The American Scene; Science Development '59

Good morning, my name is Joel Zanger for the American Scene. We thought it might be interesting here at the beginning of a new year to look back perhaps over the last year and inquire since our show does come from the Illinois Institute of Technology and are just what advances last year brought in the world of science. Now at first of course it occurred to us that this program might take on a kind of shotgun approach and then would result in being nothing more than a kind of lengthy catalog of change. It seemed much more logical and reasonable however to ask our guests this morning to talk not about the whole area of science but rather those particular changes which most interested them. Our guests this morning are two, our first is Dr. Richard F. Humphries who was the vice president for technical development at the Armour Research Foundation of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Our second guest Dr. Norman R. Albert is an associate professor of physiology at the University of Illinois professional colleges here in Chicago and at this point gentlemen I wonder if we might just start by asking what has been disturbing me since we thought about the program itself.

Is this a meaningful question in science? What has happened in the last 12 months? Can you ask that about science? Well you're certain it can ask it yes and as a matter of fact I think it's a very appropriate question. Providing you're not expecting a catalog of I think what the public likes to call breakthroughs in science, startling developments. First of all most of the significant developments in science don't occur in the dramatic way of that Hollywood likes to present of someone getting up in the morning and he has now achieved a discovery and we can date it by the calendar and the clock. These don't happen although there are instances. Newton, have an apple full upon him or Galileo? This is what the books say but and I must admit that for instance the discovery of X -rays became a very significant thing within a matter of months or nuclear fish and became very significant within a matter of months but in general significant developments in science and I think Dr. Albert will agree in his own field this is true

take a long period of germination and I think we ought to put a protective note in for ourselves that therefore all we are doing is guessing when we look back over 12 months we may guess badly. Yes I certainly would agree with that and I'd like to say that most of what I'm going to discuss is based on ten or fifteen years of work and it's only been in the last year or two that we've begun to understand some of the interesting leads that were uncovered in say 1950 or 1949 and that it's if we had been talking in 1949 I'm sure we wouldn't pick these things up they've become interesting in the last year or two but really they had been uncovered ten years ago. I think this happened to be 196 instead of 1960 and we were reviewing 195 I would not have mentioned the work by a man in the customs office in Switzerland namely Albert Einstein who had published a paper at the preceding year I doubt if I would have recognized it or anyone else was being a

really significant one. So that we can in fact state at this point that we are guessing we're guessing yes but it's fun to guess. Well I wonder could we start then Dr. Humphries guessing this year has been any well has been any one problem more pressing than others which has been in effect resolved or at least is on it seems to be on its way to resolution in the whole area of physics which is your fear. Well I think one can even go beyond that in the whole area of physical sciences there has been probably the most pressing problem for the last several years is a study of the solid state. Now it may seem curious to you that by the solid state I mean any matter anything that solid as opposed to liquid as opposed to liquid or gas this I stray this table or anything else we have great ignorance about how solids are made and particularly in the last five or six years the emphasis has grown on this from two point and on this subject from two points of view one is solids that will stand very high temperatures and still remain strong

obviously the missile development has made such demands. The other is solids which have unusual electrical or optical characteristics for instance the transistor is the result of such a demand we're making great progress in that and both these fields. I have one question here that goes back to what you said at the very beginning and kind of in a sense peaks my own curiosity you say we don't know how solid things are made yet on a purely mechanical level of course we have been making solid things for a long time and I remember in well back in college one of the little truisms that was trotted out was that with theology or philosophy is concerned with why science is merely concerned with how. Now clearly we know the how is here is this to say that science is becoming more and more interested in the why of well universe in which we live. I think I would question his truism myself I think science is very much concerned with why it's more nearly engineering which is concerned with how

science wants to know why is steel why does steel have more structural strength than lead we know how how it's put together but why more strength this is the sort of question that is very germane to therefore how will steel stand up under high temperatures versus lead and so on. I'd like to get back to those specific things you mentioned the missiles for example power but I wonder in your field in the field of biology you face very much the same kind of problem. Well I wanted to ask a question first and that is this co -question of solid state in biology one of the big assumptions that has been made for years and years is that we're dealing with a liquid system and that we're dealing with a dilute liquid system but actually we're dealing with. What do you mean by liquid system? Well that most of the intracellular material is water and that anything that goes on is going on in a extremely dilute concentrations but. 90 % of human bodies liquid in the plastic. But in actuality the place where most of the things occur are

in the non -liquid phases of the intracellular matter and what I would like to know is does any of our understanding or new insights into solid state materials help the biologist to understand better what's happening in a non -liquid, non -homogeneous and non -dilute system. I would devoutly hope it does help the biologist although he faces such a difficult problem compared to a hunk of copper for instance that I think the help is going to be very slow coming but the biologist has gained a great deal for instance in the study of crystals. And so the help is coming but it is slow. This brings up the question of the main differences between physics and biology actually. The biologist is confronted with an enormously complex system. He takes courage and tries to simplify it. If he simplifies it too much he loses the essence of it namely the life that he's trying to study. The physicist on the other hand has been very bold

and his simplifications have been very rewarding and we would like to make some of these simplifications and see if we could gain some of the rewards but so far I'm somewhat frightened at losing the essence of the biological material and this I think is one of the big differences between physics and biology. Are there equivalent simplifications in biology to the general laws of physics? Well there's to the general laws of physics. Well I would hate to go on record and say that I don't know a general law of biology but I don't think that there are equivalent simplifications and I think that this is one of the big problems in biology. AV Hill made an interesting observation that namely that physicist got into the Royal Society many years before biologists and his conclusion was that biologists either matured more slowly or that the problem was more difficult or that the nature of the problem required more

experience and this is what we're talking about the problem of making this simplification and the general laws. One interesting simplification was made in physiology and that was done by Professor St. Georgi who won the Nobel Prize for something else but what he did was he took an extracted muscle fibers with glycerol and one would think this would take all the life out of the tissue but in actuality what it does is remove everything but the contractile substance and this is allowed to people to study contraction where you can get these glycerinated fibers and keep them in the ice box for years and years and still study their properties of shortening and lengthening and there to all intents and purposes just like muscle. That's right. They work just like muscle and they have all the biochemical properties of muscle and yet they're not as complicated as a muscle in vivo. Oh do we know anything more about muscles now than we did 20 years ago? Oh yes I think we know a good deal more. Actually and a lot of

the advances that we've made come from the help of the physicist namely the electron microscopy which has enabled us to see more and the biochemist who has done a magnificent job in breaking down what does happen. It's a 10 years ago we thought that muscle contracted by a spring -like procedure or namely you have a coil spring which then shorten when you remove certain electrostatic repelling forces. We know now that the actual contractile protein, actomasin, is made up of two filaments, one actin and one amycin and they'll interdigitate and slide along each other and this shortening process is a sliding process and in the shortening you have the hydrolysis or splitting of a high energy molecule called ATP. Now this ATP gives you the energy for contraction. The rate at which it is split determines the strength of contraction that you get and one could very well ask well why doesn't muscle contract all the time since under normal conditions

there's plenty of ATP present and everything is there and one of the recent discoveries this year was that there's an inhibiting substance made by the microsomes which is another organelle outside of the contractile protein and this diffuses in and essentially inhibits the splitting of the ATP. Let's lead us to the other question then why does it ever contract. All right then you have a presumably when you excite the muscle you release let's guess something like calcium which is bound and this in turn inhibits the inhibitor and then the muscle contract and as soon as the calcium is removed the muscle relaxes again. He's like man whatever been clever enough to design a system like this. I don't think so but I think that it's an interesting system and actually the beauty of this biochemical explanation is that it also fits in with all the physical data that we have on muscle namely the thermodynamic

studies and the speed of shortening and so on. Would you agree that this may be the ultimate success of biology the extent to which it can correlate with physical data with physical laws or I would say that it certainly wouldn't go against physical laws. I think it has to correlate with physical laws. I think that physics and chemistry and biology have to have a synthesis of some sort but I'm not sure that we have the laws at hand or the statistical or mathematical means for dealing with the biological material. Yeah essentially different problem or simply a more complex problem. Is it matter simply refining your statistical procedures or creating a new set of approaches? Well I think that's a question for the physicist. I'd like to say that you're dealing with non -equilibrium systems which what do you mean by non -equilibrium? Well it's a non -study state system where

you may be making protein or breaking down protein or using up carbohydrate or manufacturing entirely new proteins or doing work and the system that has been most rewarding as far as study is concerned are the simple systems where you have study states. So it's a you need a non -study state kind of chemistry and physics. Well I'm sure there are such things to Dr. Zanger's question is yes it's both. It is a much more complicated system but entirely different techniques must be used as Dr. Albert said simplification is very very risky in a biological system. It's very easy, relatively in physics. The physicist has an easier job. He's been added for many more centuries and obviously has made more success but he ought to because of the ease of his job. He can reproduce his experiment in and out again day in and day out. This biologist has more difficulty doing. I wonder kid we've since you're talking about the

physicist and his problems certainly probably the most newsworthy endeavor that the physicist's engagement today is that of the missiles when you mentioned earlier what's happening there? Oh well that's what's more appropriate. The big problem in missiles the two big problems in missiles as I think the public well knows is one fuel that is to get enough force behind a missile to get it up and then this when the Russians have been doing a much better job than we. The second one is to retain the missile itself under the very severe heating conditions that exist because of air friction. Particularly if you want it to not only get out of the atmosphere intact but come back later and this demands and high temperature materials. There has been a lot of work and I think 59, 1959 can be pointed to as making a major contribution to these high temperature materials. These have come primarily from the hands of the metallurgist working with what he

calls refractory which is just another word for very high temperature materials. Now we've known these materials for ever and a things like tungsten, malibranum, tantalum, benedium, chromium and so on. What's the catch in? Why haven't they always been used? Well the difficulty is working with them. They're brittle or they corrode easily and particularly at high temperatures. So the trend or rather the development in the past year that has I think merited some significance is the effort to make these materials more ductile. Yeah so that they can be drawn, they can be extruded, they can be machined, they can be handled. They're not brittle. Is the problem an engineering problem or a fundamental problem in terms of understanding materials? Strictly a basic metallurgical problem of what is causing brittleness and once you know what's causing it what on earth can you do about it. It's not a question of just mixing metals together and hoping you come up with something although we've done enough of that too. But really it's an effort to understand brittleness and on the other side an effort to understand corrosion and oxidation. And I

think some real progress has been made. It's now possible for instance to take an element like brillium which is very light and weight and hence attractive as a structural material and brillium can be machined, it can be treated in a manner such as a well -behaved metal like copper. This is progress that has pretty much occurred during the last year. There is still a vast amount of ignorance on high temperature metals but we're working toward it and I think making some success. Do you think that the progress is hindered because of the tremendous emphasis on achieving a practical end or do you think that it would is helped by this? In other words if you left the scientist alone in his laboratory and said pursue what you will. If you took the general out of the laboratory. If you took the general out of the laboratory exactly do you think you would get more progress or less? That's a tough one. One thing you can't forget the general has money and the laboratories are expensive and so the practical need

certainly results in support for the research. Now you always must have scientists must eat too and they must buy equipment. If there were not the pressure of an immediate application sure this would eventually mature. At what time it's an open question you're considering debating this endlessly. I think actually though particularly in the field of metals that the need probably is very essential before the basic research work will be done. Do you find that in your field in biology there is a kind of necessity to justify the research you're going into or to put it another way and a more favorable way possibly is there a are you being given money for your research in order to satisfy a particular end? This is always a difficult problem in any science I would guess because we all need money as Dr. Humphrey has pointed out to do research and we up until recently have been laboring under the illusion that the granting agencies wanted us to work on things which were very practical. I'd like to say

though in all fairness to the United States Public Health Service which supports most of the research at our university that they're very interested in basic research and this means that there doesn't have to be an immediate practical end in mind. Although I would be not completely candid if I said that I was uninterested in the practicalities of the thing, everybody would like to cure something. Emersonis wants to feel his results are useful. That's right but I don't think that the pressures are as great as they used to be in biology for turning out results today or tomorrow or this year. They want you to work and they want you to work on what is interesting to you and to pursue the things that you think are most fundamental and they have the faith that this will be the most practical in the long run. This is a faith -build upon experience. And this is a faith -build upon experience and I think they're quite right.

I think this can be generalized throughout all the sciences that in general the dispensers of money are becoming a little bit wiser about the need for basic research. It's not the wisdom you'd like to see but the trend is the right direction. I wonder your work with muscles that you described, only this will go where. Well, if one... What good is it? Yes. One can think about that in terms of the problems which are unanswered actually. We don't know too much about how the muscle protein itself is made, namely the contractile of protein. We know that it's made from the, in the protein factories inside the cell which is primarily in the micrissomal fragments there and it's what happens here is the amino acids are hooked together in a way that makes this wonderful contractile protein. I would say that if we found out what regulates this, we would have some clu perhaps as to why muscles do not work properly when

you age or the other end of this argument is the generation of the energy producing factor, namely ATP. We know pretty much what produces ATP and something about how it's produced. It's produced by an organelle inside the cell called a mitochondria, takes the various substrates and it hooks on this high energy phosphate which can be used for various procedures in the cell itself. Have you been able to make ATP in the laboratory? Oh yes, you can make ATP in the laboratory and you talk, actually we can make ATP in laboratory and we can measure very small quantities of ATP in the laboratory. Now let's take a problem like heart failure. We don't know yet whether the heart fails because the energy production is inadequate or whether the contractile protein isn't made properly or whether the elastic fibers in the tissue are becoming non -elastic

but I would say that as we understand more about the controlling mechanisms involved here, we'll understand more and more about why these things are not working and this may give us a clue to reconstructing the muscle or to helping the cell to reconstruct its muscle fibers. This must be useful or hopefully useful in the whole field of a dimmer, muscular dystrophy things. Oh yes, all of these muscle problems would be helped if we understood more about muscle, more about muscle manufacturing, more about the energetics of it. So I think that it has very definite practical implications but when or where these will be solved, I don't know. I wonder Dr. Humphrey's, we can turn back to the physical area. We move from muscles, I suppose, to one other of the popular ideas of nuclear power, power for peace. I don't

think 1959, if we are considering those 12 months, has made the kind of progress in nuclear power that 10 years from now will say, well, back in 1959, we really did something. I don't think we're facing that. The development of atomic power, such as the resident station outside of Chicago, is going along a pace, progress is being made but not startling. The parallel problem of nuclear fusion, this is the harnessing the H -bomb, if you will, is a very, very nasty one and there, in contrast to my earlier remarks, we are really waiting probably for a breakthrough. Somebody is going to have to have a stroke of genius some night while he's not sleeping because although progress is being made, it's not rapidly being made. Now we are doing a few things though. The problem of conversion of energy into electricity without going through the heat and then through the electric generator has had some interesting attacks this year and one of them, for instance, is the so -called

plasma thermocouple that was developed at Los Alamos, whereby electricity is generated by using a plasma, which is nothing but a gas of electrically charged atoms, and heat from atomic fission, that is, so -called atomic energy. These two combined can produce electricity directly without going through the steam boiler, the rotating generator. With loss of everyone, with loss of everyone. It promises to be efficient. Now at the present state of progress, it's not as efficient as our other conventional systems run around 25 -35 percent, and this is running around, say, half that. But this is just the first experiment. It promises to be much more efficient. What about all of the statements that have been made about this magnetic bottle for containing the fusion reaction? Is that not a big breakthrough or not all that you need? We need a better magnetic bottle or a better bottle. The problem is, of course, for nuclear fusion,

you're dealing with temperatures 10 million degrees. You can't contain them with materials as we know them, and consequently, you've got to contain them with something, and the only thing anybody's thought of is a magnetic field. This will work. It doesn't work well as the tricycle. This may be the breakthrough that we're looking for. Some other way to contain plasma is other than magnetic fields. There's certainly not something that's not on, sir, are they? No. No. We can't get metals up to several thousand degrees, and let alone several million. Well, they've gotten metals up to one of the problems with the ceramics, perhaps? No. Can't do it either. No. So it has to be now. When you're up in the midagents of degrees, no material, as we know, material, exists in the solid state. In fact, way under that that becomes gaseous, so at least there's no hope. What we'll have to do is figure some other energy bottle, if you want to use the term, that will contain this plasma, like a magnetic field, possibly. But the magnetic field has its troubles, too. This is a very, very difficult subject, and own progress is only

slow, and of course, the Russians are working on the British, or the French, or we are, everyone's working on it. It may be solved. I wonder if we might turn back to your field, Dr. Albert. Heart disease is suggested as one of the things that is one of the general areas in which your muscle work leads to. What about cancer itself? This is the grape bugaboo. Well, the main problem here, as I see it, and I'm not an expert in this area, is to understand the nature of growth, and what regulates it, because these cells have gone astray, and they grow very rapidly, and they grow to the detriment of all the other cells. I would say that if we understood more about what regulates, let's say, protein synthesis in a cell, we might be able to understand more about what regulates protein synthesis in a cancer cell, and this then would give us, perhaps, a clue as to how to control it, because somehow or other, the growth has gone astray,

and without understanding the fundamental nature of the growth process, we can't really do anything about it, unless we're lucky. And of course, luck does play a role in some of these things, and there have been a lot of interesting fortuitous discoveries. But you'd have to say that as far as 1959 is concerned, there is no single, conclusive thing you would be able to put a finger to. I would say so. Well, I suppose, since we have only a very little time left, I wonder if we might turn to just, well, two questions which occurred to me, and I wonder if, either of you, who would handle them briefly, what are the Russians doing this year? This is one of the ways we judge our own progress. There's a quick answer to that from the physicist's point of view. Lunic II, the missile that hit the moon, Lunic III, the one that orbited the moon, both made good fundamental contributions. Lunic II discovered that the moon does not have a magnetic field, or if so, it's less than about a 10 ,000th out of the earth. This is a major piece of information,

also it discovered and measured the so -called vacuum between the moon and us. This too is important. What about the field of biologists? In the field of biology, I don't think that we know as much about what the Russians are doing as we do in physics, and I think it's primarily a matter of expense. Well, on that note, I'm afraid we're going to have the closest discussion I suppose we could have gone on for at least in the 30 minutes. I wish we had the time. I'd like to thank you both, Dr. Albert, to Humphrey's. Good morning. Good morning, Mr. Jules Anger, the American scene. I hope you enjoyed this program and happy new year.