubter to consider this: most human cells carry
a built-in program for self-destructiona poison pill each cell
is poised to swallow, should life ever become unpalatable. No one knows ex-
actly how the mechanism works. But as any cancer patient will confirm, there is
a protein in the body that can suppress it. So, isolate the gene that encodes the
suppressor protein, and insert the gene into a simple nematode worm. The ne-
matode cells blithely go about making the human protein. Andheres the
kickerthe human protein suppresses programmed cell death in the worm.
Cell death is by no means the only example of the deep, genetic affinities
among living things. Close analogues of the protein actin, as the Canadian
biotechnologist Howard Bussey recently noted in this magazine (Chain of
Being, March/April), are found in yeast, tomatoes, rabbits, people. Nearly a
third of the genes in yeast whose function remains unknown encode proteins
related by sequence to more-familiar proteins in other organisms. Such molec-
ular similarities, writes Martin C. Raff in Death Wish (page 36), are among
the wonders of modern biology. At the level of basic organic function, natures
strategy has been: invent a useful process once, then allow it to propagate. That
makes perfect sense. Genes are splendidly complicated entities, and it would be
highly inefficient, not to say astronomically unlikely, for them to arise indepen-
dently in more than one organism. What more striking evidence could one ask
for, for the unity of life, the evolutionary relatedness of all living things?
The theme of unity in diversity emerges again, in Stephen L. Buchmann
and Gary Paul Nabhans Pollination Crisis (page 22). The loss of bio-
diversity, note the authors, is a bloodless abstraction for many people, a distant
peril unfolding in the rain forests. The pollination crisis, though, is here and
now. The stage for crisis was set by the very success of a single species, the
honey bee. Since it was introduced in the Americas 375 years ago, the honey
bee has displaced many specialized native pollinators from their habitats.
Now, with the disastrous recent decline in honey bee populations caused by
disease and infestations of mites, the native pollinators may not be able to take
up the slack. At risk in the web of life is every plant crop that depends on
pollination to reproduce: one in three mouthfuls of the food people eat.
But perhaps the clearest case for unity within diversity is David Berrebys
witty think piece about anthropologists who go native (Bushed, page
41). Berreby meditates, often amusingly, on the risks and rewards of embed-
ding oneself in exotic cultures. But as he notes, that anthropological drive for
diversity has a flip side: the unified experience of the billions of people who
live cheek by jowl in cities with the most diverse possible denizens of the
global village. From the anthropologists, Berreby writes, we can all learn
how to know other people. . . . We are all anthropologists now.

I AM PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE SCIENCES HAS WON THE NATIONAL
Magazine Award for General Excellence (under 100,000 circulation). Recog-
nition with that award is the most prestigious honor in magazine journalism.
The 1996 award is our fifth such award, and the third in General Excellence.
I am also delighted to report that Burkhard Bilger, one of our senior
editors, has won the 1996 Gold Excel Award in feature writing for his article
Forever Young (September/October 1995) from SNAP, the Society of
National Association Publications. The Sciences also won the 1996 SNAP Silver
Excel Award for design excellence.
PETER G. BROWN

LETS GET DIGITAL
My main advice to Marshall Jon Fisher in
the light of his article on digital television,
Immaculate Reception [March/April] is
this: dont sell your wifes car for a new TV;
save the money and tune in to the Internet.
Digital television came about through
the combined efforts of many people, the
drama of General Instrument notwith-
standing. The proposed American high-
definition television (HDTV) picture stan-
dard is a result of deliberations by some
200 participants in an international stan-
dards group called ISO Working Group 9,
more widely known as MPEG (the Mo -
tion Picture Experts Group). In the end,
whatever the Grand Alliance professes to
have invented in a parochial battle to pre-
empt digital television fell before the
greater force of the needs of international
communications. The current Grand Al-
liance standard is taken from MPEG. It is a
tale of adoption, not creation.
But the larger point, well made in the
article but worth reiterating, is that HDTV
is no longer the issue. Now that purely
digital television is a reality (DIRECTV
Service, a unit of the Hughes Electronics
Corporation, is broadcasting 960 million
picture bits a second via satellite to 1.5
million customers nationwide), and now
that the Internet is emerging as the pre-
mier digital channel of choice in millions
of American homes, terrestrial airwaves
may recede as the backbone of mass media
entertainment. As digital networks ma-
ture, you may find it easier to choose your
evenings entertainment through a
search engine such as Yahoo! or Alta
Vista than to consult TV Guide. And your
choices could be built from video seg-
ments strewn throughout the world,
much as the Internet now mixes text,
sounds and pictures. ABC, CBS and NBC
may not be in charge; indeed they may
not even matter.
Existing broadcasters know that. Their
complaint before the FCC is a spectrum
grab, pure and simple. Given the license
to freely radiate 20 million bits a second
through a network of broadcast stations to
the entire nation, how many of those bits
would be HDTV, regular TV or even
television at all? Remember that the mix
can change every millisecond. Broad-
casters readily distinguish the role of
programmer, which is independent of de-
livery channel, from that of radiator,
which is subordinated to the FCC as traf-
fic cop. Naturally they want it both ways.
The issue rests on two conflicting goals:
the FCC wants the spectrum to be more
efficiently used, but existing broadcasters
Peer Review
LETTERS FROM READERS
want the new digital spectrum for free. Its
cheaper for them to accede to almost any
FCC demand than to risk an auctionin
which Microsoft might outbid them for
their own channels.
And there is a dilemma. If the regula-
tors take back the analogue licenses too
quickly, viewers will have to invest in dig-
ital converters or new TVs. But the longer
the government waits, the greater the
opportunity cost of lost new uses. If the
broadcasters go digital quickly, they risk
losing their audience; but if they go slow-
ly, they are throttling a public resource.
A middle ground might be best: auction
the space, but give existing license holders
a discount on the basis of how quickly they
go digital and how quickly they agree to
return their old licenses. That would let
newcomers into the market, facilitate the
changeover to bits and enable companies
already in the business to manage their
own transition. Many variations on the
theme are possible.
ANDREW LIPPMAN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
BOLIDE EYEWITNESS
Patrick Huyghes column Incident at
Curu [Anecdotal Evidence, March/
April] had a great success here in Brazil.
After its publication the Brazilian maga-
zines of science and some members of the
scientific community began to move. We
have continued to piece together the evi-
dence relevant to the very energetic mete-
orite that may have fallen in the Amazon
forest in 1930. New radar images are com-
patible with the craterlike structure we
found on optical Landsat images. The seis-
mic data from Bolivia are still being con-
sidered. We now think, however, that an
expedition to the region will have to wait
until 1997, during the dry season there,
between July and September.
We have located an eyewitness to the
event. Raimundo Clemente da Silva, an
old but lucid seringueiro (rubber tapper)
and fisherman living today near Atalaia do
Norte, was twenty-two years old in 1930.
We were able to record an interview with
him on videotape; the interview is now
being analyzed. There are some confusing
aspects to the testimony, particularly con-
cerning the year and the hour of the
event. Nevertheless, the astronomical and
physical circumstances and the details of
the night and the day, supposed to be from
August 12 to 13, 1930, are quite clear in
da Silvas mind.
He spent that night with his wife look-
ing for turtle eggs on the river beaches near
Santo Antnio, a rubber station on the
Curu River. The suspected impact site is
fifteen miles from Santo Antnio. The sky
was clear and the moon was bright. He saw
only one bolide, and he repeated several
times the trajectory of the bolide with re-
spect to the moon. That important fact
will help determine a highly probable en-
trance orbit. Poetically, he says it was like
a planet changing residence. He describes
a whistle, the tremendous impact noise,
the smoke (seen after the event) and a
sensation of the boiling of the earth. In-
terestingly, he says that there was no fire in
the forest after the event.
We are still looking for a Brazilian pub-
lication by the Capuchin friar Father
Fedele dAlviano, the missionary who re-
ported the event in 1931. We would like
at least to find his diaries, if they exist. At
first that search seemed hopeless, because I
couldnt even find where Fedele is buried
for sure. Then the Folha de So Paulo jour-
nalist Vinicius T. Freire discovered that
Fedele, contrary to the assertion reported
in Mr. Huyghes article, is buried in So
Paulo. I have found one friar who had
known Fedele and read his books. He re-
members having read something about the
bolide event, and so there is some hope of
finding a Brazilian publication.
Some ethnological details raised in Mr.
Huyghes article need to be corrected.
The mass suicide of the Ticuna Indians is
definitely not related to the fall of the
bolide. Fedele himself, in an ethnological
paper written in the 1940s, explained that
the reason for the suicide was the appari-
tion of an airplane in the sky, which the
Ticuna regarded as a bird of evil omen.
There is also another explanation: The
mass suicide may have taken place in the
Ticuna region, which is near So Paulo de
Olivena but far from the Curu River
[see the map on page 16 of Mr. Huyghes
article]. Some Ticuna lived in the Cu-
ru region, but not as tribe members;
they were employees of the seringueiros.
Finally, contrary to the assertion made
by Roberto Gorelli that Mr. Huyghe re-
ported, no cannibalism is known today in
the Amazon regionat least it has never
been proved. What does exist, according
to an account in the March 3, 1996, edi-
tion of the Jornal do Brasil, is a seemingly
endless war, in a region about eighty miles
to the east of the Curu, between a group
of some forty Corubo Indians, survivors
of a tribe, against white people who are
looking for wood and petrol.
R AMIRO DE LA REZA
Observatorio Nacional
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

SPREAD YOUR GILLS AND FLY
Flying insects represent a whopping 72
percent of all animal species. Their evolu-
tionary success is attributed mostly to their
development of wings and powered, flap-
ping flight. Insect wings, unlike the wings
of birds and bats, are not derived from
limbs, and so their origin, early use and
function are extremely difficult to explain.
Among the numerous attempts at expla-
nation, only James H. Mardens, as out-
lined in How Insects Learned to Fly
[November/December 1995], has been
able to describe an appendagenamely,
the proto-wingthat functions both in
vigorous flapping and in survival, by af-
fording escape from the many Paleozoic
arthropodan predators.
My own research is concerned with the
morphological aspects of the origin, early
evolution and diversification of insect
wings. One way of reconstructing the an-
cestral proto-wing is to identify the most
primitive wing veins. The method is based
on two evolutionary rules: (1) wing veins,
once they have fused together, do not un-
fuse; and (2) wing branches, once lost, do
not reappear. Those rules imply, roughly,
that the most primitive wing vein is the
one showing the fewest or no fusions and
bearing the most primary branches.
It turns out that all insect wings share a
reinforcement in which the first vein is
changed into a rigid strip, joined and rein-
forced by the second vein and by a part of
the third vein. The remaining five veins re-
peatedly branch in two and lack any fusions
or braces (which are absolutely necessary
for flapping flight); their branches run al-
ternately on ridges and in valleys in a mild-
ly corrugated arrangement. From those ob-
servations one can conclude: (1) insects
radiated not from an ancestor with already
flying proto-wings but from an ancestor
with nonflying proto-wings; (2) flapping
flight originated several times in parallel;
and (3) proto-wings were moving in a way
that required a fairly strong, reinforced
anterior margin, but the airfoil was only
relatively weakly supported by multiple,
corrugated branching, as in a folding fan.
The merit of Mr. Mardens hypothesis is
that it credibly reconstructs special condi-
tions under which an aquatic appendage
can continue generating a flapping motion
in the air and stimulating further adaptation
toward flapping flight, while increasing the
survival rate of the insect. Furthermore,
Mr. Mardens proto-wings could readily
have incorporated features predicted by the
analysis of the venation of all insect wings.
Is there any possibility that some living
insects could have retained the proto-
wing? The answer, unfortunately, is no.
All winged insects known so far, including
fossils some 300 million years old, from the
Paleozoic era, are already differentiated
into either Paleoptera (old-winged insects)
or Neoptera (new-winged insects). Each
group had already acquired two distinctive
sets of specific flight adaptations that could
not be present in the shared, ancestral
proto-wing. Thus the proto-wing, which
lacked specific flight adaptations, could
have occurred only in the common ances-
tor of Paleoptera and Neoptera, which
lived during the Ordovician or Silurian
periods, between 500 and 400 million
years ago. Freshwater deposits containing
the fossilized remains of those periods have
been nearly eroded away.
Hence the best chance for discovering
the mysterious function of the proto-wing
is exactly the route taken by Mr. Marden:
seeking inspiration from the most primi-
tive living insects and comparing them
with already known evolutionary data.
What Mr. Marden discovered is the only
acceptable hypothesis for the origin of
flight offered so far that meshes well with
the other morphological, paleontological,
developmental genetic, and neuro-
physiological evidence relevant to the
origin of wings. The multidisciplinary
evidence shows that insect wings evolved
from articulated, movable appendages of
arthropodan legs called exites, which in
the insect ancestor were functioning as
movable, articulated gill plates engaged in
a flapping-like motion.
JARMILA KUKALOV-P ECK
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
James Marden replies: My research, in
which modern stoneflies serve as model
organisms for exploring hypotheses about
how insects evolved wings and flight,
would not have been possible without the
background provided by Jarmila Kukalov-
Pecks extensive and pathbreaking research
with fossil insects. Thus it is most gratifying
to see that my ideas mesh with hers.
Ms. Kukalov-Peck poses the question,
Is there any possibility that some living in-
sects could have retained the proto-wing?
Her answer is a definitive no. But I would
distinguish that question from a similar one
I have posed: Does surface locomotion in
modern stoneflies represent the retention
of an ancestral trait? Note that Ms.
Kukalov-Pecks question addresses struc-
ture, whereas my question addresses
function and behavior. The significance of
the distinction is that winged insects may
have radiated (that is, Paleoptera and Neo-
ptera may have already diverged), and their
wings may have evolved a more sophisti-
cated aerodynamic structure than the
proto-wing, before the evolution of fully
weight-supported flapping flight. If so,
modern stoneflies may have retained the
ancestral surface-skimming behavior even
though they possess a wing that is not pri-
mordial in structure.
My experiments reveal that there are
gradations in surface-skimming perfor-
mance, as well as demands on wing rigid-
ity (that is, some insects simply sail,
whereas others skim water surfaces with
wings flapping). Moreover, most modern
surface skimmers can also fly. Thus I am
asking a tricky question about the possible
overlap of both primitive and derived func-
tion as well as primitive and derived
behavior within modern stoneflies. A
necessary first step toward addressing the
question is to determine whether surface
skimming occurs widely among the vari-
ous lineages of stonefly (which would
support the view that an ancestral trait has
been retained) or only among a small
group of closely related species (which
would support the view that a trait has re-
cently evolved). My evidence so far sug-
gests the former, but much work remains
to be done, and a full telling of that story
must await another day.
WHAT BIOLOGISTS DO
IN THE FOREST
I read with great interest Peter Tysons
Field Notes column about Chris Rax-
worthy, The Lizard King of Madagascar
[March/April]. Raxworthy has been
working with me as a postdoctoral research
associate since 1989 on a project funded
mainly by the National Science Founda-
tion, with supplemental funding and
strategic help from the National Geo-
graphic Society, Earthwatch, Conservation
International and the World Wide Fund
for Nature. Our goals are to determine the
geographical distribution of each species of
amphibian, reptile and small mammal on
Madagascar in order to identify centers of
high diversity and endemism. Such infor-
mation is crucial for conservation planning
in the face of the raging habitat destruction
taking place on Madagascar.
Mr. Tyson accurately portrays Rax-
worthy and the nature of the work we are
doing. I fear, however, that his brief ref-
erence to the irony of killing animals for
conservation will be lost on many readers.
He is referring to our anesthetizing and
preserving specimens for study. It is clear
that he understands the necessity of killing
samples of organisms for systematic re-
search and that he recoignizes the all-
important relation between systematics
and conservation. But many conserva-
tionists and land managers do not. The
usual, shortsighted response of such peo-
ple is that biologists should be saving
species, not killing them.
That attitude is perhaps understandable
with respect to what Mr. Tyson refers to
as sexy species, such as giant pandas and
lemurs. Hardly any taxonomic problems
remain to be solved for the highly visible,
well-known species, and killing them for
systematic research would indeed require
unusual circumstances in order to be jus-
tified. But the majority of the groups of
organisms on the earth are not so well
known, and systematic studies are essential
if people are to learn of their existence, let
alone make informed decisions about how
best to conserve them.
 Before our surveys, about 400 species
of amphibians and reptiles were on record
from Madagascar, and lists of species that
occur in existing reserves on Madagascar
were available. Those lists gave the false
impression that biologists already knew
what species exist, where they occur and
how well they are protected within the
current network of reserves. We were sus-
picious of the lists, however, because they
were not backed up with voucher speci-
mens in museums, and there was no evi-
dence that the authors had verified the
identifications.
As it turned out, the lists were highly
inaccurate; the error rate varied from 30 to
60 percent for various parks and nature
reserves. In addition, if we had been pre-
vented from doing our work by over-
zealous conservationists hell-bent to pre-
vent collecting, the 150 new species we
have discovered to date would still be un-
known, and certainly we would have no
idea where additional reserves should be
established to best conserve the unique
fauna of Madagascar.
The necessity of killing stems from the
difficulty of identifying many of the 550
or so species of amphibians and reptiles on
Madagascar. You cant do it with a pair of
binoculars and a checklist. Studies of in-
ternal anatomy, chromosomes and DNA
are needed to determine which forms are
valid species and which are only individ-
ual or geographical varieties. Only such
studies will eventually enable us to deter-
mine which external characters are reli-
able for field identification. The animals
and tissue samples preserved for genetic
studies must be placed in museums, where
they can be studied by other authorities,
should the original research be ques-
tioned. Unless regional biodiversity is
documented with sound systematic stud-
iesbacked up with museum voucher
specimens that not only reveal the charac-
ters of the species but also verify the pre-
cise localities where the animals were
foundconservation efforts based on the
idea of preserving maximum chunks of
biodiversity are badly flawed and to some
extent a waste of the money raised from
taxpayers and charitable donors.
RONALD A. NUSSBAUM
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
There is a special kinship among field
scientists who work on Madagascar. For
some bizarre reason those of us who have
endured the assaults of a thousand tabanid
flies, the stings of social wasps that come
from nowhere, the distant camps with zero
creature comforts and the unheralded cy-
clones are bonded together in a unique
fraternity. There are chapters. Ours is the
Kapidolo Club. Were Brits, Germans,
Americans and Malagasy who have come
together to study the endangered flat-
tailed tortoise (kapidolo in Malagasy) in the
vanishing western dry deciduous forest artist, she seems unaware of this graphic
north of Morondava. We have no charter, designers tool. It is used to get an idea of
but our mission is clear: save Pyxis plani - what a drawing might look like if it had to
cauda and its habitat. There are others like be reduced a large amount. It is also handy
us with highly focused agendas: aye-aye, if you want to see what a piece of poster
mesites, serpent eagle or rere turtle. A few, art would look like at a distance.
with indefatigable drive, a seemingly un- Now, unwindable tape at 19theres
quenchable thirst for discovery and the a bargain. Some of my tapes have become
ability to surviveno, flourishunder unwindable from lying in the sun. And
the most dreadful field conditions, have they cost a lot more than 19.
tackled an entire animal class and are in KEN FITZGERALD
their own league. Chris Raxworthy is one Tappan, New York
of them. He is without question the dean
of herpetology on Madagascar. Raxwor- T HE S CIENCES welcomes correspondence from
thy has done more than any other soul to readers. Please send electronic mail for the editor
gazette Madagascars amphibians and rep- to sciences@nyas.org. All letters should include
tiles and make sense of the chaotic state of a daytime telephone number and a complete
the literature about them. street address. Brief letters are most likely to be
As a biologist who has worked and published, and all letters are subject to editing.
traveled widely on Madagascar, I think I
am a fair critic of stories about that rarely
visited piece of real estate, its ecological
travesties and marvels, its native peoples,
and the expatriate characters who travel to
the redlands and never fully leave. When
a biological colleague or a wishful travel-
er says to me, Tell me about Madagas-
car, I find myself stumbling around for
words (and that doesnt happen when Im
asked about other biological treasures such
as the Galpagos Islands or East Africa).
Madagascar is indeed like no other place
on the earth; it is an extraordinarily com-
plicated mosaic of cultures, biodiversity,
environments and associated problems.
The country will be either lost or saved
during the working life of the current gen-
eration. But Madagascars guardians are
confused by invited expatriate planners
who push for rapid change from a world
driven by fadys (taboos) to one buoyed by
World Bank dollars. They listen to our
soapbox lectures and make their decisions.
In the end, the Malagasy, like the rest of us,
will save what they want.
In nine columns of type Mr. Tyson has
captured the essence of Madagascars com-
plex nature, as well as the world of an un-
usual field biologist who is making a dif-
ference. His article is spot on. For those
aspiring young field biologists who think
Madagascar is in their future, Mr. Tysons
tales will make great bedtime reading. But
I think Ill hold off sharing his account
with natural history buffs entertaining
Madagascar travel who have asked me for
some preparation material. Some joys must
be experienced firsthand. And sweetened
with reflective material after the fact.
JOHN L. BEHLER
Wildlife Conservation Society
Bronx, New York
IT PUTS OUT FIRES, TOO
Roz Chasts cartoon New Items from the
House of Surplus [Strange Matter, May/
June] shows a reverse magnifying glass
for $1.99. Thats a very good bargain for a
reducing glass. I paid $9.95 for mine twen-
ty years ago. Im a little surprised that, as an

Chinese science has arrived, but the fate of dissident scientists is still up in the air
P
ERSONAL TRAGEDIES, like tragic
histories, too often repeat them-
selves as farce. On this brisk, fickle
Brooklyn morning, two Chinese
dissidents are again seeking shelter. The
cafes are packed with Sunday brunchers,
but a waitress tells them they can wait on
the benches outside if they want. Once
there, they awkwardly shuffle places in the
shifting light: Liu Gang should sit in the
sun, Liu Danhong insists, for he is still frail
from his time in prison. But Liu Gang has
had enough of sitting. In solitary confine-
ment, he says, hopping in place like a run-
ner at a traffic light, they sometimes made
him sit on benches for fourteen hours at a
time. First his legs would go numb, then
his lower back would seize up, and then
he would refuse to sit any longer. It took
ten policemen to hold me down, but they
could only do it for five minutes at a
time, he says. After that, they would
stop and we would rest for a while. Then
it would start all over again.
Physicist turned fisherman turned stu-
dent activist, Liu Gang was one of the ar-
chitects of the protests at Tiananmen
Square. In June 1989, when troops shat-
tered the uprising, Liu was ranked third on
the governments most-wanted list. Had a
ticket clerk, suspicious of his soft, gradu-
ate-student hands, not betrayed him to the
police, he might have taken a long train
ride to western China. Instead, he spent six
years in prison, two of them in solitary
confinement, earning the nickname Tie
Han, the Iron Man. Early in May, after
a year of freedom marked by constant po-
lice harassment, Liu fled to the United
States and was granted temporary asylum.
Now, a few weeks later, he is still shuttling
from couch to couch, city to city, adjust-
ing to a new kind of limbo.
Being an exiled dissident aint what it
used to be. A few years ago Liu would
have rated a heros welcome: when fellow
dissident Li Lu came over in 1989, he was
befriended by George Bush and Madonna.
But while time stood still in Lius prison
cell, it hurtled forward everywhere else.
Chinese science seems poised for a renais-
sance. Chinese expatriots, once appalled
at the Tiananmen massacre, have turned
boosterish as Chinas economy has grown
by 10 percent a year. And the U.S. now
treats China as a most favored nation. Dis-
Quanta
RECENT SIGHTINGS
Holding Pattern
sidents, even some of their former sup-
porters feel, only gum up the works.
Orphan of politics, bearer of bad mem-
ories, Liu Gang, like the struggle for human
rights he helped lead, has been put on hold.
Tactical Error?
LATE IN FEBRUARY, AS AN UNderground
railroad was preparing to smuggle Liu out
of China, an only slightly less tense affair
was under way at the New York Acade-
my of Sciences. At the invitation of the
Academys Committee on the Human
Rights of Scientists, a number of experts
on China had gathered to probe an enig -
ma: Why are Chinese expatriots, unlike
Soviet expatriots, so lukewarm toward
dissidents? Is demanding human rights in
China a moral necessity or a tactical error?
The panels answers, by most accounts,
only deepened an existing philosophical
divide.
For years, the Nobel laureate C. N.
(Frank) Yang has been a particular disap-
pointment to human rights activists.
Yang, a physicist at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook, is said to have
enormous pull in Beijing, yet he flatly re-
fuses to use it for the sake of human rights.
Let the economy grow and later on re-
form, he told the panel. Eventually we
will reach a more open, more democratic
society. But we dont want to go through
the problems they had in the Soviet
Union.
Yangs optimism is not unfounded. Af-
ter Tiananmen, many observers feared an-
other generation of Chinese scientists
would be lost to labor camps and reeduca-
tion. That has not been the case. Student
numbers are growing steadily, the journal
Nature reported last winter, and the gov-
ernment plans to triple its budget for sci-
ence and technology by the end of the
century (though basic research will remain
woefully underfunded). As late as the
1960s, mathematics and physics were
taught from books by Marx and Engels.
Now Chinese research is intellectually up-
to-the-minute, thanks to international ex-
changes, pirated Western journals and the
Internet. As a generation of professors
nears retirement, meanwhile, China is lur-
ing back young expatriots with confer-
ences, collaborations, grants and university
positions.
In spite of the new blood and the fired-
up economy, however, a chill remains on
academic life. There is a certain amount
of freedom, but its largely accidental,
says the physicist Joseph L. Birman, head
of the Academys human rights commit-
tee. The government simply cant con-
trol the society to the degree that it would
like to. Chinese academics, Birman
points out, were recently ordered to reg-
ister their E-mail addresses and passwords
with the police. Its inconceivable that
they could monitor them all, he says,
but the threat alone reduces freedom of
expression. More important, dozens of
scientists remain political prisoners; and
they, in turn, are only a fraction of those
detained, who are poorly fed and some-
times tortured far beyond the rule of law.
Things are better for many people
now than at the time of the Cultural Rev-
olution, Sydney Jones, executive direc-
tor of Asia Watch, told the Academys
panel. But there is real danger in assum-
ing that economic growth by itself will
improve human rights. Other panelists
dismissed such concerns as ethnocentric.
Human rights is a Western, Christian tra-
dition, Yang said. The Chinese tradition
is mainly Confucian. When it comes to
the individual versus society in Chinese
tradition, society comes first. As proof,
one political scientist noted that the order
in which Chinese address their letters is
the reverse of that of westerners: the
country on top, then the city and street
address, and only then, at the very bot-
tom, the recipients name.
From Solidarity to Solitary
A LONGTIMEADMIREROF YANGS PHYSICS,
Liu Gang has less patience with his politi-
cal science. In China we dont have the
freedom to have many different opinions
about our situation, he says. We just
know its intolerable. During his years
behind bars Liu was regularly beaten by
guards or criminals wielding belts or elec-
trified batons. When he staged a hunger
strike, the guards rigged a machine to pry
open his teeth. They force-fed him at first,
then, his strike over, they kept him on the
edge of starvation as punishment.
Undaunted, Liu would lead prisoners
in choruses of The Internationale,
though it often landed him in solitary.
During one stretch he was the only pris-
oner in a vast, abandoned complex. A
guard told me that if I did not speak at all,
I might lose my voice, he remembers.
To keep from going mad or mute, he
would run through physics and mathe-
matics proofs in his mind, repeating the
equations out loud.
As bad as prison was, Liu now says,
freedom was worse. Stripped of his be-
longings, forbidden to work, he was told
to beg in the streets for a living. Yet the
police made sure to keep him helpless.
When relatives lent him their couch, they
were dragged off for interrogation. When
a taxi driver gave him a ride, the drivers
license was seized. Soon even Lius best
friends were frightened to help him.
China is very big, he says, but there
was no place for me to live.
Today, reminiscing over coffee, debat-
ing who made more matchbooks in prison
(Yes, you made 4,000 a day, but mine
were more difficult to make!), Liu and his
friend hardly look like prison survivors,
much less Chinas most wanted. With his
boyish face, ragged sideburns and Playboy
belt buckle, Liu fits into Brooklyn almost
too well. And Liu Danhong, survivor of a
year and a half on death row, would look
at home in any mall: plaid jumper, wavy
hair, wide, guileless eyes. But their looks
remain uncommonly deceiving. Liu Gang
still suffers from a weak heart, stomach
cramps and a potassium deficiency. Liu
Danhong is living in New Jersey on a tem-
porary visa, hoping to win asylum before
her Chinese host discovers her political
background. Malnutrition has left them
both with the aching joints of middle age,
though they are only in their thirties.
In the U.S. every computer hacker
dreams of becoming a revolutionary;
these revolutionaries dream of nothing so
much as being computer hackers. Before
Tiananmen, Liu Gang earned his masters
degree in quantum optics and Liu Dan-
hong was a psychologist. Science was
once a crucible for their protest (students
of science avoided years of Maoist indoc-
trination), and it transformed them into
full-time activists. Now disillusion is
bringing them back to science. Liu Gang
hopes to enroll at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology or Harvard Universi-
ty next fall, and Liu Danhong may follow
in his footsteps. If and when she returns
home, it will probably be as a software de-
signer. Liu Gang has decided to stick to
physics, though computer science was al-
so his first choice. In China it is the same
as in the U.S., he says with a crooked
smile. Physics Ph.D.s cannot find jobs.
BURKHARD BILGER
Out of Thin Air
Hydrogen becomes a metal,
but the metal is a liquid
Bechoed down the hall at the Lawrence
LAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! THE SHOTS
Livermore National Laboratory in Liver-
more, California, filling the cryogenically
chilled air of Building 341 with the acrid
tang of gunpowder. When the shooting
was over, three physicistsSamuel T.
Weir, Arthur C. Mitchell and William J.
Nellishad winged a quarry that their
scientific forebears had been stalking for
more than sixty years: metallic hydrogen.
It was like bagging a basilisk. Metals are
electrical conductors, substances that shunt
electrons freely from atom to atom.
Hydrogen is an insulator; at ordinary tem-
peratures and pressures, the protons in its
atoms keep a jealous grip on the electrons.
In 1935, however, the American physicists
Eugene P. Wigner and Hilliard P. Hunt-
ington of Princeton University predicted
that by squeezing hard enough, one could
make that grip relax. As the molecules drew
close together, they said, the electron
clouds would overlap and merge, freeing
the electrons to roam at will.
But what to squeeze, and how to
squeeze it? Some workers (in laboratories
at Harvard and Cornell universities and at
the Carnegie Institute in Washington,
D.C.) took the low-temperature road,
compressing solid hydrogen at room tem-
perature in diamond anvils, a technique
known as static compression.
T more violent approach. The workers
HE LIVERMORE TEAM PREFERRED A
prepared targetseach containing a hun-
dredth of an ounce of liquefied hydrogen
or deuterium (hydrogen with an extra
neutron in each atom) sandwiched be-
tween sapphire disks the size of American
twenty-five-cent coins and encased in an
aluminum disk five inches acrossand
blasted them with a high-velocity gas gun.
The gun resembles a sixty-foot long
hypodermic syringe, with a tapering bar-
rel filled with hydrogen propellant. When
it is fired, a heavy piston compresses the
gas, hurling a metal-tipped plastic bullet
down the needle of the syringe.
The bullet slams into the target point-
blank at 16,000 miles an houreight times
as fast as a high-powered rifle bullet and
close to the top speed of the space shuttle.
For a ten-millionth of a second, shock
waves reverberate through the sample,
raising its pressure by hundreds of thou-
sands of atmospheres and its temperature
by thousands of degrees, while electrodes
in the rear plate measure its electrical con-
ductivity. The shock-wave reverberations
are the key to the experiment: by tuning
them just right, the investigators can keep
the temperature low enough to prevent
the hydrogen molecules from dissociating
into atoms. In another ten-millionth of a
second the measurement is completed, the
sapphire plates blown to bits, the sample
scattered to the winds.
The shots that winged metallic hydro-
gen heated the target to between 3,500 and
7,500 degrees Fahrenheit and generated
pressures between 93 and 180 gigapascals
(930,000 and 1.8 million atmospheres). As
the pressure rose, the targets became steadi-
ly more conductive. Then the conductivi-
ty leveled off, a sign of metallicity. Hydro-
gen crossed the threshold at around 1.4
million atmospheresa lower pressure
than most theorists had predicted.
Planetary scientists are taking notice.
According to their theories, metallic
hydrogen is a major component of the gas
balls that litter the cosmos, including giant
planets such as Jupiter and Saturn and the
recently discovered not-quite-stars known
as brown dwarfs (see Quanta: Brave New
Worlds, January/February 1996). Electric
currents in metallic hydrogen are thought
to generate the magnetic field around
Jupiter, which can be as much as thirty
times as powerful as the field around the
earth. Most models place Jupiters metallic
threshold about 8,000 miles from the top
of its atmosphere, a fifth of the way to the
planets center. Now it looks as if the fig-
ure could be closer to 4,000 miles, which
would make the magnetic fields easier to
explain. Before planetary scientists rush off
to overhaul their models, however, they
need to know more about things the
Livermore team did not measure, such as
how temperature and pressure affect the
density of metallic hydrogen.
ROBERT J. COONTZ JR.
Beautiful Streamers
Around a collapsing star,
mysterious tendrils of light
F from
OUR HUNDRED FIFTY LIGHT-YEARS
the earth, in the constellation
Aquarius, shimmers an immense garland
of red and blue, stretching across more
than one and a half light-years of sky. Ex-
panding at the somewhat leisurely rate of
about fifteen miles a second, the tenuous
wreath began its bloom some 20,000 years
ago, spreading out from a central white
dwarf. That star, no larger than the earth
but with a mass equal to 60 percent the
mass of the sun, blazes with a fury fiercer
than almost any other known star. Its sur-
face temperature exceeds 123,000 degrees
Kelvin, twenty times hotter than the sur -
face of the sun, and its luminosity is sixty
times greater.
The wreath is the Helix Nebula, the
planetary nebula nearest to the earth. Since
the late 1960s investigators have puzzled
over the astronomer Walter Baades 1949
discovery of thousands of barely visible fil-
aments along the inner surface of the neb-
ulas gaseous ring, all vaguely resembling
comets and all pointing inward toward the
central star.
Now the astronomer C. Robert ODell
and his student Kerry P. Handron, both of
Rice University in Houston, Texas, have
aimed the Hubble Space Telescopes Wide
Field and Planetary Camera 2 at the Helix
and made the first close-up pictures of the
filaments [see photograph at bottom of this
page]. What the photograph shows is a
swarm of gigantic spermlike objects, each
trailed by a tail 100 billion miles long. Un-
like comets, however, the objects are not
solid bodies made up of ice and rock, but
giant bubbles of dust and gas between one
billion and two billion miles across, with-
in which might even be hidden full-size
planets. The structures show up because
the intense heat of the white dwarf ionizes
and therefore illuminates the half-moon
cusps of glowing gases visible in the Hub-
ble photograph.
H ODell and Handron call cometary
OW DID SUCH B U B B L E S W H A T
knotscome into being? One proposed
explanation relies on the dynamics of the
central white dwarf. About 20,000 years
ago, astronomers think, the star ran out of
fuel and began to collapse, a process that
continues to this day. For the first 1,000
to 10,000 years of the collapse, the stars
outer layers expelled large quantities of
matter as a so-called superwind, moving
at about six miles a second. Once that
wind died down, the star began emitting
a second wind of low mass but at great
speed, moving at 1,200 miles a second.
The fast wind crowded against the initial
heavy wind, and like waves crashing on a
beach, the second wind smashed against
the first wind, shaping and sculpting the
cloud into the deep-space dunes and
channels that exist today. ODell and oth-
er astronomers think the cometary knots
snapped by Hubbles cameras are the
dunes of the collision.
But there are other explanations for the
cometary knots. Several English scientists,
including John E. Dyson of the Universi-
ty of Manchester, have proposed they are
the remnants of sunspots that once resid-
ed on the surface of the star during its red
giant phase, just before its collapse into the
white dwarf state. The spots could have
been ejected outward when the star began
its collapse, evolving into the knots.
Perhaps the most intriguing theory of
the knots origin is that they are leftovers
from the stars birth. The cometary knots
could be part of the stars own comet
cloud, similar to the Oort Cloud that pre-
sumably surrounds our own sun. As distant
as half a light-year from the sun, the Oort
Cloud could be the home of a trillion
comets, which periodically fall sunward.
Although the comets of an Oort cloud
would normally be shrouded in darkness,
the intense heat of the central white dwarf
could be able to reveal the normally hid-
den swarm of comets in all their glory.
ROBERT ZIMMERMAN
Hand Waving?
An unconventional treatment
for post-traumatic stress
is put to the test
W mortals, an angry Zeus chained him to
HEN PROMETHEUS GAVE FIRE TO
Mount Caucasus, where each day an eagle
devoured his liver, and each night the liv-
er grew back. Imagine for a moment that
you must endure a variation of that
Promethean hell. Instead of an eagle, your
tormentor is a rapist, the murderer of your
parents, a battlefield enemy who took
away your legs and much more inside. For
many people, the unbearable circum-
stances you are only imagining are real.
The condition, known as post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), forces its victims to
live the most traumatic events of their lives
over and over again. Because the events
are often wars, assaults or natural disasters,
the persistence of memory alone would be
difficult. But if you are a victim of PTSD,
you may relive your tragic episode with
such clarity that you can see the bloody
bodies on the battlefield or smell the alco-
hol on your assailants breath.
Thus when the clinical psychologist
Francine Shapiro of the Mental Research
Institute in Palo Alto, California, offered a
new treatment for PTSD in 1989, enor-
mous pressure developed to bring the treat-
ment quickly to patients. Shapiro began
training fellow clinicians in the treatment
the following year. Her decision to do so
has led to years of controversy. Some of her
peers objected that she was disseminating
the therapy before it could be scientifically
validated. Shapiro says she made it clear to
everyone she trained that her therapy was
experimental and that clinicians should so
inform their patients. When studies were
eventually conducted, they yielded mixed
results, but only one of them met standards
set by a task force of the clinical psycholo-
gy division of the American Psychological
Association. (That study, published last
December by Sandra A. Wilson, a psy-
chologist at the University of Colorado in
Colorado Springs, judged the therapy ef-
fective.) Now, after almost a decade during
which 17,000 trained practitioners have
treated perhaps a million patients, the men-
tal health community may finally be get-
ting the research it has been waiting for.
Part of the trouble may have been that
Shapiros treatment is so outlandish that it
literally made eyes roll in the mental
health community. Her original inspira-
tion struck her on a walk through a park.
She noticed that disturbing thoughts lost
their power to upset her when she moved
her eyes from side to side. Later, when she
recalled the same thoughts without the
eye movements, the negative effects of her
thoughts were still decreased. In its pres-
ent, more refined form, the therapy,
known as eye-movement desensitization
and reprocessing (EMDR), alternates be-
tween periods of discussion and periods of
eye movements. During the latter phase,
the patient visualizes the traumatic event
while her eyes follow the therapists hand.
In March, at a trauma conference in
Boston, Steven Lazrove, a psychiatrist at
the Yale University School of Medicine,
presented what he called a prepilot study
of EMDR. He reported that the therapy
had effectively treated seven PTSD pa-
tients in three sessions. Lazroves main
study, designed to take into account past
criticisms of methodology, will be one of
the first to compare EMDR with another
treatment for PTSD. He hopes to finish
collecting data by the end of 1996 and to
have firm conclusions ready within a year.
Until sound studies prove that EMDR
works, some psychologists will remain
outraged at its use in a clinical setting.
There should be proper protection for
patients, said James D. Herbert, a psy-
chologist at the Medical College of
Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Universi-
ty in Philadelphia. It should only be
used in a research setting or with in-
formed consent.
But most of medicine has not been
studied in that way, counters Bessel A. van
der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Har-
vard University. If something works, it
certainly is important to study it, but it
doesnt mean that people should stop us-
ing it just because it has not been proven
efficacious in a double-blind study, he
says. He admits that he initially resisted the
therapy at the trauma center he runs.
When several of his patients went else-
where for EMDR treatment, though, he
was amazed at the results. Ive worked in
trauma for twenty years. Ive never seen
anything like that. Some of the symptoms
melted away like snow in the sun, he says.
The one area of consensus about the
controversial therapy seems to be its mech-
anism. As Lazrove puts it, Nobody knows
whats going on. What is known is that
during normal memory processing, senso-
ry information is integrated into a personal
narrative so that the details lose their inten-
sity. The event becomes accessible only as
a memory. But when trauma disrupts the
process, the details do not lose their imme-
diacy. Instead of merely remembering the
event, people relive it. Perhaps, Lazrove
says, the leftright stimulation of eye
movements, and the leftright auditory and
tactile stimulations that sometimes replace
it in EMDR, enable the brain to complete
the interrupted process.
As rigorous studies arrive next year,
workers in mental health will finally be
able to learn whether Shapiro has discov-
ered a Hercules to slay the eagle and set
Prometheus free.
LYNDA LIU
 Wo rk in g H yp o th es es

Kelvins Injunction
BY RODNEY W. NICHOLS
President and CEO, the New York Academy of Sciences

I WAS MUCH TAKEN BY LORD KELVINS INJUNCTION:

A S A YOUNG PHYSICIST
When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, . . . you
have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of Science, . . . whatever the
matter may be. The drive to be quantitativein explanation and predictionis so
powerful throughout science, engineering and medicine that it is tempting to apply
the injunction broadly.
No, not to the arts. And not to romance or parenting, either, or to political pow-
er or religious values. But what about subjects closer to Kelvins kenthe impor-
tance of education, science and technology, for instance, to economic growth and
development? As nations chart strategies for the future, what is worth counting?
Many countries in Asia have been rapidly increasing their investments in the
education of scientists and engineers. In the 1980s more than 60 percent of Chinas
undergraduate degrees were awarded in the natural sciences and engineering, com-
pared with about 25 percent in Japan and less than 20 percent in the United States.
How much are such investments worth? Many economic indicators suggest the
enormous value of improving human capital. The past generations technology-based
and export-led growth in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan confirms
the value of two assets: a foundation of high levels of basic literacy for the population,
and the pivotal role of advanced technical leadership for building a modern econo-
my. But precise, numerical measures are elusive when you try to relate the quality
of labor to economic productivity, particularly over periods as short as a decade.
The analyst of such affairs aims to transform rough-and-ready policy judgments
into evidence-based decisions, thereby fulfilling Kelvins injunction. The World
Bank, for instance, in its annual Development Reports during the early 1990s, has
collected data pertinent to understanding the elements of the development process.
Still, many deep questions do not yet yield convincing quantitative answers.
For example, how much economic growth can be attributed to the results of re-
search and development? The MIT economist Robert M. Solow, a pioneer in the study
of the quantitative effects of technological change, concluded that technical advance
was more important than changes in capital or labor during the growth of the U.S.
economy in the first half of the twentieth century. Another American economist,
Edward Denison, estimated that fully 20 percent of U.S. economic growth in the 1940s
and 1950s stemmed from research and development. And the economist Edwin Mans-
field of the University of Pennsylvania reckoned that the social rate of return (ben-
efits broader than the ones that accrue directly to an innovating firm or industry) was
as high as 28 percent. My working hypothesis is that such assessments are sound.
But controversy remains. Experts disagree about definitions and methods in eco-
nomic models, as well as about the implications of those models for formulating work-
able options about future investment policy in research and development. Kelvin would
be frustrated, because even the most searching quantitative reviews continue to expose
huge gaps in knowledge. Yes, there is a science of how to mesh science and technol-
ogy with the economy. But it is a young science, and the analytical lacunas are painful.
To any group of scientists and engineers seeking funds budget officers pose the ques-
tions: How much is enough? What are the benchmarks? In any nation weighing its in-
vestment in research and development economic officials pose the challenges: How long
will it take? What fraction of the results can be exploited for the national advantage? For
the world as a whole, is the idea of research as a public good so compelling that all
nations must share the burden of deepening the reservoirs of knowledge? If so, what
sharing makes sense, and how can taxpayers and stockholders justify the investment?
The New York Academy of Sciences is contributing to the analysis and debate
of those important questions. The health of the research enterprise, as well as the
economic prospects of all nations, depends on gathering fresh insights that meet