For hundreds of years medieval Islamic cities were fertile centers of learning. Wealthy, powerful patrons supported scholars and scientific thought flowered. In Cairo, al-Haytham explored the properties of light and founded the field of optics. In Cordoba, renowned physician al-Zahrawiinvented many surgical techniques and tools still in use today. And in Baghdad, the mathematician, astronomer, and geographer al-Khwarizmi greatly advanced algebra and other basic tenets of mathematics.
Between 800 and 1200 A.D., Arabic was the language in which most works on philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astronomy and geography were written, works that serve as the foundation for modern science. Contemporary scientists and scholars may find these writings useful in a new way: the centuries-old scientific works could help bridge the widening cultural divide between East and West.
A Cross-Cultural Dialogue
Members of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) met this January to mark the publication of a special issue of the journal Technology and Society entitled “Scientists, War and Diplomacy: European Perspectives.” Journal author Alexander Keynan proposed a framework for a cultural dialogue between intellectuals of the two worlds –– a multiyear collaboration that would result in “a comprehensive, in-depth study of Islamic science in the several centuries during which it flourished.”
Such a project could be beneficial in a number of ways, says Keynan, a former scientific advisor to the Israeli government and an expert in international scientific relations. Under its auspices, Islamic and Western scholars could come together “in a creative, cooperative environment conducive to mutual understanding.” In addition, he said, “Western initiative in establishing such a program will send a strong message of appreciation and a willingness to pay tribute to the contributions of the East.”
Alexander Keynan
The project would focus on archives of original writings from the 9th to 12th centuries, many of which never have been explored. “In Toledo, in Morocco and other places are many manuscripts –– thousands from this period, many of them dealing with science –– that never have been opened,” Keynan said.
A Scholarly Endeavor
To locate, catalogue, Translate and analyze these works would be a large-scale scholarly endeavor requiring the contributions of both Islamic and Western scientists, librarians, translators, historians of science –– and people who know Arabic, Greek and Latin. Those heading the project, he added, must be knowledgeable in all of these fields.
Keynan and others at the meeting acknowledged a number of potential roadblocks to the project’s success, including the difficulty in locating people with the interest and expertise in these fields. But many at the meeting agreed that the proposal is a worthy one and that the pitfalls need not stand in the way.
When Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman showed that the ribozyme, a form of RNA, could act in the same manner as a protein catalyst, i.e. enzyme, origin-of-life theorists believed the central piece of the puzzle of life had been found.
Enzyme creation normally requires RNA- or DNA-type templates, but these nucleotides themselves need enzymes to function. If RNA could be cut and spliced without the aid of proteins, however, there was a basis for self-replication: RNA molecules assisting each other, and eventually evolving into life as we know it.
The concept of a primordial replicator is at the center of most origin theories. So it seemed only a matter of time before researchers would show how the components of RNA became available under prebiotic conditions, and how they connected up.
But it has proven far from easy, and most researchers now agree that RNA itself is too complex and fragile to have formed entirely from abiotic processes. They are now looking for a simpler replicator, a pre-RNA, with RNA coming on the scene later.
Nonetheless, some scientists, including nucleic acid chemist Robert Shapiro of New York University, are convinced that this whole approach is misguided. Making his case before audience at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) in February, Shapiro pointed to a growing number of skeptics who wonder if life started with a replicator at all.
At Least 3.5 Billion Years Old
It’s too difficult to conceive, Shapiro said, of all these sensitive organic ingredients coming together, hanging together and creating a replicator complex enough to build proteins –– and eventually cells –– under the earth’s early conditions. And, given the evidence that cellular life on earth is at least 3.5 billion years old, less time was available than once was imagined.
If one were to put pre-RNA ingredients together in a laboratory, without the helping hand of a chemist, and cook them with the other chemicals that were likely present on the early earth, Shapiro said, the outcome would be “a tarry mess.” It would be a near-miracle for these components to come together spontaneously to form a functioning replicator.
Shapiro prefers the work of a growing number of researchers looking at the possibility that small organic and inorganic molecules could organize themselves into self-catalyzing metabolic webs. These webs could recruit components into an increasingly complex organic matrix of reactions, and the simple compartments that held them could reproduce by the simple act of splitting. If a suitable energy source were available to drive the process, such systems could have multiplied and evolved. Accurate residue-by-residue replication would be an advance that was introduced later in evolution.
Primordial Laboratories
Günter Wächtershäuser has formulated scenarios involving molecular adhesion on the surface of iron pyrite, drawing chemicals such as iron, nickel and sulfur, and energy from deep sea vents. David Deamer, Doron Lancet and others have proposed that the chemistry of lipid vesicles –– growing and splitting and carrying around water and small molecules –– could have been the environment. These “little bags of dirty water” might have been primordial laboratories for the emergence of early life.
Shapiro urged support for these new ideas, many testable in the laboratory. He also urged support for space missions that might find environments that harbor, or once harbored, primordial life. We might glimpse this process at work, he suggested, or find evidence of primitive life forms. Most important, says Shapiro, we might prove that the emergence of life from non-living conditions is natural and common, that self-organizing principles exist in prebiotic chemistry.
Dr. Shapiro has written acclaimed books on this topic for the general reader, including, most recently, Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth.
New York artist Frank Moore is a man of fancies and facts turned into magic. His paintings –– as visionary as they are realistic –– address contemporary ecological and biological issues with intensity, austerity, and wit; often with a sense of political morality.
Moore’s interest in and knowledge of science grew from being immersed in nature and environmental concerns as a child and adolescent. After being diagnosed with HIV in the early 1980s, this interest was amplified by his personal need to learn all he could about the crisis that befell him. His work –– as exemplified on these pages –– is suffused with scientific themes and symbols that reflect his hope of helping to “preserve diverse life forms on this earth.”
How did this kid from suburban New York, a graduate of Yale whose works are in collections ranging from the Museum of Modern Art to the Victoria and Albert Museum, acquire his scientific “education?” How does this knowledge affect his worldview and thus his art? Here’s what he had to say in a recent interview.
What was the genesis of your interest in nature and ecological issues?
In summers, I grew up in the Adirondacks of New York State and was surrounded by a pristine ecosystem. Over the years I watched that ecosystem degrade and also saw, at home on Long Island, the scallop industry wiped out and the eelgrass beds in Peconic Bay die. That had a big impact on my view of the human interaction with nature. I became a serious collector –– butterflies, orchids, moths, shells, frogs, bird eggs. I just went from one thing to another, learning all that I could.
How did this early interest translate into your art?
By the time I began painting, I had a level of compassion with the natural environment and felt there were aspects of the animal kingdom that were being abused. I was becoming a kind of activist naturalist. There are many ways that the interests of the larger natural community can be maintained or enhanced at no loss to human happiness. As a painter, I see myself as providing a visual form for people to reflect on what their relationship with nature is and how they feel about such issues as genetic engineering, our use of chemicals and fossil fuels, pollution, and our relationship with technology.
You’ve said that the ecological crisis and the AIDS crisis are related. How is that?
I believe you cannot have healthy people in an unhealthy environment and you can’t have a healthy environment where unhealthy –– greedy, exploitive –– people predominate. In Africa, for example, the AIDS crisis is having an enormous impact on the economies of these countries, how they can handle just housing and feeding these very sick people. This inevitably creates an enormous burden on the ecologies of these countries as well. If there’s no money to take care of people’s health, there’s no money to preserve the environment. When you have a ravaged economy and a society ravaged from disease, you’re going to have a ravaged ecology.
How has your personal battle with AIDS influenced your view of science?
My experience with science –– especially pharmaceutical science –– has been very positive. Genetically engineered formulations have kept me alive. I have some quibbles about the way things are marketed and the way the pharmaceutical industry interacts with the larger social fabric of the world, but on the whole I’m very grateful for the selfless people out there who have helped us all. The AIDS virus is just a virus. It has no personal agenda. It’s just another creature in God’s creation. We need to get over the demonizing of disease, which I believe blocks our ability to understand what it truly is and how it truly operates…and thus how to deal with it.
What is the current focus of your work?
This whole genetic engineering thing is mind-blowing! We’re at the threshold of something that is going to change every aspect of our lives, including health care, in a major way. But in terms of agriculture, what’s going on is more worrisome: How can we integrate advances in the genetic sciences with the overall issue of what humans eat and what we’re going to be growing in the next 50-100 years?
Do you see science and technology as the enemy of art?
I never really conceived of art as being opposed to science. Instead, I see my art as arising out of investigations into the natural world. I think if art becomes unmoored from fact, from some kind of a direct experience of nature, it becomes less interesting. Like science, there’s always a fundamental investigation that’s going on in any great art. And that investigation can be incredibly methodical and painstaking. But so many of the great scientific discoveries reflect a moment of intuitive perception. The guy who figured out the benzene chain was daydreaming in front of a fire and saw a snake grabbing its tail and realized benzene was a ring.
That happens in art, too. There was a moment when I realized that a computer keyboard looks like an ear of corn. So I decided that I would make all the corn in my genetically engineered corn paintings computer keyboards. It was a visual “click” –– that moment when you make a connection. In science, and art, there are probably few “grand” moments, but a huge number of small incremental clicks where you say “what if,” or let’s try this, let’s try that. In art, you may work on something for a few months and you realize it’s a dead end. And that’s what happens with a lot of pharmaceutical research as well.
What is your reaction to some of the recent advances in science?
The human genome project, cloning, stem-cell research are all amazing and exciting –– and fraught with danger. They are marred by the same negative motivations that often plague human activities, but also are ennobled by the higher motivations that accompany human enterprise. It’s a question of how everyone –– the government, society, corporations –– can operate to enhance the positively-directed uses of these advances and how we can suppress the negative uses, such as the development of biological weapons or self-serving cloning practices.
As an artist, I want to inspire people to think about the positive ways new information can be used. I think we all have to work in ways that enhance our overall happiness and reduce our overall suffering. And when I say “our,” I mean every living thing.
As part of the Academy’s continued efforts to advance human rights, a representative recently visited Cuba to advocate for imprisoned dissident scientists.
Published March 1, 2002
By Fred Moreno, Dan Van Atta, Jill Stolarik, and Jennifer Tang
A representative of The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) Committee on Human Rights of Scientists traveled to Cuba in late November to visit the physics faculty at the University of Havana. He also met with political dissidents and provided moral support to the wife of Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a physician who has been imprisoned for publishing a medical report deemed to be “antigovernment.”
In an attempt to access the present status of human rights issues among scientists in Cuba, Dr. Eugene M. Chudnovsky, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Herbert Lehman College, the City University of New York, met with two dissidents –– an economist and an electrical engineer –– who were previously imprisoned for their political views. They are not permitted to hold official jobs, and both have illnesses for which they need medical supplies.
Chudnovsky also met with Elsa Morejon, the wife of Biscet, who is serving a three-year prison term for his medical report entitled, “Rivanol –– A Method to Destroy Life.” The report documented a 10-month study at Municipal Hospital of Havana, where the drug had been given to thousands of women.
In the report, Biscet found that 60% of the fetuses survived the procedure, which is supposed to kill the fetus after the first trimester. He wrote that surviving babies were left to die by the attending physicians. Dr. Bizcet charged that Rivanol was being promoted as a way to keep Cuba’s birth rate low.
Barred from Professional Jobs
Dr. Eugene M. Chudnovsky
Although Morejon was Chief Nurse at the Havana Hospital of Endocrinology prior to 1998, neither dissidents nor their immediate families are allowed to have professional jobs in Cuba. Dr. Biscet is being held in a high-security prison in the province of Holguin, 800 km from Havana. It is a three-day journey from Havana for his wife, who is allowed to visit only once a month for a two-hour guarded conversation. Morejon told Chudnovsky her husband has lost some teeth and is in serious need of medical attention. Chudnovsky said he is attempting to assist Dr. Biscet through a number of diplomatic channels.
During his visit, Chudnovsky delivered a talk on Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling at the University of Havana and met with 20 of the school’s 70 physics professors. He also visited the Institute of Materials Science, which is associated with the Physics Department, and toured the Institute of Molecular Biology.
He reported widely varying conditions at the Cuban universities. Most modern and best equipped was the Institute of Molecular Biology. Cuban Premier Fidel Castro believes biotechnology is Cuba’s path to prosperity, according to the hosts, and the institute does both research and production for hospitals in Europe as well as Cuba. Some scientists there are nuclear physicists who switched fields when Russian support for Cuban nuclear research ended.
Good Research Despite Extreme Poverty
Elsa Morejon
The average professor’s salary is about $25 a month, he said, and almost $4 of it goes to buy ration cards that enable Cubans to obtain 5 kg of rice and 10 kg of beans. Since all apartments belong to the government and rent is 10 percent of salary, he said “most professors and university administration live with parents.”
Despite the extreme poverty, he noted that some Cuban professors appear to be doing good research. “Experimentalists are trying to switch to cheap, soft condensed matter physics of sand piles, turbulence, etc.,” Chudnovsky said. “Their primitive electromechanical devices, interfaced with 15-year-old computers, surprise by their ingenuity.”
Chudnovsky said he believes the American Physics Society and allied scientific organizations should support their Cuban colleagues by providing scientific journals, which are now occasionally sent via e-mail from friends in Europe. He said he also will encourage the APS leadership to visit physics departments in Cuba and explore possible roots of cooperation.
“We are doing everything we can to support our members in Cuba,” commented Svetlana Stone Wachtell, director of the Academy’s Human Rights of Scientists program, “and to encourage our members throughout the world to engage in a professional exchange with their colleagues in Cuba.”
Although he lost many friends on September 11, Academy Member Leslie Robertson is thankful to be among the fortunate New Yorkers who did not lose family members or coworkers, as did thousands of others. Still, the shock and grief he felt during and after the attacks might be somewhat akin to the incomparable horror of suddenly losing two dear children.
For Robertson, now Director of Design at Leslie E. Robertson Associates, Consulting Structural Engineers, the World Trade Center has been a central part of his professional life –– the defining project that launched a distinguished career –– since the early 1960s. Together with then partner John Skilling and architect Minoru Yamasaki, Robertson and his team conceived, and helped develop the structural designs for five of the seven buildings in the WTC complex, including the 110-story Twin Towers.
An active member of the Academy’s Human Rights of Scientists Committee, Robertson was in Hong Kong on September 11 discussing a new skyscraper when he first received word that a plane had hit the WTC’s north tower. Everyone believed that it had been a helicopter or other small aircraft. He then was able to reach his wife, Saw-Teen See, an Academy Member and engineer in her own right, who reported the seriousness of the event and that the second tower had been struck. He rushed to his room to prepare for a return to New York.
The Structural Strength of the Towers
After turning on the TV and registering the shock of witnessing the dreaded images of death and destruction taking place, Robertson said his memory of the following hours are somewhat blurred. “You wanted to reach out and stop it,” he recalled, “but there was nothing you could do.”
Although he’s still plagued with thoughts about “what we might have done differently,” Robertson acknowledged in an interview that –– as many Members and other colleagues have told him –– the structural strength of the towers allowed them to stand long enough for perhaps 25,000 occupants to escape after each of the Boeing 767 aircraft crashed into them. The north tower was struck between the 94th and 99th floors at 8:45 a.m. and did not collapse until 10:28 a.m.; the south tower, which was impacted at a lower level, between the 78th and 84th floors, was the first to collapse, at 9:59 a.m., 53 minutes after the second aircraft struck.
“When I started work on this project, the tallest building I’d worked on had only 22 floors,” Robertson said. “The WTC engineering was a first of a new kind of high-rise building.” Aware of the military aircraft that hit the Empire State Building in a dense fog in 1945, Robertson said, “I thought we should consider the structural integrity that would be needed to sustain the impact of a (Boeing) 707 –– the largest aircraft at that time.”
Achieving Structural Strength
Leslie Robertson
Robertson added, “We didn’t have suicidal terrorists in mind.” Rather, he was considering an accident, a 707 flying at low speed, most likely lost in a dense fog. To achieve the structural strength, Robertson and his team designed the Twin Towers as steel boxes around hollow steel cores. An unusually large number of rigid, load-bearing columns of hollow-tube steel –– each column being only 14 inches wide and set just 40 inches on center –– supported the Towers walls.
Because the 767s were traveling at high speeds, were somewhat larger than 707s and each carried about 80 tons of jet fuel, Robertson said, “the energy that was absorbed by the impact was not less than three-times, and probably as much as six-times greater than the impact we had considered.
“The idea that someone might plant a plastic explosive or the like somewhere in the structure was considered in the design. The structure was redundant –– two-thirds of the columns on one face of each of the two towers were removed (by the aircraft) and yet the buildings were able to stand. But it was the combination of the impact from the speeding aircraft and the burning jet fuel –– both the kinetic and petrochemical energy released –– that ultimately brought them down.”
Impact on Future Design
Robertson said he doubts that the attacks will have a major impact on the structural design of new tall structures. “If you design buildings as fortresses that can withstand anything, then the terrorists will just avoid the fortresses,” he said. “There are plenty of other, smaller buildings that could be targets, and the threat of chemical or biological weapons is an even greater concern.
“Structural engineering is applied science. If a ceiling sags or a lobby is too drafty, life goes on. But structural reliability has been high; building collapses are rare. When they do occur, they’re usually caused by natural events –– wind or water or the ground shaking. I don’t believe we should engineer against the kind of event that happened on September 11, much less the impact and fire that could be created by the much larger Boeing 747 or the new AirBus 380.”
Robertson concluded that the solution lies in confronting the root causes of hatred among mankind: “There’s no end to the number of ways that man can do harm to man.”
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks there’s been more emphasis on protecting public places and tracking terror threats. But what are the ethics of this?
Published January 1, 2002
By Fred Moreno, Dan Van Atta, Jill Stolarik, and Jennifer Tang
Picture yourself living each day under the watchful eye of a network of surveillance cameras that track your movements from place to place. Every time you enter a large building or public space, your facial features are compared with those in a database of known criminals and terrorists. Do you feel safer knowing that someone, somewhere is watching?
This may sound farfetched, or something out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, but closed circuit TVs (CCTVs) –– like those being widely used in the United Kingdom –– and facial recognition systems are just two of the many well developed technologies the government and private companies are considering to bolster security. The Pentagon issued a request for new security proposals in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and, already, new anti-terrorism laws have expanded the government’s surveillance powers.
Complex technological security measures are “coming on faster than lawmakers and the public can process and evaluate them,” said Susan Hassler, editor-in-chief of the IEEE Spectrum and moderator of a recent media briefing on surveillance technology at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy). Sponsored by the Academy and the IEEE Spectrum, the briefing mirrored the debate now being waged in the Congress, the Pentagon, the media –– and on the streets.
A New Manhattan Project
To sift through the myriad security ideas, Michael Vatis, director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth College, issued “a clarion call for a new Manhattan Project.” Vatis proposed that security experts from industry, academia and government be asked to assess and recommend available surveillance technologies.
“I urge that we develop a mechanism to bring together expertise from across different fields to develop a research and development agenda to counter the threats now facing us,” Vatis said. Such an effort is even more urgent in light of the Pentagon’s recently published security technology “wish list,” he added. Biometrics, a technology used for analysis and quantification of the physical features of an individual, is already “on the radar” of law enforcement and airport security companies.
Biometrics, a technology used for analysis and quantification of the physical features of an individual, is already “on the radar” of law enforcement and airport security companies. Facial recognition is one aspect of biometrics that could be deployed in counter-terrorism efforts. “The cornerstone of our defense against crime and terror is our ability to identify and deter those who pose a threat to public safety,” said Joseph Atick, chairman and CEO of the Visionics Corp., a leader in the biometrics field.
Atick said facial recognition systems could be used in airports. As passengers pass through security gates, the systems could capture an image of each face, analyze its features and produce a unique, 84-byte computer code to describe it.
Vatis said this technology is an adjunct to security measures already in place such as X-rays, bag checks and metal detectors. Unlike a person scanning a crowd, he said, this technology “delivers security in a non-discriminatory fashion — free of prejudices.”
Increasingly Pervasive and Invasive Surveillance
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he was troubled not only by the specter of increasingly pervasive and invasive surveillance technologies, but also by the danger that government and industry leaders could, under pressure to act, invest in technologies that don’t work and instead provide a false sense of security. “As we look at any technology that may be introduced into society, we have to ask: Does it improve security? How much does it threaten our liberties? And do the benefits outweigh the risks?”
While facial recognition systems may or may not ever be implemented widely, we can look across the Atlantic to study the effects of a surveillance technology that’s been adopted with enthusiasm. Over the past decade, Britons have welcomed the installation of CCTVs in public places, work spaces and homes. Estimates are that some 2 million CCTVs are now scattered throughout the country, said Stephen Maybank, of the department of computer science at the University of Reading in the U.K.
The British fervor for CCTV comes from the belief that the cameras deter criminal activity, a contention that some studies support. The London Underground alone is laced with 4,000 cameras, and the sheer numbers of CCTVs pose problems: how does one store all the data and how can one find a particular image amongst all the data that’s stored?
Better and Cheaper Cameras
Improvements are coming in CCTV technology that will further encourage their use, said Maybank. “Cameras are becoming better and cheaper; they will soon work on low power and will be easy to install –– some are reduced to the size of a thumb. Software for people-tracking and behavior recognition also is improving. And large, coordinated camera networks are coming that will enable the analysis and description of people as they move over large areas.”
Closer to home and on a much smaller scale, anecdotal reports about CCTVs point to drawbacks in their use as crime stoppers. Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government, reported that some residents and shopkeepers on the perimeter of New York City’s Washington Square Park believe the installation of CCTVs in the park simply pushed crime to the fringes of the areas.
New ideas will continue to emerge on how best to protect ourselves from future threats. Government’s challenge will be to select the best of the alternatives, technologies that pose the least threat to our civil liberties, and to knit them together to form an invisible shield –– without creating a technological version of the Emperor’s new clothes.
We are living in “the golden age of cosmology” as scientists and engineers continue to learn more about the universe’s origin that led to us being here today.
Published January 1, 2002
By Fred Moreno, Dan Van Atta, Jill Stolarik, and Jennifer Tang
We’re all familiar with the Big Bang theory –– the most widely known model explaining the evolution of the universe. According to this standard model, the universe began some 1,010 to 1,515 billion years ago in a hot, dense state where particles were rapidly expanding and cooling. As the universe cooled, matter congealed to forms stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Today the universe continues to expand, and at an accelerating rate.
But what sparked the “bang” of the Big Bang? What circumstances existed just prior to this nascent event to trigger the birth of the modern universe? The answers to these questions may lie in another scenario about the origins of the universe –– the inflationary model –– proposed by Alan H. Guth.
Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described his model at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) in October. The event, “Inflationary Cosmology and the Accelerating Universe,” was jointly hosted by the Academy and the M.I.T. Alumni Club.
An Inflating Cosmos
The notion of an inflating cosmos, which has received substantial support in the last two decades, may explain many of the mysteries of the universe: its enormity, its uniformity, why it began so extraordinarily close to its critical density and why it is considered geometrically “flat.” It even offers a possible explanation for the origin of essentially all matter and energy in the observable universe –– no small feat.
Guth noted that the Big Bang model does not explain the “bang” itself, but rather its aftermath. “Inflation provides a prehistory, a possible explanation for what happened before the Big Bang. Moreover, the same force that was responsible for triggering inflation billions of years ago is still at work, causing our universe to continue to swell in size at a rate faster than ever before.”
According to the inflationary model, the initial matter of the universe could have been a billion times smaller than a single proton. This patch of matter grew exponentially, doubling and redoubling in size every 10-37 seconds, but its density remained the same and energy was conserved. At this point, Guth explained, gravity was “turned on its head.” A repulsive gravitational field arose, the opposite of what we know as gravity here on Earth — a force that repelled, rather than attracted matter. This initial inflationary period was blindingly fast, lasting only a tiny fraction of a second.
The repulsive gravitational field was highly unstable, however, and decayed much like a radioactive substance. It then erupted, releasing energy and creating the hot primordial soup of particles that is thought to have existed at the moment of the Big Bang.
Cooled Too Quickly
According to the Big Bang model, the universe cooled too quickly to explain current uniformity, the even distribution of stars and galaxies. The theory of inflation gives us a way to understand it, since the universe during inflation was small enough to distribute its contents uniformly. Cosmic radiation is also remarkably uniform, the same intensity to about 1 part in 100,000. The inflationary theory received a further boost in 1992 when the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) found enough tiny variations, or “ripples,” in this uniformity to explain how, despite inflation and overall uniformity, there could still be local distribution of matter into stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, interspersed with patches of empty space.
The inflationary model may also explain the geometric “flatness” of the universe, a universe critically balanced between eternal expansion and eventual collapse. At one second after the Big Bang the critical mass density was apparently very close to a value of one, which would be an inexplicable coincidence without inflation. Guth’s theory shows that unlimited inflation can take any curved surface and make it appear flat, thus providing a general principle for explaining a phenomenon that is at the same time consistent with astronomical observations.
Recent observations of distant supernovae lend further support to Guth’s inflationary model. Astronomers measure changes in the expansion rate of the universe by using supernovae type Ia explosions as “standard candles.” By observing that these supernovae are appearing dimmer — and therefore moving farther away — they’ve determined to their great surprise that the rate of expansion in the universe today is actually larger than it was five billion years ago.
Repulsive Gravity
Guth attributes this once again to repulsive gravity. “So the universe today is not slowing down under the influence of gravity, which is what everybody had thought previously,” he said, “but in fact is actually speeding up in its expansion rate.”
Inflation is certainly not the answer to all of the questions about the origins and future of the universe. For one thing, some of the tenets of the model may be at odds with the uncertainty principles of quantum physics. But the coming together of cosmology and particle physics, coupled with new data generated from recording devices such as COBE, give astrophysicists great reason for excitement. Concluded Guth, “We are living in the golden age of cosmology.”
On September 24, in a cheerful ceremony as part of the Academy’s 183rd Annual Meeting, Dr. Robert Lahita received a special award in appreciation of his years of service as a member of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy’s) Board of Governors.
Less than two weeks earlier, on Tuesday, September 11, Lahita was at center stage of a far different venue — a New Jersey pier across from the smoking ruins of what had been the twin towers of the World Trade Center. What had started as a quiet morning making rounds at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he is Chief of Rheumatology, became a living nightmare of burned and mangled bodies arriving by tugboat and ferry from the collapsed buildings across the Hudson River.
“As soon as I heard about the attack, I left the hospital and caught a train to Jersey City, where I’m the medical director of the mobile intensive care units of Hudson County and EMS at Jersey City Medical Center,” Lahita said. Most of his equipment, such as burn kits and trauma materials for treating patients, was in his car in New Jersey. “An EMS dispatcher sent me to the Colgate-Palmolive piers, where hundreds of victims were being unloaded by the Coast Guard and other groups. Had I parked that morning in Manhattan, I might have gone directly to the scene and been among the missing,” he observed.
The Walking Wounded
When Lahita arrived in Jersey City, a handful of paramedics and EMS technicians were trying to deal with the wounded. As the only doctor on the scene, Lahita took over and began treating injuries that ranged from open skull fractures and crushed pelvises to broken arms and legs. Many were firefighters and police officers, as well as “the walking wounded” – people temporarily blinded from the billowing smoke and ash.
“It was the most devastating scene I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “There was lots of blood and a great deal of emotion. It seemed like Armageddon.”
Because the radio transmitter atop the towers was destroyed, Lahita’s efforts to call for more help were thwarted. He immediately assigned specific tasks to everyone working with him. Chairs with wheels were converted into makeshift stretchers, splints were fashioned out of window blinds and, as other supplies like bandages began dwindling, office workers contributed their first-aid kits.
A Scene of Mass Confusion
Dr. Bob Lahita.
After an hour Lahita was joined by another doctor and more medical personnel began arriving. As the 200 most critical patients were delivered to area hospitals, Port Authority officials asked Lahita to accompany them on a caravan headed to “ground zero” via the Holland Tunnel. There he found a scene of mass confusion, debris, smoke, fire and five inches of smoldering ash.
“I saw dust, papers and scattered personal belongings everywhere,” he said. “Everyone was covered with ash and it was difficult to breathe.” Lahita carried boxes of masks and began distributing them to rescue workers.
A resident of Ridgewood, New Jersey, Lahita later learned that 35 people from his area were among the dead. However, he knows that his efforts helped save an untold number of people. “I work best under pressure, but this was beyond what I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.” Nor will the people whose lives he saved.
Lahita joins other Members and friends of the Academy in expressing their condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the tragedy. “The Academy personifies science,” he said. “This is a sad occasion for all of us, as the World Trade Center was also a magnificent feat of engineering science.”
Lahita is a Fellow of The New York Academy of Sciences and has been a Member since 1979. He chairs the Academy’s Conference Committee, which he joined in 1991. He also has co-organized two major Academy conferences, B Lymphocytes and Autoimmunity and Neuropsychiatric Manifestations of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). Since 1994, he has been a Member of the Academy’s Committee on the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Constance Sutton reflects on the lasting impact imparted on her by pioneering female anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Published October 1, 2001
By Constance Sutton, PhD
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead had a profound influence, personally as well as professionally, on the lives of many people. Dr. Constance Sutton, professor of Anthropology at New York University and a fellow of The New York Academy of Sciences, knew Mead for 24 years. Following are some recollections of Mead and her work by Sutton.
A few weeks after my arrival in New York in late 1954 I began working as Mead’s editorial assistant in her turret office in the American Museum of Natural History. (We were working on the manuscripts of New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformations- Manus, 1928–1953 [1956] and Childhood in Contemporary Cultures [1955], co-edited with Martha Wolfenstein.)
I had come with an MA in anthropology from the University of Chicago and uncertainty about how to chart my future. At that time it was thought that women who were married to non-anthropologists and who wanted to have children would not be able to manage the fieldwork necessary for a PhD in cultural anthropology.
It took only a week for Margaret Mead to banish all that! Having said her characteristic “fiddlesticks” to the reasons I offered when she asked why I wasn’t working for my doctorate degree, she arranged a two-year fellowship for me in anthropology at Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor and where I was to work as her teaching and research assistant. (She was the only woman professor I was to have in my entire undergraduate and graduate education!)
Make the Way
Peppered with advice on how to handle this and that, she had said in effect that it was possible to “have it all.” I did my doctoral research on sugar workers in Barbados and she chaired my dissertation committee. Indeed, she gave me support and encouragement throughout the rest of her life.
Mead helped “make the way” for many of us, male and female. She early erased the line between the personal and the professional, integrating an interest in our lives with an interest in our ideas and the work we were doing. It was for her both a mode of interaction and a method of scientific work and theorizing. Moreover, she was remarkably open to new ideas whatever their source.
Bridging the personal/professional divide was also present in her teaching and writing about “participant observation”— the code word for field-based research methodology. She was concerned with giving it a scientific grounding. In so doing, she prefigured much that has become current in contemporary writing on research methodology in the human sciences. Writing against the narrow, logical, positivist concept of objectivity prevalent in the social sciences of the ’50s and ’60s, she emphasized not a distancing of oneself from the subjects of one’s research, but an active engagement that included observing oneself and one’s reactions as an explicit part of the data.
Research in New Guinea
Constance Sutton, PhD
About her early research in New Guinea in 1932 with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, she wrote: “Our sense of discovery was completely combined with our own personal sense of discovering ourselves.” I referred to this aspect of the research process in my university teaching as recognizing that you are an important datum in your own research.
Today this is called “positioning yourself” in relation to the people you are researching. Those of us who took Margaret Mead’s course in “Field Methods” at Columbia University in the 50s remember it as the only “hands on” information we received about how to do field research in a systematic way. Most of our training was about what to research, not how to do it.
Margaret Mead has been particularly well known for her belief in the relevance of anthropological knowledge (and social science more generally) to issues of public policy and everyday life. She drew upon the broad sweep of her research and knowledge in addressing both micro-cultural issues, such as nutrition or breastfeeding, and global issues, such as nuclear disarmament—and everything in between.
Mead strongly believed that if we knew how to ask the right questions we could find solutions. Asking the right question meant understanding that the way a question is asked shapes its answer. Given this awareness, she felt that a great deal could be achieved by putting social science knowledge to work on behalf of human welfare and justice. As this involved making social science knowledge widely available, she committed herself to writing in a way that would make what she said accessible to a wide public.
Public Engagement
Mead’s public engagement and what this kind of public engagement means today are important aspects of her contributions to science and one focal point in the series of events at the Academy this Fall celebrating Mead’s centennial. The Academy is an appropriate site for re-examining Mead’s legacy. She had been active at the Academy as vice president in 1966–72, as a Life Governor of the Board, as a member of its Committee on Science and Public Policy in 1974–75, and as a participant in a number of its conferences.
I want to underscore an important point about this celebration. It emphasizes one of Mead’s chief interests, namely the changing nature of the cross-generational transmission of knowledge and culture (see her Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964). In examining the ways Mead prefigured the kinds of knowledge and the approaches to knowledge that remain of concern to us today, we will be addressing the key issues of how knowledge is communicated across generations.
Advocacy or science? A recent forum sponsored by The New York Academy of Sciences emphasizes challenges teachers face when teaching environmental science.
Educating young people about global warming, biodiversity, the importance of conservation and other matters has become a major issue in K–12 education. Students are taught sensitivity to the natural environment, the potential impact of human activities and the value of conservation. However, ecological science is difficult and complex, and many questions remain open on how we might best understand the diverse factors—geological, biological, economic, societal—involved in natural systems and man-nature interactions.
Some fear that science education is being shortchanged in favor of advocacy, with the promotion of specific policies or practices (e.g., recycling and composting) substituting for a deeper education in the sciences that promotes scientific literacy. In the wake of studies such as the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) that show America’s high school seniors’ math and science skills are superior to their peers only in Cyprus and South Africa, some educators and scientists are concerned that environmental education is yet another field in which students are not learning enough science.
Advocacy or Science?
Is there a way to bring environmental issues into the science classroom while maintaining a strong focus on the underlying science? How does learning ecological science relate to traditional biology, chemistry, and physics?
These questions and more prompted the NYC Science EduNetWork and The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy’s) Science Education Section to sponsor a forum entitled “Environmentalism in the K-12 Science Classroom: Advocacy or Science?” Featured panelists were: Dr. Paul R. Gross, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Virginia, and coauthor of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science; Dr. William F. Schuster, executive director of the Black Rock Forest Consortium, and Mr. Don S. Cook, director of the Tiorati Workshop for Environmental Learning at New York’s Bank Street College.
Environmental Education
No one disputes that K-12 education should offer courses on the environment. The Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, the energy blackouts in California and other high-profile events attest to the importance of understanding environmental issues. Currently, there are more registered specialists in environmental education in American public schools (26,000) than there are in physical science. Most state K–12 science frameworks and science standards documents place some major emphasis upon environmental science.
Environmental education often covers a wide range of areas including: the workings of ecosystems and threats to ecosystem viability; pollution prevention; conservation; waste and recycling; human health; the economics of electric power grids; and the thermodynamics of planetary atmospheres. However, while some stress the importance of teaching environmental stewardship, others are more concerned that fundamental scientific concepts are being omitted or given less classroom time in environmental education.
Gross espoused the latter view. “The fraction of our population with even minimal comprehension of scientific inquiry and scientific claims is dangerously small and the same holds true, on the whole, for our schoolchildren,” he said. “Are those children, in environmental education, learning the basic science whose classroom and fieldwork time has been preempted by it? From what I have seen and heard, the answer is no.”
Preach Rather Than Teach?
From left: Paul Gross, William Schuster, Don Cook
Gross highlighted two factors affecting the quality of environmental education: the quality of the textbooks being used in schools and the level of teacher preparation in K–12 science education. In some textbooks, he observed, “The dominant tone is one of proud advocacy rather than science.” Although Gross agrees that the existence of serious environmental concerns warrant the inclusion of environmental science in the curriculum, he fears environmentalism in the science classroom may promote an activist mentality in students while failing to teach them the scientific complexity surrounding environmental issues.
He noted that only one out of five science teachers at the middle-school level have ever taken a college physical science course. For teachers who have not been adequately prepared to teach science education, it may be easier for them to “preach rather than teach.”
In addition, Gross believes that environmental education should focus on environmental science. He defined environmental science as an applied science, that is grounded in facts, concepts, and techniques from basic sciences and mathematics. “You cannot have a useful, serious notion of the scientific or even the economic issues of global climate change, historical and current, without a reasonable background in the physics of heat and energy, the elementary thermodynamics of gases, and the elements of geology,” he said.
Environmental Stewardship
While Schuster agrees that advocacy should not replace basic science teaching, he believes environmental literacy should be an integral component of scientific literacy. “From scientific studies, we know we are substantially changing the makeup of our planet’s atmosphere. The quality and availability of water is severely compromised in many areas and human activities are causing one of the biggest episodes of extinction in our planet’s history. These are serious matters and ones that deserve to come under the microscope of scientific research and teaching,” he said.
As executive director of the Black Rock Forest Consortium, an organization that operates a nature preserve 50 miles north of New York City, he has led and overseen outdoor forest experiences for thousands of pre-college students. In his experience, most students enjoy nature field studies and seem to thrive in a classroom “without walls.” He noted that “interest in organisms and their environment often leads not just to knowledge but also to care, respect and even love for these ecosystems. These feelings may naturally engender what is typically considered environmentalism.”
Schuster believes there is more value in holistic science and nature studies than Gross, however, and sees it as a valid way to introduce K–12 students to the scientific world. “Science education should put an emphasis on an active process of inquiry as opposed to an inert body of information to be memorized,” he added. However, he cautioned that classroom lessons and field experiences complement each other and are both necessary to give students “a well-rounded education that includes scientific and environmental understanding, as well as knowledge about human social systems so that they will have the tools they need to make informed, responsible decisions on the environment.”
Experiential Learning
While Cook agreed with Gross’ assessment that science education in the U.S. needs to be improved, his focus was on making science more accessible to students and the importance of experiential learning. He believes that students need to actively engage in subject matter in order to understand it. In order to give students a basis for learning more complex concepts, scientific experiences should begin with phenomena described in everyday language before introducing terminology used by scientists. “We need to rethink the roles of language and experience in the education of non-scientists,” he said.
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