Planets & Paramecia

The scientists who went there to look around for better jobs called it the "slave market." The official name was the 114th Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Cooperating Associated Societies.

For six days last week some 7,000 scientists milled around Chicago hotels and the University of Chicago. They greeted old friends, bearded professional enemies, drank less than convening Legionnaires but more than Doctors of Divinity. They listened to learned lectures on everything from "Are Basic Needs Ultimate?"* to "What is a Virgula in Virgulate Cercariae?/- When they went home to their various campuses and laboratories, they took with them, like the ships of Tarshish, a freight of sound scientific gold & silver -- along with a few peacocks and apes.

Have a Heart. A high spot of the meeting was a speech by President James B. Conant of Harvard on "The Role of Science in our Unique Society." Conant seemed worried, as most thoughtful scientists are, by the horrifying weapons and powerful techniques that Jacob-science has put into the hairy military hands of Esau. The remedy, he thought, is not to stop research (it can't be done) but to give more thought to the sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) which study Man and his relationships with his fellow men.

The "social" sciences, said Conant, should stop being coldly neutral toward "value judgments." They should take a moral stand, like Medicine, which comes right out and admits 1) that life is better than death, 2) that health is better than sickness, and 3) that the well-being of people is important. Conant suggested that the social sciences agree to a kind of Hippocratic oath which would state as their objective the doctoring of democracy. "The empiricism of the past may be a sufficient guide for the masters of a police state," he said, "but an open society with our ideals requires other instruments and a wider understanding of modern man." Having listened to Dr. Conant and his worrisome conscience, the scientists turned with relief to discussion of objective activities (devoid of "value judgments"), an atmosphere in which they are at home and comfortable.

107 Meteorites. The astronomers, as usual, were full of attractive theories. This year they concentrated on the origins of almost everything near the sun. Dr. Harrison Brown, 30, of the University of Chicago, told where meteorites come from: they are just bits & pieces, he said; of an ex-planet.

The idea was not original with Dr. Brown. Others have conjectured that a good-sized planet may once have revolved in the orbit (between Mars and Jupiter) now cluttered with little asteroids. When the planet broke up (for an unknown reason), the bigger chunks became asteroids; some of the smaller remains stampeded around the solar system as maverick meteors.

To promote this guess into a well-considered theory, Dr. Brown collected information about 107 meteorites (grounded meteors). He reasoned that "all the fragments came from an exploding planet which had a molten core of nickel-iron at about 3,000DEG Centigrade [5,432DEG F.] and an internal pressure of more than 100,000 atmospheres [1,470,000 pounds per square inch]."

For reconstructing the planet he thought had existed, young Dr. Brown got a $1,000 prize for "the outstanding paper" presented to the A.A.A.S.

The Big Push. Another stubborn mystery that got the theory treatment: cosmic rays--the enormously powerful particles that slam into the earth's atmosphere. Cosmic rays, said Drs. Donald H. Menzel (Harvard) and W. W. Salisbury (Collins Radio Co.), may be "accelerated particles" from a natural cyclotron whose power source is the sun.

Man-made cyclotrons work by making electrically charged particles (such as deuterons) circle faster & faster inside a vacuum chamber. On each trip around, they get two boosts from a rapidly alternating electrical field. If the vacuum chamber were big enough, they might move in straight lines and pick up their energy from one long boost.

This is what may happen, said Menzel & Salisbury, in the great "vacuum chamber" (space) outside the earth's atmosphere. They start with the assumption that disturbances (such as sunspots) on the sun's surface send out powerful radio waves about a million miles long which set up "transient fields" in space. These pick up wandering protons and give them a mighty, long-lasting push. When the protons hit the earth's atmosphere, they have enough energy to rate as cosmic rays.

Menzel & Salisbury are trying to find out (no easy matter) whether the sun is really broadcasting those long, strong radio waves.

The Killers. Classical genetics took some punishment from Professor T. M. Sonneborn of Indiana University, who headed a symposium on paramecia.

A paramecium is a minute one-celled animal which multiplies both non-sexually (by simple division) and by a kind of primitive pairing. Several years ago, Dr. Sonneborn discovered that special strains of paramecia give off a poison (paramecin) that kills normal paramecia. The "killers" differ from the "sensitives" in only one known respect: the amount of a substance called "kappa" which they contain.

A paramecium, to rate as a killer, has to contain at least 200 particles of kappa. If it has less, it is a sensitive, and can be destroyed by killers with plenty of kappa. Dr. Sonneborn discovered that sensitive paramecia can be turned into killers at will. He put sensitive paramecia into a solution of mashed killer paramecia. Half of the sensitives absorbed kappa particles, which turned them into killers. Their descendants were killers too.

As a proper scientist should, Dr. Sonneborn spoke modestly of his achievement. But it is none the less notable: he had given his sensitive paramecia an acquired characteristic (the killing ability) which they transmitted by heredity to their offspring. Classical genetics has been saying firmly that it just cannot be done.

* Answer: No.

/- A bilobed or paired organ near the buccal cavity of styleted xiphidiocercariae.

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