The University of Arizona

NEW FRONTIERS THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA BY CARLE HODGE IN SCIENCE

One day last summer, a University of Arizona zoologist greeted a fellow faculty member for the first time. Had it occured amid the palm-canopied campus at Tucson, where enrollment now exceeds eighteen thousand students, their introduction would have been commonplace, of course. But they met in Paris. A colleague was at the moment, moreover, busily determining the magnetic direction of rocks in Japan, while another had returned from Fiji on an ethnographic mission. Still others from the same institution could have been observed at the ornate Hotel Ukraine in Moscow. Within a few weeks, two anthropologists and a tree-ring researcher, all of whom had flown from Spain, appeared in the Soviet capital, along with an atmospheric physicist. A young graduate student, meanwhile, prepared to depart the States for Antarctica to look into the incredible diving prowess of Weddell seals, and Dr. Gerard Peter Kuiper hurried triumphantly to an international astronomical gathering in Germany. He carried the freshly-printed photographs made of the moon by Ranger VII. Although our travelogue follows merely a fraction of the peregrinations of the season, it does not suggest that no one was left to mind matters at the University in Tucson. No fewer than four-hundred and fifty separate scientific endeavors were underway at home, in fact. They were as disparate in concept as the banding of bats, a creature whose migratory patterns are of concern to public health officials, and the devising of detectors that will sniff out and identify gases in the tenuous atmospheres of other planets. What the summer's odysseys did reflect, to employ a term the scholars themselves would abhor, was status. Among the measures of success in science is the frequency with which participants are summoned elsewhere to further their investigations, to confer with people in their fields or to report at learned meetings.

Few men know the moon as Gerard Kuiper does. Because of perhaps fortuitous circumstances, the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory director also has heralded widely the scientific eminence attained by the school. Residents in other regions, according to a legend perpetuated by undergraduates, have tended in the past to dismiss this largest of Arizona's seats of learning as simply a cow-country college or else as a "country club" to which wealthy Easterners consign their young. Neither viewpoint, to be truthful, completely lacks substance.

Understandably, the University takes pride in an affinity for the livestock business and for agriculture in general. Before the first classes began, in 1891, its scientists already were sampling soils and water supplies around the state. They still are.

Methods grew more sophisticated, and the subject broader, but agriculture continues to be a focus for inquiry and experimentation. Only recently, a study was set forth to see what steers eat on the range. The answer was less obvious than a city man might suppose. By emptying their rumens (first stomachs), it was found that the animals sometimes will bypass stands of perfectly good grass to browse on fallen cacti. The scientists had cactus spines to prove it.

Climate can be credited partly with the second or clubby notion. The salubriousness of local weather, a prime asset, certainly is one lure that attracts so many out-of-state students, not all of whom are poor. In the snobbish or non-working sense, nonetheless, it would be wrong to characterize the campus as a "country club." Registration represents an economic cross-section and academic standards are impressive. Science aside, curricula and quality of instruction are outstanding in the fine arts, the humanities and an assortment of others. At any rate, if any visions persisted of the place as a redoubt for cowboys and rich coeds, they must have vanished last August. It was then that Kuiper became familiar on network television, in press conferences and before Congressional committees. This scarcely was a role for which the astronomer, a big, no-nonsense man with a residue of his native Netherlands in his speech, would have volunteered.

But he is "principal experimenter," that is, the chief scientific adviser, for the Ranger series of lunar flights, a responsibility entrusted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As such, he was expected to elaborate on the results once the six-eyed spacecraft televised back across a quarter of a million miles the first closeups of the moon. Whether Kuiper liked it or not, he was a front-page figure for days, and his Arizona affiliation seldom was overlooked.

He had acquired a global reputation long before becoming an Arizonan, it should be pointed out. But finally he was drawn, as numerous men in his profession have been, by the clarity of Southwestern air, and hence the "good seeing." When Kuiper moved nearly five years ago from the University of Chicago, where he directed the Yerkes Observatory, he brought with him eleven tons of scientific books and paraphernalia (the day he arrived, the elevator was out of order) and a squad of associates By these or any other touchstones, the University of Arizona has become, with some suddenness, a beehive of scientific bustle. Federal agencies, foundations and industry invested nearly $9,000,000 in its research last year alone. Such outside support in grants, gifts and contracts (which paid for the aforementioned travel, incidentally) amounted to a ten-fold increase over what it had been seven years earlier. Even the burgeoning enrollment seemed snail-like by comparison.

A romanticist, or a person historically oriented might regard this rise in research in another context: the University was established while Arizona itself remained a raw, uncertain territory. Now, three-quarters of a century later, it provides a crucial outpost on a new and endless frontier. The unknown and the unexplored beckon as they always have and, here, modern-day frontiersmen map the moon and reach for the stars. They build better farm machinery, hark to what rocks and trees can tell of the earth's past and pry at the infinitesimal, innermost secrets of life. Some of them pursue disciplines that were, or are, so pioneering that words had to be coined to describe what they do. An example is selenography, the geography of the moon.

Atmospheric Physics Apparatus In Medical Technology Laboratory

that included English-born Ewen Whitaker, another of the five Ranger experimenters. Both the staff and the problems it addresses have multiplied manyfold since then. Until an astronaut actually alights on the pock-marked lunar face and quite conceivably thereafter the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory will remain an all but unequalled source of knowledge about the planet that once was a twin to our own. The credentials for this authority include the stack of lunar atlases which "LPL," as it refers to itself, has publisbed under Air Force auspices.

Mysterious though the moon may be, and as challenging, it is not the limit of Lunar Lab work. LPL is blueprinting an orbiting observatory and attempting to define with more precision the extent of the Milky Way. Also being readied, to single out an additional project, is a balloon-borne bundle of instruments for analyzing the light from stars and planets. The balloon, bloated with helium, will be sent soaring virtually one hundred and twenty thousand feet above Glen Canyon.

Tools are prerequisite to all this, naturally, and Kuiper has dotted the Santa Catalina Mountains, the range rimming Tucson to the north, with four telescopes. The fourth, installed early this year, was an innovation. Designed expressly for inspection of the infrared portions of spectra, it should prove particularly valuable in detailing the glow given off by planets.

Farther afield, a fifth mirror will be mounted on the island of Hawaii, atop the extinct volcano Mauna Kea. That site posed a note of irony for Alika Herring, an LPL scientist who helped select it. Although his mother was born in the islands, and he speaks Hawaiian himself, Herring had never been there before.

The extraterrestrial fever appears to be contagious. An extra floor, being built onto the University's Steward Observatory, will harbor a graduate program in optics, only the second of the sort in the country. The program is to be a special province of Dr. Aden B. Meinel, the Observatory director and an acknowledged expert in optics. Across Cherry Avenue, to continue the tour, a four-floor Space Sciences Building has taken steely shape.

By the construction timetable, it should open for occupancy this autumn. A glance at the floor plans, however, would convince the most earth-bound of skeptics why NASA Administrator James Webb has said that the U of A and "its nearby area is growing into a world center of astronomy and space science," and why his agency allotted the funds for the building.

Astronomers are only a part of the picture. Room is reserved for aerospace engineers, for psychologists concerned with the human factors in astral exploration and, among others, the astrogeologists who probe the rocky composition of planets. Besides LPL, segments of six departments are to become tenants. There will be an analog computer to simulate space flights and, for research on the reduction of noise, a "zero-noise room" perfectly insulated against outside sounds.

Out of purely logistic consideration, though, one dramatic astronomical aid will not be moved into the new center. It is a recently purchased atom-smasher, and a tale apart. To begin, one might assume from the attention devoted to it that starlight must contain clues of some importance. It does. Any element emits colors that are unique. Therefore, its resulting wave length pattern should be as identifiable as fingerprints. A pinch of ordinary table salt flicked into a fire, for instance, shows up through a spectroscope as a pair of bright yellow lines unmistakably meaning sodium.

So, scientists usually can ascertain what elements helium, hydrogen and the like make up a heavenly body by breaking down spectroscopically the rays emanated by the body. The trouble is, the spectral lines that astronomers detect have by no means all been tied to specific elements.

A physicist at the University, a bow-tied New Yorker named Stanley Bashkin, may have an answer. He has duplicated in his lab light that previously had been noted only in the spectra of exploding stars. His trick is to shoot supercharged atoms (at three thousand miles a second) through a thin foil inside a particle accelerator. The light, or radiation, results as electrons snap back into orbit.

If other researchers are right, and the technique has stirred considerable excitement, Dr. Bashkin could hold the pieces to a number of puzzles, not the least of them the ingredients which went into the creation of all matter. Consequently, the school was pleased to buy Bashkin, who had been borrowing one back East, an atom-smasher of his own and deposit it in a Physics Building basement. The machine was set up behind a door on which someone has stuck a strip of plastic tape, of the type used to mark luggage and the like. The legend on the tape reads: "Stanley's Steamer."

That something can be learned about the enormity of the universe from the tiniest of its components the atom will astonish no scientist, for atomic research has led its practitioners down all manner of paths. Two men in the same building as the "steamer" prove the point. Japanese-born Dr. Carl Tomizuka centers his attention on the places in such solids as metals where atoms aren't, while Dr. Alvar Wilska, who comes from Finland, perfects a device that may make history.

To say that atoms are small is not to exaggerate. A million of them could be lined up on a pinhead, with space to spare. Not surprisingly, one never has been seen. Wilska expects to correct this deficiency through further refinement of his electron microscope. Soon, he believes, he will be able literally to look at atoms and also make it possible to read the genetic code which is packed into all living cells. He has come increasingly close.

Even at its present stage of development, the machine resolves detail down to a twenty-fifth of a millionth of an inch. The onetime physiology professor, trained as a physician, prefers to be known as "an inventor." As a World War II weapons expert in his homeland, he conIn electron microscopes, beams of electrons act as a radiation source, rather than the visual light of conventional optical microscopes. A Wilska contribution was to establish that lower voltages slow down the electrons and allow them to interact with biological specimens. Not long ago, he finished a new filter lens which he says "eliminates fog and improves contrast." He fashioned and discarded, before getting the one he wanted, nine hundred and ninety lenses.

Tomizuka, on the other hand, has gained fame among his conferers in solid-state physics for what, one might say, he knows about "nothing." He specializes in the invisible vacancies that exist in solids where atoms are missing. These defects are worth knowing about because they affect the way atoms whirl around within a solid and, in turn, the way metals must be processed. Tomizuka diagnoses their behavior by adding to metals, and then tracking, materials that hold radioactive tracers, an approach that requires pressures equivalent to the force of seven pounds of TNT. Brought in the lab to a gaseous head the energy is concentrated in sheets of steel, behind sand. As Tomizuka explains with a smile, "we're all hypochondriacs."

An international aura, plus a not inconsiderable intellectual stimulus, has accrued from the recruitment of scientists such as Tomizuka and Wilska, Kuiper and Whitaker, all native to other nations. The list is lengthy and varied, though it could be typified by a chemist from Ceylon, Quintus Fernando. Dr. Fernando concocts atomically claw-like compounds that, among other potentials, might trip up the wildfire dispersion of cancer cells.

Chemistry at the University is, like astronomy, an old field with a fresh and lively step. Consider the laboratory of Dr. Carl S. (Speed) Marvel, a veritable assembly line for new polymers. Polymers are substances in which two or more molecules of the same sort are combined to form larger, heavier molecules.

Or as Marvel has delineated it, "we hook little molecules into larger ones and zip them chemically into long chains." Plastics are born by polymerization; so are synthetic rubber and ersatz fabrics. Since Marvel came to Arizona four years ago, he and the dozen PhDs over whom he presides have announced a "non-metallic metal" and a space-age glue both of which withstand temperatures of a thousand degrees or more besides a turpentine-derived alcohol. The alcohol may be good for the manufacture of synthetic rubber for tires. More will follow from the team, operating on outside funds that total more than $100,000 a year. The latest of these

In Lab College of Agriculture

sizable grants was reported by a local newspaper a few months back beneath a noticeably oversimplified headline. It read: "Professor Gets Job."

As adequately as anyone, Marvel also symbolizes an important component of the new scientific frontier. He had retired in 1961 after a distinguished forty-five-year teaching career at the University of Illinois. As the human lifespan expands, numerous men find themselves in the predicament he did, put to pasture and yet capable of many more productive years. Arizona, an enthusiastic beneficiary of this geriatric bonus, has enlisted some of them.No roster of foremost American scientists could overlook biochemist Reuben Gustavson, nuclear researcher Norman Hilberry, geologist and Antarctic explorer Laurence Gould or biophysicst Ralph W. G. Wyckoff. Each must be accorded summit rank in his own calling. Each has "retired" to Tucson, and is as active as ever. Gould, formerly president of Carleton College in Minnesota, now is president of the august American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Wyckoff was one of the earliest experimenters to venture into the wide-ranging world of the electron-microscope and, with that periscope into the most minute of objects, became in the 1940's the first person ever to see the shape of a virus. He still relies on the instrument for investigations that include the microscopic structures of cotton and teeth. Only last year, he came upon proteins in the fossilized bones of prehistoric beasts. "Like everyone else," he reflected later, "we had taken it for granted that these highly complicated things had disintegrated."

His revelation that they had not long ago fallen apart presages an opportunity to unravel more of the mystery from the story of evolution. As happens often, the finding was a byproduct of something quite different. Wyckoff was scrutinizing the dentitions of extinct animals when, on a hunch, he decided to poke around for proteins.

Electron microscopy, as he and Wilska improve upon it, enhances almost fantastically the ability of a variety of scientific sleuths to watch where they are going. It has enabled Drs. Albert Siegel and Milton Zaitlin, agricultural biochemists, to examine more or less leisurely the "naked," or incomplete, viruses they created by chemically stripping the protein coats from normal tobacco-mosaic viruses. Since the deformed, man-made viruses resemble others that occur naturally, and which circumstantial evidence has connected with cancer, they have elicited a great deal of interest. Exercises along this tack are known as basic, as opposed to applied, research, meaning that there is no immediate utilitarian goal. The only objective is to add to the sum of knowledge. If the data he has assembled help, in the course of events, control tumors, no one would be happier than Al Siegel. All he is striving to achieve, albeit, is to enlarge upon what man knows about viruses in particular and genetics în general.

Neither kind of research is without merit, and at the University they roughly are divided equally. Half or thereabouts of the projects are applied, or developmental. These are the better-mousetrap builders, as illustrated by the "hybrid," or combined digital-analog, computer Dr. Granino Korn has put together and which promises to be the world's speediest solver of differential equations.

Two-hundred of the lettuce-picking machines invented by Dr. Kenneth Barnes and Billie Harriott should be able to harvest every head of lettuce in the United States, and advances of the same sort are legion. Engineers have pinned down improvements for space re-entry vehicles, and are busy on long-lived nuclear power plants that would stay in space. Mining men hope to take fuels from the ground by converting them to gas and then recovering them as liquids.

In no area more than agriculture is the institution's tradition of useful science more entrenched. Farming, and not coincidentally the Arizona economy, have been revo lutionized by the long-staple cottons bred by Drs. Walker Bryan and Elias Hardin Pressley.

And profound changes were wrought on dentistry, young teeth and television by a mild woman named Margaret Camack Smith. It was Dr. Smith, a nutrition chemist, who figured out in 1930 that fluorine mottles the enamel on teeth.

More recently, a high-yielding aphid-resistant alfalfa has been tailored to the somewhat severe requirements of arid-lands crops. There are current efforts to reseed ranges, to improve blood lines and heat tolerance of cattle and to capture and conserve more water. In particular, water (or the lack of it) always has been a target for the Tucson researchers. Some of them are engaged in the compilation for the Army of an encyclopaedic inventory of everything science knows, or needs to know, about the world's deserts as environments.

The school's Institute of Atmospheric Physics wound up, a few seasons ago, five summers of seeding with silver-iodide smoke the clouds which accumulate over nearby mountains, the idea being to see whether rainfall could be wrung out. It wasn't. When the returns were in, it was concluded, ironically, that more rain fell on the days when the clouds were not doctored. Had the reverse been true, Arizonans would have read the news with more relish. Regardless, the physicists concerned, Drs. Louis J. Battan and A. Richard Kassander, were content. They had embarked to resolve some of the enigmas of weather, and in this they succeeded.

This, again, was basic or pure science. In the same category would be the work of the U of A electrical engi neers who measured the size and took the temperature of lightning (it was slimmer and hotter than had been supposed) and the diving-seal studies of Gerald Kooyman. Among the uninformed, investigations like these are a frequent butt for jokes, and a usual question is, "What good is it?" To a Congressman skeptical of the value of the seal project, zoologist Albert Mead replied that it could "contribute to man's mastery of underwater navigation." No rationalination should be required for any research, beyond the obvious fact that any new knowledge is good.

Science often leads into the totally unexpected, for one thing. Dr. Andrew Ellicott Douglass, a wispy little New Englander who went to the University as an astronomer in 1906, became beguiled by the annual growth rings in trees because he thought he could correlate them with sunspot cycles. He never did, although he tried for decades to document a relationship.

But Douglass did give breath and a name dendrochronology to an entirely separate specialty. Tree-ring research opened vistas for prehistorians as well as foresters, permitting the former to date ancient ruins by the wood found in them. The laboratory that Douglass created continues and, among other feats, it declared the bristlecone pines which grow in mountainous eastern California to be the oldest living things on earth. Stunted pines that still cling to the slopes there were teenagers four-thousand and more years ago. Dendrochronology, geochronology (the dating of past events) and archaeology are tightly interwoven and, at the University, all strong. A fleck of charcoal from a campfire kindled by aboriginal hunters was extricated by the archaelologists from a floor in Ventana Cave on the Papago Indian, Reservation. Carbon-dated by the geochronologists, the charred wood was shown to be more than eleven-thousand years old.

Dr. Emil Haury, who excavated the cave, now is unearthing the remnants of Snaketown, a Hohokam village that thrived beside the Gila River when Christ was born. Haury is looking not simply for potsherds but for information on one of the most significant events in human history, the transition from food-gathering to food-growing cultures.

Plants the Indians once cultivated for medicinal reasons, or still do, also are of interest for a far different purpose. Dr. Mary Caldwell is extracting from them, and other Southwestern plants, substances that are screened as possible anti-cancer drugs. The shy, gray-haired pharmacologist came out of retirement to do this after her husband died of the disease. By the end of this decade, the U of A will have a medical school, the first in the state. It will fit, though, into a framework of health-related research already well grounded. Rheumatoid tissue and, for comparison, normal tissue are cultured in one laboratory, and there are many others.

A writer can hope only to distill the essence of research at a facility as large and diverse as the University of Arizona, and perhaps entrap its restive spirit. No single report really summarizes it. The center is abrim with unsung investigators, and always will be. Yet, the adventure of science is such that tomorrow's great discovery might be made not by a Kuiper or a Marvel but by an apprentice now unknown outside his own department. A milepost to this possibility obtrudes from a sandy Mexican beach on the Gulf of California. At the little Sonoran fishing village of Puerto Peñasco, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics is realizing a dream as old as civilization the wresting of fresh water from the ocean. The pilot plant, erected in cooperation with the University of Sonora, is a solar still. It harnesses energy from the sun to evaporate potable water.

The process is this. Seawater heats up as it flows slowly through long, shallow plastic-sheeted heating bays. From the trough-like bays, it is pumped into twin fiftyfoot towers. There, about a tenth of it evaporates, condenses and finally can be collected. The salty sludge that is left swirls back into the sea.

Without doubt the system works; the question is whether it operates with sufficient economy. When projected to a larger scale, the plant should produce drinkable water at a cost in the order of seventy-odd cents a thousand gallons. No other method has desalted water so cheaply, and the sum seems preposterously minor to the people of Puerto Peñasco. They must pay up to ten times that amount for water trucked from inland wells, their sole source of supply.

But to be practical except in special situations, the cost, ideally, should be cut. Carl N. Hodges, the wiry red-head who conceived and carried out the scheme, continually tinkers and modifies, hopeful that he may effect savings. Government grants, not awarded lightly, are paying for his seaside experiments. Hodges first had to test his theories in Tucson with a smaller model. He fabricated it at one end of what used to be the U of A polo field, mainly with make-do materials he begged or borrowed.

There was some problem at the outset with curious neighborhood dogs, until he fenced in the contraption. The dogs would go up to sniff at the heating bays, and their paws broke through the thin plastic covers. Hodges, who is twenty-eight, is a home grown scientist, from Phoenix. And at the time he came up with his calculations for desalting, which could change the course of a thirsty world, he was still a graduate student.