November 2000 $4.95 the Future Of

The VASIMR Rocket: Riding Plasma to Mars ¥ AIDS Drugs for Africa

Late-Breaking News CLONING ENDANGERED SPECIES NOVEMBER 2000 $4.95 www.sciam.com THE FUTURE OF

Interactive Worlds Virtual Actors Digital Cinema Merged Media

Established 1845

Cloning and EDITOR IN CHIEF: John Rennie

MANAGING EDITOR: Michelle Press ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Ricki L. Rusting NEWS EDITOR: Philip M. Yam Conservation SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR: Gary Stix SENIOR WRITER: W. Wayt Gibbs EDITORS: Mark Alpert, Graham P. Collins, Carol Ezzell, Steve Mirsky, George Musser, Sasha Nemecek, Sarah Simpson alk of cloning typically inspires speculation and worry about duplicating CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Mark Fischetti, Marguerite people. How anthropocentric of us. Other animal species could benefit Holloway, Madhusree Mukerjee, Paul Wallich from cloning technology, too, maybe long before humans do. As the arti- ON-LINE EDITOR: Kristin Leutwyler ASSOCIATE EDITOR, ON-LINE: Kate Wong cle by Robert P. Lanza, Betsy L. Dresser and Philip Damiani describes, be- Tginning on page 84, it is now possible to clone animals that are on the edge of ex- ART DIRECTOR: Edward Bell SENIOR ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR: Jana Brenning tinction. Optimists are even hopeful that they might be able to clone some animals ASSISTANT ART DIRECTORS: Johnny Johnson, that are slightly over that edge, having vanished within recent decades. Heidi Noland, Mark Clemens The process for multiplying endangered animals—some rare panda, for example— PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR: Bridget Gerety PRODUCTION EDITOR: Richard Hunt is probably not exactly what might have been envisioned most commonly in science fiction. We can’t COPY DIRECTOR: Maria-Christina Keller COPY CHIEF: Molly K. Frances (yet?) just pluck any cell from our panda and then COPY AND RESEARCH: Daniel C. Schlenoff, grow a whole animal from it. Cloning depends on Myles McDonnell, Rina Bander, Sherri A. Liberman merging DNA from a body cell into an egg cell EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR: Jacob Lasky stripped of its own DNA, then implanting this com- SENIOR SECRETARY: Maya Harty posite into a female for gestation. On the face of it, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, PRODUCTION: William Sherman that’s not necessarily any help, because the females of MANUFACTURING MANAGER: Janet Cermak ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER: Carl Cherebin an endangered species (and their ova) are by definition PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER: Silvia Di Placido in short supply. Conventional breeding and artificial PRINT PRODUCTION MANAGER: Georgina Franco insemination would generally still be easier. But that PRODUCTION MANAGER: Christina Hippeli ASSISTANT PROJECT MANAGER: Norma Jones bottleneck can be avoided by borrowing an egg CUSTOM PUBLISHING MANAGER: Madelyn Keyes cell and a nurturing womb from a closely related Paradoxically, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/VICE PRESIDENT, CIRCULATION: nonthreatened species. Researchers hope soon to Lorraine Leib Terlecki be able to point to gaurs born from cows, ocelots cloning could save CIRCULATION MANAGER: Katherine Robold born from South American cats called oncillas, and CIRCULATION PROMOTION MANAGER: Joanne Guralnick species while making FULFILLMENT AND DISTRIBUTION MANAGER: Rosa Davis so on. This approach may not work for all species, but it could help pull many back from extinction. conservation harder. ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER, STRATEGIC PLANNING: Laura Salant PROMOTION MANAGER: Diane Schube So the potential of cloning to preserve species is RESEARCH MANAGER: Susan Spirakis terrific, and yet it does not solve the endangered species problem. In extreme cases, PROMOTION DESIGN MANAGER: Nancy Mongelli it could even make matters worse. SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES [email protected] U.S. and Canada (800) 333-1199, Outside North America (515) 247-7631 ow worse? Cloning can be used to help perpetuate an endangered species. But Hit might also eventually be used, miraculously, to resuscitate a species that sur- DIRECTOR, FINANCIAL PLANNING: Christian Kaiser BUSINESS MANAGER: Marie Maher vives as no more than a sample of cells frozen in liquid nitrogen. Forgive my para- MANAGER, ADVERTISING ACCOUNTING AND noia, but I can imagine a future time in which a land-use developer argues that there COORDINATION: Constance Holmes is no reason to worry about the disappearance of a given species in the wild because DIRECTOR, ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING: Martin O. K. Paul we can always resurrect it later through cryogenics and cloning—whereas we need OPERATIONS MANAGER: Luanne Cavanaugh that ranch land now. DIRECTOR, ANCILLARY PRODUCTS: Diane McGarvey The charismatic pandas, ocelots, tigers and other creatures that decorate ecology PERMISSIONS MANAGER: Linda Hertz MANAGER OF CUSTOM PUBLISHING: Jeremy A. Abbate posters are most important as bellwethers for their disappearing habitats. Hunting and other human activities may target endangered species in some cases, yet most CHAIRMAN EMERITUS John J. Hanley species face more of a threat from the broad, indiscriminate pressure exerted by the CHAIRMAN encroachment of our homes, roads, farms, ranches and factories. In saluting the Rolf Grisebach wonderful value of cloning as a conservation tool, let’s not forget that real conserva- PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Gretchen G. Teichgraeber tion involves preserving the life and lands we might least think to save. VICE PRESIDENT AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL Charles McCullagh VICE PRESIDENT Frances Newburg Scientific American, Inc. 415 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10017-1111 [email protected] PHONE: (212) 754-0550 FAX: (212) 755-1976 WEB SITE: www.sciam.com ERICA LANSNER www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 1 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Contents

November 2000 Volume 283 www.sciam.com Number 5

SPECIAL REPORT 47

The barriers separating TV, movies, music, video games and the Internet are crum- bling. Audiences are getting new creative options. Here is what entertainment could become if the technological and legal hurdles can be cleared.

50 Creating Convergence 70 Digital Cinema Is for Reel Peter Forman and Robert W. Saint John Peter D. Lubell 57 Music Wars 72 Digital Humans Wait in the Wings Ken C. Pohlmann Alvy Ray Smith 61 Moviemaking in Transition 79 Your Own Virtual Storyworld Peter Broderick Glorianna Davenport

Cloning Noah’s Ark 84 AIDS Drugs for Africa 98 Robert P. Lanza, Betsy L. Dresser and Philip Damiani Carol Ezzell

Cloning technology Most of the 35 million might offer the best people infected with way to keep some the AIDS virus live on endangered species the African continent, from disappearing. where drugs that can fight The first cloned beasts HIV are rare. Will the world let born of other mothers these people die? are on the way. The VASIMR Rocket 90 Franklin R. Chang Díaz Rockets used to be of two types: powerful but fuel-guzzling, or efficient but weak. A new design that uses plasma energy for thrust combines the advantages of both.

The Odd Couple and the Bomb 104 William Lanouette

The ﬁrst controlled nuclear chain reaction and the Manhattan Project grew out of the caustic collaboration of physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. Contents

FROM THE EDITORS 1 BOOKS 120 Betrayal of Trust argues that the global public LETTERS TO THE EDITORS 8 health system is dying of neglect. Also, The Editors Recommend. 50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO 12

PROFILE 32 WONDERS by the Morrisons 125 Olga Soffer, fashionista The magic of magnetic needles. turned archaeologist, ﬁnds remainders of CONNECTIONS by James Burke 126 Paleolithic haute couture. ANTI GRAVITY by Steve Mirsky 128 TECHNOLOGY 36 END POINT 128 & BUSINESS Ubiquitous computing: A smart house is a nice place to visit, but would you want to live there? NEWS & ANALYSIS 14 Disposable aircraft collect CYBER VIEW 42 weather data. 14 E-businesses learn about distributed computing from E.T. The Kursk’s ecological threat. 18 14

WORKING KNOWLEDGE 110 Electronic maps find their bearings. 20 How home pregnancy tests work. Better biotechnology databases. 22 20 THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST 112 by Shawn Carlson Refrigerating the desert. 26 Simulating boids, floys and other artificial life. A robot-building robot. 26 26 MATHEMATICAL 116 By the Numbers RECREATIONS Getting out the vote. 23 by Ian Stewart How nature draws spirals and stripes. News Briefs 26 30

Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733),published monthly by Scientific American,Inc.,415 Madison Avenue,New York,N.Y.10017-1111. About the Cover Illustration by Philip Copyright © 2000 by Scientific American,Inc.All rights reserved.No part of this issue may be reproduced by any mechanical,pho- tographic or electronic process,or in the form of a phonographic recording,nor may it be stored in a retrieval system,transmitted Howe and Mac Congrave. Photofest or otherwise copied for public or private use without written permission of the publisher.Periodicals postage paid at New York,N.Y., and at additional mailing offices.Canada Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No.242764. (Gone with the Wind). © Derick A. Canadian BN No.127387652RT;QST No.Q1015332537.Subscription rates:one year $34.97,Canada $49,International $55.Postmas- Thomas; Dat’s Jazz/Corbis (Ray Charles). ter:Send address changes to Scientific American,Box 3187,Harlan,Iowa 51537.Reprints available: write Reprint Department,Sci- entific American,Inc.,415 Madison Avenue,New York,N.Y.10017-1111; (212) 451-8877; fax: (212) 355-0408 or send e-mail to [email protected] Subscription inquiries: U.S.and Canada (800) 333-1199; other (515) 247-7631.Printed in U.S.A.

Searching for Extraterrestrial Life later work and that of Eric M. Jones of Los Alamos National Laboratory, does not sup- our article on the Fermi Paradox port vastly longer colonization times. Indeed, Y[“Where Are They?” by Ian Crawford] my own estimates were based on a simplified failed to mention what may be the most equation provided by Newman and Sagan important rejoinder to it. In a paper pub- themselves in a later version of their paper. lished in Icarus in September 1981, Wil- The only contentious issue is the popula- liam I. Newman and Carl Sagan analyzed tion growth rate required for colonies to be- how fast a spreading interstellar civiliza- come established. My range of galactic colo- tion would expand through our galaxy. nization times of between five million and They based their work on mathematical 50 million years corresponds to annual models covering everything from the dif- colony growth rates in the range of 0.2 to 2.5 fusion of molecules in a gas to the ob- percent. Newman and Sagan derived longer served spread of animal species intro- colonization times mainly because they as- duced into virgin territories on the earth. sumed lower population growth rates, but the Newman and Sagan found that how justification for this is not clear to me. fast the galaxy fills up depends surpris- NASA AND SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE SCIENCE TELESCOPE AND SPACE NASA ingly little on the speed of interstellar George W. Swenson, Jr.’s article “Intra- IF INTELLIGENT BEINGS once lived around travel. The limiting factor is that there are galactically Speaking” leaves one with extinct stars, where are they now? too many planets to be settled and filled the sense that multipath interference is up along the way. A key point is that an insuperable constraint for SETI. Yet path actually magnifies, rather than de- each step of colonization will not neces- anyone who ever uses a cell phone inside feats, the signal intensity—at all times. sarily be directed radially outward from a building knows that multipath can be ROBERT G. HOHLFELD the starting point but instead toward the an advantage. Nathan Cohen of Boston Research Associate Professor, nearest empty target. University addressed the multipath prob- Center for Computational Science ALAN M. MACROBERT lem in SETI with David Charlton of Yale Boston University Bedford, Mass. University and published it in 1993. Called “polychromatic SETI,” it is a Darwin and Divinity Crawford replies: special version of spread spectrum frequency hopping. Unlike conventional thoroughly enjoyed Ernst Mayr’s article. t is true that the colonization timescale is spread spectrum, polychromatic SETI is IBut I would like to note that a “secular Irelatively insensitive to the assumed star- easily detected. It works by having up to view of life” need not exclude divine ac- Letters to the Editors ship speed, depending mainly on the colony six narrow frequency channels combed tion. There is no need to claim that God consolidation time. But the 1981 Newman over a large frequency range, alternating cannot employ randomness as well as ne- and Sagan paper, together with some of their in groups. This ensures that the multi- cessity. Those who pooh-pooh Darwin because of their interpretation of the biblical accounts of creation and On the Origin of Species are generally unwilling to allow for THE_ MAIL other interpretations of the same texts. Of- ten writers who wish to defend biological SETI DOES NOT TRANSMIT SIGNALS; it only lis- evolution against religious enthusiasts end tens. Readers worried about our being detected (one up shooting down only paper tigers, as contingent among the astounding number of respon- well they should. But having done so does dents to Ian Crawford’s article “Where Are They?”) not mean that the case against God is should look to the military and the broadcasting net- closed or that religious thought is invalid. works, not SETI. Besides, the earth is visible through Just as physical science seeks to find and any telescope. formulate a “unified field theory,” theo- Other readers cited historical precursors to Darwin’s logical thought and methods can also theory of natural selection [“Darwin’s Influence on Mod- strive for the unity of all truth even though ern Thought,” by Ernst Mayr], including pre-Socratic there are always unanswered questions— philosopher Empedocles and Patrick Matthew, in his just as there are always unanswered ques- 1831 book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. Evan tions in the natural sciences. The dedicat- Fales of the University of Iowa writes that “David Hume formulated the key ideas of ed scientist does not walk away from these variation and selection in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, crediting Greek questions, and the sincere theologian will philosopher Epicurus with the germ of the hypothesis. It seems very likely that acknowledge that it is not our business to Darwin would have read Hume. That is not to detract from the power and originality tell God how to create. of Darwin’s insights concerning how strongly the biological evidence supports the RT. REV. KENNETH C. HEIN hypothesis. But it would be interesting to know whether he got the basic explanato- Holy Cross Abbey ry strategy from Hume.” For more on these and other July articles, please read on. Cañon City, Colo.

8 Scientific American November 2000 Letters to the Editors Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Editors’ note: OTHER EDITIONS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN n his essay, Mayr does point out that “one Iis certainly still free to believe in God even Sandra Ourusoff publisher if one accepts evolution.” [email protected] Spektrum der Wissenschaft Verlagsgesellschaft mbH new york advertising offices Vangerowstrasse 20 Brave New Genetics 415 Madison Avenue 69115 Heidelberg, GERMANY New York, NY 10017 tel: +49-6221-50460 212-451-8893 fax 212-754-1138 [email protected] find much of the media hype sur- Denise Anderman rounding the Human Genome Project Associate Publisher I [email protected] and its commercial applications rather David Tirpack Pour la Science disingenuous. The immediate prediction Sales Development Manager Éditions Belin often reported from this tremendous ef- [email protected] 8, rue Férou fort is that the major drug companies Wanda R. Knox 75006 Paris, FRANCE [email protected] tel: +33-1-55-42-84-00 will make custom variations of particular drugs based on individual genetic pro- Darren Palmieri LE SCIENZE [email protected] Le Scienze files. I wonder, though, if the companies detroit Piazza della Repubblica, 8 will be loath to develop these optimal for- Edward A. Bartley 20121 Milano, ITALY mulas once the market potential of the Midwest Manager tel: +39-2-29001753 248-353-4411 fax 248-353-4360 [email protected] various genetic subgroups is clearly deter- [email protected] mined. How do companies plan to get los angeles multiple versions of a drug through the Lisa K. Carden West Coast Manager Investigacion y Ciencia Food and Drug Administration given that 310-234-2699 fax 310-234-2670 Prensa Científica, S.A. agency’s stringent double-blind study re- [email protected] Muntaner, 339 pral. 1.a san francisco 08021 Barcelona, SPAIN quirements? And what will that do to the Debra Silver tel: +34-93-4143344 overall cost of prescription drugs? With San Francisco Manager [email protected] 415-403-9030 fax 415-403-9033 health care financing and drug costs for [email protected] the elderly a major political issue this chicago year, I can’t help but think that the in- rocha & zoeller media sales Majallat Al-Oloom 312-782-8855 fax 312-782-8857 dustry—and Wall Street—is a little giddy. Kuwait Foundation for [email protected] the Advancement of Sciences KEVIN COLEMAN [email protected] P.O. Box 20856 Tualatin, Ore. dallas Safat 13069, KUWAIT the griffith group tel: +965-2428186 972-931-9001 fax 972-931-9074 Scientists need to use the wisdom of [email protected] Darwin as they seek cures for human dis- canada Swiat Nauki

Letters to the Editors fenn company, inc. eases. They often ignore the fundamen- 905-833-6200 fax 905-833-2116 Proszynski i Ska S.A. tal concepts of evolution, as when they [email protected] ul. Garazowa 7 02-651 Warszawa, POLAND design drugs targeting anxiety, even u.k. tel: +48-022-607-76-40 Anthony Turner [email protected] though under the Stone Age conditions Simon Taylor in which humans evolved, built-in anxi- the powers turner group 100 Rochester Row ety was a reasonable way to ensure that London SW1P 1JP, England Nikkei Science, Inc. people would react quickly to the slight- +44 207 592-8323 fax +44 207 592-8324 1-9-5 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku [email protected] est rumble, such as the approach of a car- Tokyo 100-8066, JAPAN france and switzerland tel: +813-5255-2821 nivore. These “bad genes” were used as Patricia Goupy genetic solutions by our ancestors to sur- 33, rue de l’abbé Grégoire 75006 Paris, France vive earlier dangers. Most genetic diseases +33-1-4548-7175 are not mistakes but are in fact good [email protected] Svit Nauky Lviv State Medical University adaptations, or else evolution would not germany Rupert Tonn 69 Pekarska Street have selected for them in the first place. John Orchard 290010, Lviv, UKRAINE publicitas germany gmbh tel: +380-322-755856 JAMAL I. BITTAR Oederweg 52-54 [email protected] Toledo, Ohio D-60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany +49 69 71 91 49 0 fax +49 69 71 91 49 30 ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΕΚ∆ΟΣΗ [email protected] Scientific American Hellas SA [email protected] Letters to the editors should be sent to edi- 35–37 Sp. Mercouri Street [email protected] or to Scientific American, middle east and india Gr 116 34 Athens, GREECE peter smith media & marketing tel: +301-72-94-354 415 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10017. +44 140 484-1321 fax +44 140 484-1320 [email protected] japan pacific business, inc. ERRATUM +813-3661-6138 fax +813-3661-6139 Ke Xue korea The DNA molecules illustrated on pages Institute of Scientific and biscom, inc. Technical Information of China 54 and 60 [ July] were inadvertently print- +822 739-7840 fax +822 732-3662 P.O. Box 2104 ed as “left-handed” helixes, when in fact hong kong Chongqing, Sichuan hutton media limited PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA they are “right-handed” molecules. +852 2528 9135 fax +852 2528 9281 tel: +86-236-3863170

10 Scientific American November 2000 Letters to the Editors Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. banks of the Grasse River, which is uti- Census 1900 lized as a tail-race [outflow] for the dis- charged waters. The present capacity is More Americans, More Electricity 75,000 horse power [see illustration].” NOVEMBER 1850 GOITRE AND CRETINISM—“Doctor Grange, a learned Physician of Paris, was commis- NOVEMBER 1950 THE ROOKWOOD POTTERY—“The awards sioned some time ago by the govern- GENETIC SURPRISE—“Thirty years ago the for ceramics at the Paris Exposition have ment to pursue, in France and other age-old question of how living things served to awaken fresh interest in a countries, inquiries into the causes of pass on their biological inheritance to unique institution at Cincinnati, Ohio. goitre and cretinism. He has come ab- their offspring was widely believed to The Rookwood pottery has produced not solutely to the conclusion that they are have been solved. Heredity could be only as artistic ware as ever has been independent of latitude, altitude and cli- traced to invisible factors in the nucleus turned out on this side of the Atlantic, mate, and even of circumstances of habi- called genes. In this scheme of things the but also may be the most thoroughly rep- tation, poverty, and so forth. Their pres- cytoplasm—the material of the cell out- resentative of American ideas and meth- ence appears to be connected with that side the nucleus—was just a silent part- ods in pottery work. Practically no ma- of magnesia found in food or drink; their ner. Now claims have been made that the chinery, save the primitive potter’s wheel, absence often proceeds from the iodine cytoplasm, like the nucleus, houses gene- is used at the Rookwood plant in the ac- which the article contains.” like factors that take a hand in shaping an tual work of manufacture. From the mix- organism’s heredity. Some biologists have ing of the clay to the withdrawal of the SNAIL MAIL?—“We would not have no- gone so far as to contend that the cyto- completed piece of ware from the kiln, a ticed this story, only we have seen it plasm controls all the basic traits of the Rookwood specimen passes through the copied into a number of papers: ‘The organism and the nuclear genes deter- hands of twenty-one operatives.” marvels of the electric telegraph are anni- mine only the relatively trivial ones. hilated, and the means of instantaneous However, most professional students of HYDROELECTRIC WONDER—“Nearing com- communication between man and man, heredity reject this extreme view.” pletion at Massena, N.Y., near the St. at any distance whatsoever, has been dis- Lawrence River, is one of the latest and covered! The inventors of the alleged mar- FALLOUT SHELTER—“The U.S. has been largest of the hydraulic electric power vel have ascertained that certain descrip- presented with a ‘master plan’ for the na- plants, which are one of the most signifi- tions of snails possess peculiar properties tion’s civil defense, prepared by the Civil- cant features in engineering at the close or sympathies. With the snails placed in ian Mobilization Office of the National of the nineteenth century. At the Long boxes, the operator has only to make snail Security Resources Board and submitted Sault Rapids the St. Lawrence River is A give a kick (sic) and snail B in a corre- to Congress by President Truman. The about 42 feet higher than the Grasse Riv- sponding box, which may be in the back- plan, however, places ‘the primary respon- er, a tributary stream. Advantage has woods of America or the deserts of Africa, sibility for civil defense’ on the states and been taken of this fact, and a canal has repeats the kick. The snails of course must local communities with the philosophy of been cut across the intervening country. be put in sympathetic communication.’ It ‘organized self-protection.’ In New York A power plant is now located on the is a piece of French nonsense.”

50, 100 & 150 Years Ago 50, 100 & 150 Years City the Sherry-Netherland Hotel has arranged to shelter its guests in its deep cellars, and a projected Madison Avenue skyscraper has included shelter for 4,000 in its plans.” [Editors’ note: Not, so far as we are aware, in our building.]

NOVEMBER 1900 1900 CENSUS—“The population by the Twelfth Census of the United States, of the 45 States and seven Territories, was ofﬁcial- ly announced by Director Merri- am to be 76,295,220, compared with 63,069,756 in 1890; this is a gain of 13,225,464 in ten years, or an increase of 21 per cent. The three most populous cities are: Greater New York (including Brooklyn Borough), 3,437,202; Chicago, 1,698,575; and Philadel- TURBINES of the power plant at Massena, N.Y., near the St. Lawrence River, 1900

phia, 1,293,697.” AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC FROM

12 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. AVIATION_ REMOTE SENSING Robots in the Sky Miniature unmanned planes called aerosondes are ready to ﬂy for science

AEROSONDE is transported by a pickup truck, which also serves as the launch vehicle.

oint Barrow, Alaska, may not go plane that you can afford to lose, rea- the dynamics of the annual freeze-up down in aviation history along- soned Holland, who proposed the aero- process, an overlooked component in side Kitty Hawk, N.C., but this sonde concept in 1992 with Tad McGeer global climate models. Surprisingly, the past August a group of would-be of the Insitu Group in Bingen, Wash. aerosonde did not see more gaps in the PWright brothers pushed the frontiers of “We look at these things as disposable ice, as reported this year in other parts of flight in a new direction. From an airstrip aircraft, which is a concept some people the Arctic. There was actually much more on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, the re- have a hard time with,” says Juris Vag- sea ice around Barrow than in recent years, searchers prepared their aircraft, an or- ners of the University of Washington, Curry says, which demonstrates how hard ange-crested drone not much bigger than who leads an engineering group working it is to pick out long-term climate trends a great blue heron in flight. The plane to give aerosondes the smarts to navigate from normal year-to-year variations. hurtled down the runway perched on the semiautonomously. With onboard GPS But it’s the weather data from distant roof of a pickup truck before soaring sky- navigation and computing power, aero- expanses of the Arctic, where there are ward as the truck hit freeway speed. sondes can follow a programmed flight few reliable atmospheric soundings by What the 30-pound “aerosonde” lacks path and can accept course changes from balloons or satellites, that has European

News & Analysis in takeoff elegance it promises to make up a ground controller if necessary. Future meteorologists excited. (Weather systems in its ability to carry a payload of minia- flights will rely on a satellite link so that in this part of the world tend to move ture scientific instruments to places where the controller can even be a continent from west to east, so Arctic conditions af- pilots dare not fly. The craft, which can get away from the plane, Holland remarks. fect European weather.) “That’s the new more than 1,500 miles per gallon, may be It was University of Colorado climate re- ingredient you get from aerosondes: you able to fill in blind spots in global weather searcher Judith A. Curry’s search for hard- can move them with the atmosphere,” forecasts, monitor hurricanes, and help to to-get Arctic climate data that brought says Tim Palmer, who heads a research decipher the ebb and flow of Arctic sea ice. the aerosonde to Barrow. There, in April group at the European Center for Medium- The little robotic plane, which entered 1999, Curry put a flock of aero- the record books by completing the first sondes outfitted with meteorological unmanned flight across the North At- instruments to the test. Two that

lantic in 1998, is ready to become a sci- vanished over the Arctic Ocean were ) entific workhorse. Funded by the Nation- victims of ice buildup on the plane. bottom ( al Science Foundation, the shakedown Despite this setback, Curry won NSF flights in Barrow, which took place at up support to return to Barrow and es- to 13,000 feet and away from commer- tablish aerosondes in the Arctic as a cial flight lanes, were the first step in es- routine research tool. The five-year

tablishing a new aerosonde facility. That project began this past summer: two “LINCOLN” AEROSONDE );

site, along with others planned in Aus- weeks of flights to test new instru- top ( tralia and Taiwan, could form the nexus ments, ice detectors and anti-icing of a global aerosonde network over the coatings. All the aerosondes survived. next few years. “I wanted to gather data For the flights just completed in in severe weather events, like tropical cy- August, an off-the-shelf digital cam- University of Colorado clones,” says Greg Holland, CEO of Aero- era in the belly of the aerosonde ARCTIC VIEW taken by an aerosonde indi- sonde Ltd. in Victoria, Australia. To do collected images of sea ice that Cur- cates the potential of the unmanned craft to that, you need to fly without a pilot in a ry’s research group will use to study gather sea-ice data over remote areas. MATTHEW R. ALLEN

14 Scientific American November 2000 News & Analysis Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Range Weather Forecasts, based in Read- lieves that the generally poor European miniature instruments, an upgraded aero- ing, England, that is working to improve weather forecasts during the summer of sonde design and a new catapult device computer forecasting systems. If a net- 1999 could have been improved if more to replace the pickup-truck launch vehi- work of aerosondes stood at the ready in data from the Arctic had been available. cle. She is confident that over the next key areas of the world, Palmer could run He’s testing this hypothesis by rerunning decade aerosondes will become a stan- his daily forecasting models, pinpoint August’s forecasts with aerosonde data dard research platform, especially in re- data-poor “atmospheric hot spots” that from Alaska. mote regions. —Stephen Cole could significantly alter the forecast, and Routine science operations won’t be- then direct an aerosonde to fly quickly to gin in Barrow until next summer, when STEPHEN COLE is a science writer and that area and collect data. Palmer be- Curry and her colleagues return with more editor based in Washington, D.C.

ENVIRONMENT_ RADIATION DANGERS Radioactive Wrecks Sunken nuclear subs pose no immediate threat, but they could be long-term ecological time bombs

any environmental groups became alarmed this past August after the sinking of the Russian submarine News & Analysis MKursk in the Barents Sea. Greenpeace In- ternational warned that the pristine Arc- tic waters could become contaminated by radioactive materials leaking from the submarine’s two nuclear reactors. Be- cause the vessel lies in relatively shallow water—only 108 meters below the surface—ocean currents could spread the deadly isotopes to the Barents’s rich fish- ing grounds. Greenpeace officials urged world leaders to consider raising the submarine from the seafloor. Nuclear engineers who are familiar with submarine reactors agree that the danger RUSSIAN SUBMARINE KURSK, shown here a few months before it sank in the of leakage exists, but in all likelihood the Barents Sea, is one of seven nuclear submarines lying on the ocean floor. contamination will not occur for a long, long time. Although the explosion that cayed away. But several longer-lived iso- reactors’ coolant rather than the fuel rods. doomed the Kursk ripped open the sub- topes could pose a threat when the fuel Some scientists believe that even when marine’s hull and may even have dam- rod casings finally corrode in 1,000 years the long-lived isotopes finally leak out, aged the thick steel walls surrounding the or so. Thomas Pigford, professor emeritus they will settle harmlessly into the mud reactors, the several hundred kilograms of nuclear engineering at the University of at the sea bottom. But other researchers of uranium fuel in the reactors have an California at Berkeley, believes the most caution that neptunium 237 and other extra layer of protection. In U.S. subma- hazardous contaminant in the long run fission by-products could spread with the rine reactors, each rod of uranium fuel is may be neptunium 237, which has a half- currents under certain conditions. encased in a zirconium alloy that is de- life of 2.1 million years. “It can get into A more immediate issue is the disposi- signed to withstand seawater corrosion the food chain if fish or shellfish ingest tion of dozens of decommissioned Russ- for several hundred years. Nuclear exit,” Pigford says, “and if it gets into your ian submarines carrying spent nuclear perts say the fuel rods in Russian reactors body, it can have some very bad effects.” fuel. They are rusting away in Russian have similar casings. The Kursk, however, is just the tip of ports because the government can’t afford Unless the explosion cracked or the radioactive iceberg. Six other nuclear to dispose of the radioactive waste prop- smashed some of the Kursk’s fuel rods, the submarines lie on the ocean floor, includ- erly. “That’s a more important thing to highly radioactive by-products of uranium ing two U.S. vessels, the Thresher and the worry about than the Kursk,” says Thom- fission will probably not leak out until well Scorpion. The U.S. Navy has collected sed- as B. Cochran of the Natural Resources into the next millennium. By then, many iments from the areas near its downed Defense Council, an environmental group of the most dangerous isotopes—such as submarines and found slightly elevated based in Washington, D.C. “Those reac- strontium 90 and cesium 137, which have levels of radioactivity, but the source of tors are sitting just offshore, in a few feet half-lives of about 30 years—will have de- the contamination is believed to be the of water.” —Mark Alpert AP PHOTO

18 Scientific American November 2000 News & Analysis Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. INTERNET_ SOFTWARE links to other connecting segments. A typical U.S. road database contains eight million to 10 million road segments and tens of thousands of “points of inter- Atlas Shrugged est”—airports, museums, businesses and so forth. One road database occupies sev- When it comes to online road maps, why you can’t (always) get there from here eral gigabytes of memory. Once the addresses have been matched to road segments (149 Main Street would he proliferation of online servic- that some experienced users say under- be located midway on the 101–199 Main es such as MapQuest and Map- states the problem. Unfortunately, Map- Street segment), the software calculates Blast would appear to be a god- Quest, which supplies service to many an “optimal route” between the segments. send to the American man’s sites, including America Online, its par- Most optimization methods are based on Tdream of not having to stop to ask for di- ent company, and Yahoo, is not alone. an obscure but powerful piece of graph rections. Today navigational Web sites “There’s still a big difference between the theory called the Dijkstra algorithm, in- serve up more than 12 million maps and state of the art and what people would vented in 1955 by Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, three million driving directions daily, like to see,” admits Scott Young, a senior now a computer scientist at the Universi- and monthly traffic is growing at double- vice president at Vicinity, which operates ty of Texas at Austin. The algorithm cal- digit rates. Wireless personal digital assis- MapBlast and provides the navigation culates the distance of possible paths be- tants, cell phones and pagers are increas- engine for Rand McNally’s Web site. tween the source and destination node ing their geographic reach even further. To generate directions, the online serv- and then selects the shortest one. Imagine But to anyone who downloads direc- ices first transmit the starting and desti- an army of rats simultaneously spreading tions regularly, there’s one slight problem nation addresses entered into the brows- out through a maze in search of the cheese with this geographically enabled info- er window to an application server that while keeping track of the distance they topia: the directions don’t always take locates these points on a road-network traverse along the way. News & Analysis you where you want to go. Common com- database. This process is called geocoding. In the case of a road network, each seg- plaints include nonlocatable addresses, Rather than storing individual street ment is given weights to represent dis- directions that stop short of their intend- addresses, road databases are organized tance, speed limits and other data. Com- ed destination and the occasional geo- into road segments—one side of a single putational speed is also critical, because disaster that leaves you circling the back block, for instance. Each segment is rep- the software must crunch through hun- streets of terra incognita. resented by a string of 256 characters dreds of thousands of road segments for Nick Hopkins, director of software en- that contains its name and address infor- each request while handling dozens of re- gineering at MapQuest, estimates that as mation, latitude and longitude, and oth- quests each second. As a result, program- many as one out of every 20 MapQuest er important attributes such as road class, mers have had to develop shortcuts—for driving directions is wrong, a statistic speed, turn and access restrictions, and example, choosing paths that favor highways over local streets—to reduce the time it takes to calculate a route to less than 100 milliseconds. Finally, the software translates the resulting set of connecting road segments into a narrative that the user can understand, like “Merge onto Bruckner Expressway in 2.7 miles.” More than half of the bad directions stem from user error, MapQuest’s Hop- kins says—misspelling a street, for example, or leaving out critical designations such as north or south. Incorrect geocoding accounts for most of the other direc- tional faux pas. Road databases are generally updated four to six times a year and are usually out of date by the time they are published. Although the physical road network changes slowly, attributes such as turn and access restrictions, posted speeds, and street names are effectively in a state of flux, considering the millions of road segments out there. The databases also GEOCODING computes an address’s geographic coordinates from a road database have inaccuracies, which some estimate network supplied by third-party vendors such as Etak in Menlo Park, Calif. Rather than to run as high as 30 percent. Sometimes store every single address in a database, the software can extrapolate. For instance, it the geocoding process mistakes the desti- can assume that “1736 Eisenhower Street” lies somewhere on the road segment de- nation for one with a similar street name. fined by, say, between 1700 and 1800 Eisenhower Street. And there are the usual software bugs. ETAK, INC. ETAK,

20 Scientific American November 2000 News & Analysis Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Fortunately, most navigation services (Global Positioning System). These “mil- situation reminiscent of the computer in- have processes in place for identifying lion ant” correction schemes are still a dustry in the 1970s, everyone advocates and correcting systematic errors. Each day ways off, he says, but the use of wireless standards, as long as they are his or her MapQuest receives several thousand e- Internet devices with GPS will elevate the own. Formal groups have sprung up mails, which are sorted by an automated service: “If we know where you are and worldwide with names like the Bio- system and routed to the quality assur- where you’re going, we can supply a lot Pathways Consortium, the Life Sciences ance department. There they are reviewed of dynamic information.” He predicts Research Domain Task Force of the Object and forwarded to the software group or that in time, online directions will be as Management Group, and the Bio-Ontolo- the database vendor for correction. detailed and seamless as those dispensed gies Consortium—and each has a differ- Although the Internet has sped up the by the staff at a fine hotel. Of course, ent idea of how things should be done. error-correction process, Vicinity’s Young even the concierge at the Four Seasons Eric Neumann, a member of both the says that the service’s overall 95 percent occasionally gets them wrong. Bio-Ontologies and BioPathways consor- reliability will not significantly improve —Michael Menduno tia, is a neuroscientist who is now vice until corrections can be made automati- president for life science informatics at cally in real time, say, by monitoring the MICHAEL MENDUNO writes about the the consulting firm 3rd Millennium in movement of vehicles enabled by GPS digital economy from Menlo Park, Calif. Cambridge, Mass. (no relation to Millen- nium Pharmaceuticals). He says Extensi- ble Markup Language (XML) is shaping BIOINFORMATICS_ STANDARDS up to be the standard computer language for bioinformatics. XML is the successor to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the current driver of the World Wide Hooking up Biologists Web [see “XML and the Second-Genera- tion Web,” by Jon Bosak and Tim Bray; Consortia are forming to sort out a common cyberlanguage for life science Scientific American, May 1999]. News & Analysis One of XML’s advantages is that it contains tags that identify each kind of infor- magine that your co-worker in the ly so that, to use an automobile metaphor, mation according to its type: “Camaro,” next cubicle has some information if someone typed in “Camaro,” the results for example, would be tagged as a car. you need for a report that’s due would include other cars as well because Neumann proposes that XML-based lan- soon. She e-mails it to you, but the the system would be smart enough to guages will “emphasize the Web-like na- Idata are from a spreadsheet program, and know that a Camaro is another kind of car. ture of biological information,” which all you have is a word processor, so there’s The immediate payoff is expected to be stretches from DNA to messenger RNA, no possibility of your cutting and pasting the faster development of new drugs. proteins, protein-protein interactions, it into your document. Instead you have “Pharmaceutical research is the only in- biochemical pathways, cellular function to print it out and type it in all over again. dustry I know of with declining produc- and ultimately the behavior of a whole That’s roughly the situation facing bi- tivity,” says Tim Clark, vice president of organism. Current ways of storing and ologists these days. Although databases informatics for Millennium Pharmaceuti- searching such biological information are of biological information abound—espe- cals in Cambridge, Mass. “The R&D ef- centered on single genes, according to cially in this post-genome-sequencing fort is at a primitive craft scale, like cot- Neumann, “but the diseases we want to era—many researchers are like sailors tage weavers, although standardization is treat involve more than one gene.” thirsting to death surrounded by an ocean: one of the first problems that got tackled Clark says the main problems facing what they need is all around them, but in the Industrial Revolution, with the in- bioinformatics that make standard devel- it’s not in a form they can readily use. vention of interchangeable parts.” opment necessary are the sheer volume To solve the problem, various groups The issue is what standards to use. In a of data, the need for advanced pattern made up of academic scientists recognition (such as within DNA P17 and researchers from biotechnolo- P32 p sequences and protein structural P5 gy and pharmaceutical companies P30 domains), the ability to process p53 are coming together to try to devise signals to eliminate “noise” from computer standards for bioinfor- P31 P18 P17 data, and something called com- DPI P26 P matics so that biologists can more PARP P46 P4 binatorial optimization, or find- c-ARI A4 P52 P47 easily share data and make the most P16 ing the best path through a maze RPA S6 P33 of the glut of information resulting TF II H P27 P33 of molecular interactions. “You from the Human Genome Project. P17 ss DNA can’t build all of it yourself,” he P29 HMG Their goal is to enable an investiga- contends. DMPI C11b p19ARF P40 p300 tor not only to float seamlessly be- P24 Neumann thinks combinatorial tween the enormous databases of P42 P41 optimization could be the highest DNA sequences and those of the hurdle. “Pathways are a lot more P28 P45 14-3-3o three-dimensional protein struc- PCNA/Gadd45 P44 P43 complex than [DNA] sequences,” Karp1 P50 tures encoded by that DNA. They he states. “If we don’t come up also want a scientist to be able to WEB OF INTERACTIONS involving cancer-related with something, it’s going to be a search the databases more efficient- gene p53 is just one that bioinformatics must tackle. real mess.” —Carol Ezzell ERIC K. NEUMANN

22 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 News & Analysis Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. By the Numbers SOCIOLOGY_ POLITICS working-class whites, thus further boost- ing voter turnout. As for the decline in turnout since 1968, Winders notes that the long-standing Voter Turnout split in the elite group that led to the popular gains of the 1930s and 1960s no longer exists. The Southern planters were galitarian democracy made a militant union activity, protest demon- replaced by agribusiness, which has com- spectacular American debut in strations and an unemployment rate that mon interests with Northern industry, 1828, when Andrew Jackson won reached 25 percent by 1933 created an such as promoting free trade. The decline the White House by mobilizing unstable situation. Recognizing this, the was reinforced by the social unrest of the Eworkers, small farmers and frontiersmen more realistic industrialists and members late 1960s, which divided the supporters in unprecedented numbers. It was the of the planter merchant class split with of civil rights. start of a golden age of grass-roots democ- their more conservative colleagues and Furthermore, the economic crisis of racy, a time when people—white men, at supported, or at least did not hinder, the the 1970s strengthened the hand of the least—were passionately involved in po- efforts of unions and other popular or- more conservative industrialists of the litical discussion. So vigorous was the dem- ganizations to get out the vote. Each North, who allied themselves with indus- ocratic impulse that it survived the Civil member of the alliance got something: trial segments in the South that had long War and Reconstruction, ending only af- workers got better union and social poli- been antiunion. And then, beginning in ter the presidential election of 1896. cies; liberal industrialists got greater regu- the 1970s, a growing stream of special-in- The reasons for the decline in voter lation of the economy; and Southern terest money made politicians far less de- turnout since then lie somewhere in the landowners got agricultural assistance. pendent on mass organizations to get out interaction of ordinary people the vote. Party leaders were with major economic power 90 reluctant to recruit massive groups. The needs and aspira- OUTSIDE THE SOUTH numbers of new members, tions of farmers and workers, 80 fearing loss of control over particularly in times of eco- 70 party organization, Winders nomic or social crisis, came up concludes. As an example, he against the imperatives of the 60 cites the 1996 primaries, in power groups, such as North- which Republicans became ern industrialists and the 50 alarmed about Pat Buchan- NATIONAL Southern planter merchant an’s attempt to draw in work- 40 class. When these groups were ing-class voters, sensing that in alliance, popular move- 30 they were incompatible with ments had less opportunity SOUTH the businessmen who are the to gain political momentum, 20 backbone of the party.

but when these groups fell of eligible population who voted Percent The U.S. had a 47.2 percent 10 apart, popular movements 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 turnout in the 1996 presiden- had a better chance to gain Year tial election, well below the influence. SOURCE: Adapted with modification from Bill Winders, ”The Roller Coaster of Class 71 percent European average Bill Winders of Emory Uni- Conflict: Class Segments, Mass Mobilization, and Voter Turnout in the U.S., of recent years. The 36.7 per- 1840–1996"; Social Forces, March 1999. The ”South“ includes the 11 states of the versity, who has authored the Confederacy. The eligible electorate excludes black men before 1870, most women cent of those eligible who vot- most systematic analysis of before 1920, 18- to 20-year-olds before 1972, and most aliens throughout. ed in the 1998 midterm con- the topic in recent years, gressional elections was the identifies four main periods during the Thus was the New Deal coalition born. third-lowest turnout in at least the past 50 past century or so when the major power In the third phase—1948 to 1968—a years. An important cause involves restric- blocks played a key role in determining similar mobilization of the disenfran- tions on registration and voting, which turnout. In the first phase, running from chised took place, this time mostly in the are greater in the U.S. than in other West- 1896 to 1924, Northern industrialists, South. Northern industrialists broke with ern countries. In most jurisdictions, for in- threatened by populist farmers, striking the Southern landed class and helped to stance, Americans must reregister when workers and unruly immigrants, came to channel black protest into politics, as for they move, a problem for one sixth of an agreement with their erstwhile oppo- example in the Freedom Summer of Americans every year; European countries nents of the Civil War, the Southern plant- 1964, which decisively increased black tend to ensure permanent registration. At er merchant class: the industrialists would voter registration throughout much of the most fundamental level, one can ar- get a free hand in dealing with unrest in the South. Furthermore, the courts de- gue that U.S. voters don’t go to the polls the North, and the Southern planter mer- clared restrictions such as the poll tax and often because the political parties and chant class would be allowed to reimpose literacy tests illegal, and the federal gov- their allied economic interests have little control over the former slaves, using in- ernment passed the Voting Rights Act of incentive to promote citizen involvement, timidation, the poll tax and literacy tests. 1965 to increase voter registration among while at the same time there is no social or Turnout declined heavily through this blacks. Southern landowners, in an at- economic crisis strong enough to generate period in both the North and South. tempt to offset the black vote, made ef- a sense of urgency in the electorate. In the second period—1928 to 1940— forts to increase the turnout of lower and —Rodger Doyle ([email protected]) RODGER DOYLE

www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 23 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. News & Analysis T fore coolsdown heatwithit.Theinnerpotthere- carrying the pots’claywallsandsandevaporates, dry, well-ventilatedplace,thewaterheldin systemisstoredinavery the “Pot-in-Pot” packed withalayerofdampsand.When enware potnestledinsidealargerpot, What’s more,itcosts30centstomake. PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOMAS BERTELSEN that Africanspinach(amaranth),which several weeksinsteadofdaysand his trialsshowedthattomatoeswouldlast ria, whereAbbalivesandworks.says frigerator inthenortherndesertsofNige- 26 W TECHNOLOGY ROBOTICS Dawn ofaNewSpecies? oln od hnteesntasce around asocket not whenthere’s Cooling foods Desert Fridge pelled bypistons andcontrolledbysim- are plastictrusses(likeTinker Toys) pro- special integratedcircuits.) Theoffspring simulated onlyoncomputers andon efforts, replicatingmachines had been design andbuildotherrobots. (In earlier signed andbuiltthefirstrobot thatcan researchers reportthattheyhavede- gust 31 Lipson andJordanB.Pollack.IntheAu- The elegantdesignconsistsofanearth- Scientific American Nature tor thatdoesn’t needelectricity. Abba hasdevelopedarefrigera- modynamics, MohammedBah hanks tothesecondlawofther- , theseBrandeisUniversity place ofhonortoHod sis, itwillsurelygivea writes itsBookofGene- hen afutureroboticrace — and makesausefulre- _ REPLICATION _ REFRIGERATION oebr2000 November September 27.TheotherswereElizabeth biennial RolexAwards forEnterpriseon and thuswouldhavetimetogoschool families’ freshlypickedfoodsrightaway who useditwouldnothavetoselltheir impact, too:Abbasaysthatyounggirls ThePot-in-Potmayhavegreatsocial ria. at JigawaStatePolytechnicinDutse,Nige- cannot bedried,remarksAbba,alecturer some foods,suchasspinachandonions, dried foods,Leonardsays.Inaddition, to beinshortersupply”the things likevitaminCarelikely of thePeruvianaltiplano.“But has workedinthehigh Northwestern Universitywho biological anthropologistat notes William R.Leonard,a or caloriecontentmuch, ing doesn’t diminishprotein them.Dry- foods topreserve their which generallydry alternative fordesertcultures, the innerpotbecomes.) just howmanydegreescooler (He’s never measured,though, canlastupto12days. harvest, normally wiltswithinhoursof (www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem). So available forWindows-based computers the humanswhattodo.Thesoftware is but to straponmotorsandconnect wires, crawling aroundtheirlab.They stillhad next morningtoseeartificialinchworms tem toworkatnightandcomeinthe researchers could(almost)leavethesys- small plasticsculpturesofanyshape.The error, anda3-Dprinter, whichcancreate which drawsupplansthroughtrialand computer runningageneticalgorithm, ple neuralnetworks.Themotherbotisa Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. For hiswork,Abbareceivedoneoffive Abba’s fridgeprovidesan — in areversalofroles desert — the robottold Abba ( POT-IN-POT vprto rma nevnn ae fwtsand ( wet evaporation from anintervening layer of above . rolexawards.com). ment todevelopingcountries(seewww. ering usedbicyclesintheU.S.forship- vid Schweidenback,anAmericanrecov- ing traditionalTibetanwho ispreserving heal- Pordié, aFrenchethnopharmacologist sustainable farmingintheAndes;Laurent Ecuadorian environmentalistpromoting lumbia; MariaElizaMantecaOñate,an unearthed anichthyosaurinBritishCo- Nicholls, aCanadianpaleontologistwho o agru,yt — not dangerous, yet. in theirpaperthat“roboticlifeforms” are that theresearchers feltcompelledtosay cyborgs? Ifthatsoundssilly, consider will humanssoonsharetheworld with cs-i.brandeis.edu/results.html). center (for a video, seehttp://golem03. its using thepiston at along thecarpet itself COMPUTER-DESIGNED ROBOT ossso etdca oscooled by pots nested clay of ) consists ytmdvlpdb Mohammed Bah system developedby methods innorthernIndia;andDa- News & Analysis — Naomi Lubick George Musser pushes left ).

COURTESY OF HOD LIPSON AND JORDAN B. POLLACK MEDICINE PSYCHOLOGY Universal Soldier Stiﬂed Recall

Emotions may affect how one remembers an event, but so can keeping those emo- The war against cancer gets a shot in tions in check. A study in the September Journal of Personality and Social Psychology the arm with the promising preliminary found that emotional regulation can take away from finite cognitive resources available to pay attention to an event. Subjects asked to stifle their physical responses to emo- results of a universal cancer vaccine. Most tions while looking at potential vaccines are associated with slides of injured people molecules from specific tumors. But re- could not recollect spe- searchers at Duke University and Geron cific details of the images a short time later as well Corporation in Menlo Park, Calif., report in as a control group could. the September Nature Medicine on an ex- Not all types of emotional perimental vaccine that depends on a part regulation affected mem- News Briefs of the enzyme telomerase that, they note, ory to the same degree, however: subjects asked “is silent in normal tissues but is reacti- to view the slides with de- vated in more than 85 percent of cancers.” tachment, as a physician The telomerase vaccine slowed the would, effectively precon- growth of melanoma, breast and bladder trolled their emotions and hence had better re- cancers in mice and provoked an immune call than those who did response in cells derived from human re- not have a chance to pre- Corbis nal and prostate cancers. The search is on pare beforehand (the full for other molecules that, combined with text is at www.apa.org/ TIM WRIGHT journals/psp/ telomerase, would broaden and strength- KEEPING A STIFF UPPER LIP colors memories of emo- psp793410.html). en the effect. —Steve Mirsky tionally laden images, such as those of an accident. —Naomi Lubick

ACCRETION DISK, such as this depiction around a black the Lost Peptide hole, may wobble when spacetime is dragged along. Narcolepsy most likely results from a lack of the neurotransmitter hypocretin, according to two groups, one led by Jerome M. Siegel of the University of Cali- fornia at Los Angeles and the other by Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University. The studies, appearing in the September

RUSSELL KIGHTLEY MEDIA issues of Neuron and Nature Medicine, found that compared with normal human brains, narcoleptic brains had lost practi- Three years ago astronomers reported detecting black holes and neutron stars that cally all their hypocretin peptides, known were not only sucking in matter but also twisting the very fabric of spacetime around it. to regulate both appetite and sleep. Less The twisting makes the matter precess, or wobble, as it spirals into the dead star. Re- certain is the underlying cause of the loss searchers from the University of Amsterdam report in the August 24 Astrophysical Jour- nal Letters that they have detected three neutron stars emitting so-called sideband radi- of hypocretins; an autoimmune response ation in the x-rays emitted when material gets drawn in. Such sideband emissions are is a possibility. Therapies repairing the like the stations carried by AM radio waves. But instead of delivering news, sports and hypocretin system could be a better alter- weather, they convey information about the stars and can be used to conﬁrm Einstein’s predictions about the dragging of spacetime. For an animation of the precessing matter, native to the current treatment of stimu- see www.physics.uiuc.edu/Research/CTA/news/sidebands/index.html —Philip Yam lants and other drugs. —N.L.

Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. News Briefs 30 fNovember. of end the www.taaccl.org until entries, can be viewed at from more than 200 August winners, chosen in year’s thejudges. This ings, oneof Rawl- Pat ed space artist not- competition,” says tant animpor- this makes that cialize inthesciences, and whospe- for artists venues many Tex. “There arenot Clear Lake in Nassau Bay, Alliance Center at the Arts American, sponsored by co-competition,gal. The England, France andPortu- came from some entries A Depictions Digital ART SCIENCE inlacsiiiyeasier accessibility tional made interna- the contest nature of space. The digital through cyber- submissions encouraging contests art thefew oneof Competition, Art Digital & Technology race won the2000 Science ORE:US eateto giutr;Ntoa atee’ efAscain ofosAssociation ofNorthAmerica; Soyatech; A BeefAssociation; Soyfoods ofAgriculture; NationalCattlemen’s SOURCES: U.S. Department Retail value: Tofu production: Retail value: in1999: production Beef in1990: production Total U.S.beef Pork: Chicken: pounds,1999: Per capitabeefconsumption,in Amount ofbeefproduced percow: Total numberofcattle intheU.S.,1999: Medium Rare,Please DATA POINTS Scientiﬁc American 48.8 ikandaunicycle tick 49.2 was presented by presented was $173 million $54.4 billion Scientiﬁc — Edward Bell 116 millionpounds — 26.4 billionpounds oebr2000 November

JEREMY HORNER Corbis Prize, Science Division 1st I One Transgenic Latte,ComingUp GENOMICS erhr rmJpnadSoln eoti h uut31 intheAugust from Japan and Scotland report searchers decaffeinated brew. Re- theperfect beonthe verge of science hefounded would oneday the genetic Decaf coming to coffee beans? rgrMne odrdhspapatdt vrcfe,h ih have beenpleased to learn that data over coffee, hemight pea plant pondered his Gregor Mendel f 21.8 billionpounds 616 pounds 99,115,000 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. 64.7 Recommended dailycholesterol intakeby the Average dailycholesterol consumption by U.S.males: Amount ofcholesterol inahamburger: American Heart Association: American Heart s rz,Tcnlg Division Prize, Technology 1st eia er soito.Tf grsaefo 97 h aetavailable. are from 1997, Association. Tofu the latest ﬁgures merican Heart Nature less than300milligrams htte have characterized and they that 35 to 50milligrams to natural brews. brews. natural to beotherwise identical ically caf, however, would theoret- de- processes. Transgenic inthedecaffeination lost be may ﬂavor andaromas because feinated beverages eschew decaf- consumers duce thestimulant. Many pro- cannot that tea plants coffee and ating transgenic cre- about can set scientists With thegene now known, caffeine. of the biosynthesis enzyme in synthase, akey cloned thegene for caffeine 337 milligrams News Briefs — S.M.

DENA WINKELMAN AND WILLAM MATTHEWS ( ); left MATT COLLINS RICHARD GREEN (right) ARCHAEOLOGIST_ OLGA SOFFER The Caveman’s New Clothes

From what they wore to how they hunted: overturning the threadbare reconstructions of Ice Age culture Profile

ARIS—Walking through the human evolution exhibit in the Musée de l’Homme, two things stand out to Olga Soffer: males Pare depicted to the exclusion of females, and they’re wearing the wrong clothes. Only someone who has never sewn before would conclude that this needle could have pierced through hides, she declares, drawing my attention to a deli- cate sliver of bone in one of the display cases. Rather, the University of Illinois archaeologist asserts, it must have stitched a far finer material—perhaps even something akin to the linen of her blue pin- striped suit. Such needles—some of which date back more than 25,000 years to the Upper Pa- leolithic period—vaguely suggest that caveman couture extended beyond the crude animal-skin ensembles envisioned by many of her colleagues. Soffer’s efforts are revealing just how sophisticated those first fashionistas were. By scouring the archaeological record for evidence of perishable technologies like weaving, she has uncovered clues to formerly invisible activities of Ice Age men—and women— forcing a reevaluation of the men-in-furs- hunting-megafauna motif that has long dominated reconstructions of prehistoric lifeways. The fabric of their lives, it appears, was much richer than previously thought. Soffer’s passion for fashion predates OLGA SOFFER: FASHION MAVEN TURNED ARCHAEOLOGIST her interest in the Paleolithic. After grad- •Born September 9, 1942, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia uating from Hunter College with a de- •Speaks Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian and Czech fluently; converses in a number of others gree in political science, she entered an •Typical airplane reading: Vogue and W executive training program with New York •Favorite designers: Yohji Yamamoto, Geoffrey Beene and Coco Chanel, to name a few City’s Federated Department Stores—own- •Received an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences ers today of Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and others. This led to a 10-year career in fash- Picasso to prehistoric art to prehistoric by her then husband and her six-year-old ion promotion, which, she says, suited her ways of life and concluded that she daughter, to conduct her dissertation re- just fine early on but grew tiresome as “might as well” get her master’s in ar- search. Russia was an open niche, she rec- she reached her late 20s. “I started play- chaeology. Then, after taking a summer ollects, unlike France, where, she says, ing hooky,” she recalls, chuckling. “I’d go off from her job to go to France “to learn there was “a ratio of about two archies for to fashion shows and actually sneak off digging,” Soffer decided to pursue a Ph.D. one square meter of territory.” Additional- to the library.” through the City University of New York ly, her Russian parentage meant that she SABA To feed her mind, Soffer decided to take while continuing to work halftime in had the advantage of language and cultur- some night school courses in art. In a fashion during the first two years. al sensitivity. There on the central Russian couple of years she worked her way from In 1977 she left for Russia, accompanied Plain, home of the famous Upper Paleo- RALF-FINN HESTOFT RALF-FINN

32 Scientific American November 2000 Profile Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. lithic mammoth-bone dwellings, she de- perishables. As a result, the archaeological Most of Soffer’s startling observations veloped her interest in prehistoric subsis- record has preferentially preserved behav- have been made on archaeological mate- tence practices. There, too, she began to ioral remains associated with young men. rials that were discovered long ago. Yet wonder whether conventional wisdom Soffer’s efforts, however, have demon- until now, no one had noticed them. on the matter was flawed. strated that it is quite possible to recover That’s because they weren’t looking for “We bring an awful lot of baggage to evidence of what these other people did. it, she asserts. “If you’re looking with prehistory,” Soffer rues. Take, for exam- Over the past few years she and her col- these questions in mind, stuff that had ple, that perennially popular Ice Age leagues have identified all sorts of plant always been there starts jumping out at scene, the mammoth hunt. She doesn’t fiber artifacts—impressions of cordage, you—like the fact that the Venus figur- buy it. No known living or recent hunter- textiles, basketry—from Upper Paleolith- ines are dressed. They’re wearing clothes, Profile gatherer groups have ever survived on ic sites across Europe. And research con- for God’s sake.” Although these volup- elephants, she observes. Like elephants, ducted just last year indicates that certain tuous female statuettes from Upper Paleo- mammoths were dangerous animals, and bone and antler objects once thought to lithic sites across Europe have been the close encounters required by hand- be hunting tools actually represent tools known for decades, most scholars over- held spear hunting would have posed far used to manufacture these perishable looked their apparel. How? “Because an too many risks. What then of those items: net gauges and battens for weav- awful lot of people who were studying mammoth-bone assemblages in Russia ing, for instance. this stuff were men who looked at the and elsewhere in eastern and central Eu- Although remains of perishables are variables that were far more emotionally rope? The same sites have also yielded known from 13,000-year-old Paleoindian charged: secondary sex characteristics,” the remains of numerous small animals, sites [see “Who Were the First Americans?” Soffer remarks matter-of-factly. “When such as rabbits and marmots. “If they’ve by Sasha Nemecek; Scientific American, we started looking at these things as ar- got all this mammoth meat, why in heav- September], these Upper Paleolithic ma- chaeologists, looking at the range of vari- en’s name are they hunting bunnies?” she terials push back the date for the oldest ables and the patterning of those vari- demands. A more plausible explanation plant-based technologies by thousands of ables—aside from boobs and asses—lo for most of the mammoth bones is that years. But they’re still too advanced to and behold, there’s this other stuff.” people collected them off the landscape represent the origins of such practices. The other stuff, it appears, includes a from animals that died of other causes. Indeed, the most basic of these technolo- stunning array of ritual garb: the famed She concludes that mammoth and other gies—cordage—probably dates back at Venus of Willendorf from Austria wears a megafauna hunts were occasional and least 60,000 years to the first colonizers woven hat (previously interpreted as a did not play a central dietary role. of Australia, whom many researchers sus- coiled coiffure); the French Venus of Les- As for bringing down those small ani- pect sailed over from Southeast Asia. Con- pugue sports a string skirt; other Venuses mals, Soffer suspects it wasn’t with spears. sidering the limited availability of animal model bandeaus, snoods, sashes and belts. She and James M. Adovasio of Mercy- sinew in that region, Soffer says, their rafts Close study of the carvings reveal that all hurst College have identified impressions would most likely have been lashed to- the representations of apparel clearly de- of netting on fragments of clay from Up- gether with ropes made of plant fibers. pict fiber-based items, as opposed to hide- per Paleolithic sites in Moravia wear, further strengthening and Russia that open up an in- the case for early textiles. triguing possibility: net hunt- These Paleolithic representa- ing. Ethnographic descriptions tions of women stand in stark of this strategy, Soffer explains, contrast to the few known rep- reveal that “you don’t need to resentations of men, none of be a strong, brawny, skilled which show clothing. Wheth- hunter. You can participate and er these mysterious figurines help with this kind of commu- represent sex symbols, fertili- nal hunt if you’re a kid with ty goddesses or some other no experience, if you’re a nurs- entities, we may never know. ing mother, et cetera. It’s non- Yet to Soffer, the fact that an- confrontational” and relative- cient artists took such pains ly safe. to immortalize their apparel Impressions of netting and clearly illustrates the impor- other perishable materials pro- tance of these perishable tech- vide some of the first insight nologies. And if the ethno- into the lives of prehistoric graphic record on perishables women, children and the eld- is any indication, the manu- erly—or, as Soffer describes facturers were probably wom- them, the silent majority. en. “Women were not just out Whereas the activities of prime- there to reproduce,” Soffer in- age males in hunter-gatherer VENUS WEAR: Forget those tattered animal-hide getups—Ice sists. “They were actively in- cultures tend to entail the ma- Age women had textiles, as seen on Venus figurines that date volved in production as well, SABA nipulation of durable materi- back as far as 27,000 years ago. A cast of the Venus of Willendorf just as women are in any and als, those of women, children from Austria (right) shows a woven cap; the one from Kostenki in all societies that we know of.” and the elderly involve more Russia (left) displays similar headwear and a twined bandeau. —Kate Wong RALF-FINN HESTOFT RALF-FINN

34 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Proﬁle Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING_ HOMES As We May Live Computer scientists build a dream house to test their vision of our future

TLANTA—To pedestrians walking past in the muggy summer heat, the green house at the corner of 10th and Center streets looks Avery much like any of the other two-story homes in this quiet neighborhood a block north of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Only the loud whir of two commercial-size heat pumps in the side yard hints at the fact that the house is infested with network cables threaded through the ﬂoorboards, video cameras staring from the ceiling, sensors tucked into kitchen cabinets, workstations stacked in the basement, and computer scientists bustling from room to room. Inside the house, some passing student has arranged toy magnetic letters on the refrigerator door to spell out the purpose of this odd combination: “Aware Home of the Futur,” a laboratory in the shape of a house where humans can try out living in more intimate contact with comput- IT’S AWARE: a new computer science lab will monitor its live-in test subjects. ers. There’s a piece missing from the message, but the project itself has many gaps but should be highly interconnected and net network. Cordless devices communi-

Technology & Business Technology to fill. Construction wrapped up only a able to adapt their behavior to different cate through a house-wide wireless net. A few months ago, and seven faculty mem- users, locations and situations. In this vi- radio-locating system can pinpoint any bers from Georgia Tech’s computer sci- sion, we will share many kinds of UCs, tagged object to within 10 feet. The two- ence department are still working with a and the devices will share us. gigabit-per-second connection to the uni- battalion of students to get the house’s A decade’s work on UbiComp, as it is versity and the Internet is fast enough to sensory systems online. known in the field, has produced a zoo of transmit several channels of full-screen This house does all the light-switching, ideas and many demos but few realvideo and audio. And with some 25 cam- stereo-piping tricks of “smart” homes that world tests. NCR unveiled a microwave eras and almost as many microphones provide technophiles with electronic con- oven that could support e-mail and elec- trained on the first floor alone, there is venience, but here that is just a starting tronic banking in 1998 and last year plenty of audio and video to go around. point. The goal is to make this place the demonstrated a trash bin that can use a Aaron Bobick, who specializes in com- most ambitious incarnation yet of ideas bar-code scanner on its lid to track the puter vision, gives me the grand tour. that have been fermenting in computer contents of the pantry. Neither has made “Everybody in our department thought research labs for a decade, ever since it beyond prototypes. On a quick stop at building this must be a good thing to Mark Weiser launched the first “ubiqui- the IBM Almaden Research Center, do,” he says, “although we didn’t really tous computing” project at the Xerox Cameron Miner shows me a glass case have a clear vision of why.” The research Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the full of digital jewelry: a tie-bar micro- team eventually decided that those who late 1980s. In a seminal 1991 article in phone, earring earphones, a ring with a most need the home of the future are Scientific American, Weiser predicted that multicolored LED. “It might flash when people of the past—not the rich gadget human use of computers would in the you get an incoming call,” Miner sug- nuts who typically purchase smart homes early 21st century go through a transi- gests. But these are mock-ups; they do but rather marginally infirm seniors. “If tion comparable to the shift from shared not actually connect to anything. technology could help you be certain mainframe machines to personally owned No one knows yet what kind of infra- that your parent maintains social con- workstations, laptops and handhelds. The structure is needed to support a UbiComp tact, takes her medicine, moves around third generation of “UCs,” he argued, world, so the designers of 479 10th Street okay, and that means she can stay anoth- should look like everyday objects—name took no chances. Every wall has at least er 18 months in her own home, then tags, books, jewelry, appliances, walls— six high-speed jacks to the internal Ether- that’s a slam-dunk motivator,” Bobick GARY MEEK W.

36 Scientific American November 2000 Technology & Business Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. says. “When we told that to the people video streams collected by the house— ple suffer some cognitive declines that from Intel, they just loved it.” Intel is the same streams that Bobick claims he make it difficult for them to deal with in- now one of the project’s corporate spon- wants to distill at each source. Abowd is terruptions.” So she is designing a re- sors, along with Motorola Labs, Ander- also trying to build an intercom system minder program that will use the kitchen sen Consulting and Mitsubishi Electric that will allow one person to speak with cameras and sensors to assemble a run- Research Lab. another simply by saying the person’s ning montage of snapshots that can re- Two engineers from Sprint, which is name. And he enthusiastically describes mind people what they were doing just interested in the project, arrive on a fact- his idea for a program that would auto- before they were interrupted. She is simi- finding mission and join us as we resume matically place a phone call to your larly trying to come up with subtle sounds the tour. “On the surface, this could look mother when you talk to her picture— or images that the house can emit to help like Big Brother or The Truman Show,” Bo- but only after checking with her house to inhabitants remember important times bick concedes, gesturing to the video cam- make certain she is awake. “I’m under no of day, such as for appointments or med- eras aimed at us from several directions. illusion about the potential this creates ication. Other researchers want to stick Our images pour through wires onto the for major privacy problems,” he says. small radio-tracking tags on easily mis- hard disks of computers in the basement. “But I’m one of 12 children. I’d rather placed objects such as keys and remote “But it is important to realize that we want push the boundary of privacy than cower controls. The list of ideas seems to change to process video data at the spot where it is from it.” weekly, reflecting the enormous uncer- collected,” he continues. “Then these Just over Abowd’s head, a digital pho- tainties in the UbiComp field about what won’t really be video cameras but sensors tograph of someone’s grandmother sits society needs and what people will accept. that simply detect people’s location or on the mantle. The photo is bordered by In a year or so, test subjects will help the direction of their gaze. I want to put pastel butterflies of various shapes and answer that question as they move into cameras in the bathrooms, to make that hues. It is a prototype of a device that the second story of the house and judge distinction clear. Suppose your shower one might place on an office desk to keep whether all this complex infrastructure could detect melanoma? That’s some- track of a distant relative living in an and software does in fact simplify and thing people are working on.” Behind “aware” home. Every day the photo would enrich daily life. The project has its skep- Bobick, Elizabeth D. Mynatt grimaces. contact the house for a status report from tics. There is no way to know what Weis- Mynatt, the only woman on the team the system that tracks Grandmom’s phys- er would think, unfortunately, because and the one who suggested the focus on ical movement and social interaction; he died suddenly last year from liver can- the aged, spends half her time working more activity would add a larger butterfly cer at the age of 46. But his colleague with caregivers and anthropologists to to the history. The idea, suggests Mynatt, Rich Gold worries that the occupants of a figure out what problems tend to force who designed the device, is to find calm- UbiComp house may feel it controls seniors from their homes and what an- ing technology that helps family mem- them rather than the other way around. noyances and invasions of privacy they bers feel close and in control without be- In an essay on “intelligent” houses sever- might trade to postpone that. This ap- ing invasive. al years ago, Gold wondered: “How smart proach sometimes conflicts with the more She describes another active project does the bed in your house have to be be-

Technology & Business Technology typical technocentric style of her col- over lunch: “We know that kitchens are fore you are afraid to go to sleep at leagues. “I call it the ‘boys with toys’ phe- hot spots of activity and that older peo- night?” —W. Wayt Gibbs nomenon,” she says. “Someone builds a hammer and then looks around for something to bang on.” Mynatt does not want cameras in the A Machine for Living In bathrooms. She used to work with Mark The four-bedroom, four-bath Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory built by Weiser at Xerox PARC, and she remem- Georgia Tech has more cameras than windows. Amenities include: bers the lessons of his first experiments with ubiquitous computers. “Xerox tried • Computers: at least 60 to make everyone in the building wear • Video cameras: 25 (first floor only) these active name badges that we had de- • Microphones: at least 1 per room veloped,” recalls Dan Russell, who worked • Cabinet sensors: 40 (first floor only) in Weiser’s group at PARC for several • Televisions (for fun, not research): 60-inch years before moving to IBM Almaden. upstairs, 8-by-12-foot projection The idea was to let anyone see where system in basement anyone else was at any time. “About half • Network outlets: 48 (at least one per wall) the people said, ‘No way.’ We also tried to • Connections per outlet: 2 Ethernet; put a Web cam in the coffee room, but 2 coaxial; 2 optical fiber again there was a huge backlash.” This • Internet bandwidth: 2 gigabits per was at the lab where UbiComp was born. second (via 4 DSL lines and an “Still, I feel uncomfortable about focus- optical-fiber link) ing too much on the social implications,” • Internal wireless network bandwidth: says Gregory D. Abowd, co-director of the 11 megabits per second NETWORK CABLE: Aware Home Research Initiative. Abowd • Construction cost: at least $750,000, about 10 not including computer equipment miles’ worth in total. is designing software that will automatically construct family albums from the GARY MEEK W.

40 Scientific American November 2000 Technology & Business Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. money is to be made with corpo- Wholesale Computation rate networks, where tens of thousands of well-administered machines sit idle every night. (Ap- Companies want to sell your computer’s spare processing time. Are there buyers? plied Meta currently operates for the National Science Foundation a seamless, secure network of more than 4,000 CPUs.) he fastest supercomputers in Internet bandwidth). That, he says, will Proponents downplay such worries, the known universe are virtual- enable him to sell a standard CPU-year (a pointing out that encryption, along with ly free. All you need to beat the 400-megahertz Pentium II operating full- the very decentralized nature of the com- performance of a $50-million, time for 365 days) for about $1,500, or puting, make it unlikely that an adver- Tmassively parallel research machine is a less than a fifth the cost of equivalent sary will be able to piece together more little software and some way to convince time on a supercomputer. Nelson Minar than a tiny bit of the big picture. Porter 1 percent of the people on the Internet to of PopularPower expects that even lesser says that his company is mostly bidding run it. Unlike a dedicated supercomputer, incentives, say between $60 and $200, on projects based on publicly available which generally requires special housing would still cut individuals’ Internet ac- data and algorithms—it’s only the com- Cyber View and a staff of attendants to keep it going cess bills in half—or add up to a tidy sum puting power that his clients need. Minar while it falls rapidly behind the state of for schools and libraries. And at Centrata, points out that there’s just as much need the art, the network equivalent increases business development vice president to protect PCs from potentially malicious in power regularly as people upgrade Boris Pevzner says his company intends distributed code. His company places their PCs. And when you’re done using to bypass individual recruiting entirely programs in a Java-language “sandbox” the virtual supercomputer, you can stop that isolates them to prevent unautho- paying for it. Little wonder, then, that rized access to a user’s own information. more than a dozen startups should have Moreover, it isn’t just cycles that will appeared in the past year, all trying to be for sale. Centrata and Applied Meta, scoop up spare computing cycles and sell for example, both tout their ability to them to the highest bidder. store information on what looks like one The best-known example of virtual su- enormous disk. (Redundancy and en- percomputing is the volunteer SETI@ cryption are just the beginning of the Home project, a search for radio signals techniques required to make sure that from an extraterrestrial intelligence; it has the data are consistently available to the attracted more than two million partici- owners and inaccessible to anyone else.) pants. Following in the footsteps of code- Porter and others are also looking for- breaking ventures such as distributed.net, ward to trading in bandwidth: a PC with SETI@Home can run as a screensaver; a megabit-per-second Internet connec- then it is active only when a machine is tion, typical of cable modems and DSL not doing anything else. Each chunk of connections, could cache data from dis- radio-telescope data can be processed in- tant Web sites and serve them to neigh- dependently, so machines don’t need to boring users, reducing the load on Inter- communicate with one another, only net backbones. (Companies such as Aka- with a central server. Other embarrassing- and use its high-powered venture-capital mai are already doing a rapidly growing ly parallel problems include DNA pattern contacts to get computer manufacturers business in such “edge” caches, but their matching, Monte Carlo financial model- and Internet access providers to build the approach requires dedicated hardware.) ing, computer-graphics rendering and, ap- company’s software into their products, So in a few years, your computer could propriately enough, Web site–perform- where it will operate automatically. be surfing the Net looking for the best ance testing. Genome applications alone, Meanwhile Adam L. Beberg, one of the bids for its spare resources. But will the says United Devices CEO Ed Hubbard, founders of distributed.net and now an ready availability of computing power to could soak up all the Net’s spare comput- independent software developer, predicts handle peak processing loads end up cur- ing power for the next 50 years. that no one will make money reselling tailing the rapid increases in CPU speed Only two questions stand between the computer power—too many sellers, not that make distributed computing attrac- venture capitalists and enormous profits: enough buyers. Completely open distrib- tive, or will the ability to solve problems Can they get millions of users to surren- uted computing has intractable security that were utterly unapproachable only a der CPU time to profit-making organiza- problems that will prevent firms from few years ago whet appetites for yet more tions, and can they sell the resulting pow- putting sensitive code and data out on power? That issue might not even con- er to enough paying customers? Steve the Internet for everyone to see. “The cern the startups. It’s possible that widely Porter of ProcessTree Network has little only market is behind firewalls,” he says. disseminated distributed-processing soft- doubt that his company can retain the Andrew Grimshaw of Applied Meta ware—such as that recently released by 100,000 people currently donating time agrees: “Most businesses won’t buy con- Beberg and his friends—will allow buyers to nonprofit computations by offering sumer-grade [computing] resources from and sellers to work directly, leaving the in- payments of between $100 to $1,000 a some Linux hacker’s dorm room.” Beberg termediaries hoping to sell your comput- year (depending on processor speed and and Grimshaw both argue that the real er power out in the cold. —Paul Wallich DAVID SUTER DAVID

50 Convergence 57 Music 61 Moviemaking 70 Cinemas 72 Graphics 79 Interactivity ) S.I.N./Corbis

The Perfect Storm usic, movies, television, video games and the World Wide Web are morphing into a single entity. As these previously distinct media switch from essentially

); KATIA NATOLA ); NATOLA KATIA analog means of production (like celluloid ﬁlm) and distribution (like delivery ); SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS M vans) to all-digital ones, their products are converging into one big stream of digital data. Space DogSpace ); BROS.( ©2000 WARNER illustration Call it d-entertainment. It will come to us on our TV screens, PCs, wristwatches and dashboard displays—anywhere, anytime. And once a few more technical and legal issues are ); ( ATOMFILMS worked out, we’ll not only be able to enjoy it, we’ll be able to create it and distribute it, too. Hollow Man Hollow Metallica and guitar detail Metallica TOM DRAPER DESIGN ( TOM ( (

Sony’s vision of Predicted for years, the convergence of media d-entertainment content, of distribution channels such as cable TV is built in part on and the Internet, and of PCs, TVs and those wire- ping and other interactive Internet services. Sony the Glasstron less personal digital assistants is finally starting to has reportedly signed an agreement to provide on- “personal theater” happen. Television shows such as Who Wants to line banking through the PlayStation. headset and pow- Be a Millionaire? and Monday Night Football Rival corporate marriages could just as likely erful PlayStation 2 graphics such as now synchronize their broadcasts with interactive change the entertainment world. The proposed those in the video Web sites. Delphi Automotive is taking pre-orders merger between media and cable TV giant Time game The Legend for a service that will bring e-mail, the Internet, Warner and Internet service provider America of Dragoon. digital MP3 music files and other d-entertainment Online, awaiting antitrust review, represents the options to our cars. convergence of content and distribution. If the While transforming our leisure time, the digiti- companies could reach a deal with a hardware zation of everything audio and video will also dis- manufacturer, they, too, could complete a conver- rupt the entertainment industry’s social order. An gence chain. early sign will be a shakeout in entertainment technology. The TV, VCR and even DVD players Broadcast Be Damned could be wiped out by a killer appliance such as the new “personal video recorders” from TiVo he digital disruption of entertainment’s social and ReplayTV. These magic boxes let us pause Torder will force the industry to confront new and replay live TV and skip through its commer- issues. For example, record labels are scrambling cials, as well as search for and store programs on to find a profitable way to allow music lovers to any subject or starring any actor we like. download tracks online. They may have to forget The shakeout could also be catalyzed by a dark the $15 CD and offer us a one-time listen of a song horse such as Sony’s PlayStation 2 game machine, for a 10-cent online micropayment, unlimited play released this year, whose microprocessor and for $1, or access to their entire catalogue for $100 graphics capabilities rival those of today’s PCs. a month. Sony could take the d-entertainment world by Consumers will clamor for entertainment-on- storm if it could sign a deal with a distribution demand, no longer happy to be passive recipients power—say, a cable TV carrier—to complete the of what media companies decide to broadcast at a given time. The new technology will let us choose from the world’s d-TV, d-music and d-movies [see Digitizing everything audio and video “Creating Convergence,” on page 50], served up on will disrupt the entertainment industry’s the Internet. By 2020, a more robust, broadband Internet could replace all “broadcast” models— social order and force new issues. radio, TV, film, newspapers, magazines, books— as the preferred distribution medium for entertain- chain of content (Sony Pictures, Sony Music, ment, predicts Martin Tobias, founder of Loud- video games), distribution, and platform (PlaySta- eye, a Seattle company that encodes and distrib- tion 2). Indeed, Ken Kutaragi, CEO of Sony Com- utes digital media. puter Entertainment, which engineered PlaySta- Creation of content will be democratized. It tion 2, says his firm will be the driver for the entire used to be that only big Hollywood studios could parent company. His next-generation “game” ma- afford to film and distribute movies or TV shows. chine, dubbed PS3 by Sony, will offer online shop- No more. Low-cost digital movie cameras and PC

48 Scientific American November 2000 The Future of Digital Entertainment Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. video editors allow anyone with an eye to record dents in totalitarian states could safely post anti- and edit a movie for just a few thousand dollars, government rhetoric. Then again, child pornogra- and distribute it through firms such as AtomFilms phers could route their illicit photos and drug and IFilm that serve up video over the Web [see dealers could make online trades. Anarchy just got “Moviemaking in Transition,” on page 61]. a shot in the arm. Advertising must change if a magic box allows Regardless of whether d-entertainment alters so- consumers to cut out the commercials. Broadcast- ciety profoundly, it will change consumer habits. ers might have to scroll ads along the bottom of As Robert W. Saint John, founder of the d-video the screen during a show to prevent us from stripping them out. Or Coke might have to pay big bucks to get the stars of The whole concept of holding a CD or NBC’s Friends to wear T-shirts sporting movie in your hand will disappear once the Coke logo during an episode. And how will the copyright infringe- d-entertainment is widely available. ment riot be settled? The trouble beset- ting the music industry over online swapping of d- production company Nearly News Productions in music on sites such as MP3 and Napster will play San Diego, says, “The whole concept of holding a out on a much larger scale once d-TV and d- CD or movie in your hand will disappear.” Why SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT SONY COMPUTER movies arrive en masse [see “Music Wars,” on plunk down money to acquire one entertainment page 57]. Already, Web sites that enable distribu- “thing” at a time when everything will be instant- tion of d-video, such as Scour.com, are thriving. ly available, updateable, portable and cheap? Yet despite the (mostly young) public’s attitude It’s easy to get caught up in the vision of all en- that music and videos should suddenly be free just tertainment going digital. Web surfers can already because they’re on the Net, copyright law still dictates that artists, authors and filmmakers control the rights to their creations and deserve to be paid for them. Lawyers may also have to devise new rights and royalty terms for actors who allow believable, computer-generated avatars that look and act like them to be created for d-movies [see “Digital Humans Wait in the Wings,” on page 72].

An Entertainment Economy

he emergence of d-entertainment could Tcause entertaining changes in society, too. Some pundits maintain that the U.S. economy could center on entertainment. Michael J. Wolf, a senior partner at the think tank Booz-Allen & Hamilton, likes to twist Irving Berlin’s famous line, saying that in the digital age, “there’s no business without show business.” As he wrote recently in Forbes ASAP, marketers must achieve the same goal as network programmers—“they

must now engage, inform, titillate, captivate.... RMN/ART RESOURCE,YORK NEW In a word, they must be fun.” Witness the phe- nomenal success of the ice-blue iMac and the take virtual tours of world museums. Broadway Web surfers can Volkswagen Beetle. Hence, Wolf says, the tradi- Digital Entertainment is digitally taping Broadway take virtual tours tional business cycle could evolve into a Holly- plays for pay-per-view and streaming on the Inter- of many renowned wood-like entertainment cycle, thriving on hits net. But no matter how realistic a virtual-museum museums, includ- and dying with flops. tour, walk on the Great Wall or image of a fire-eating the Louvre in Paris; few cultural More volatile issues could arise. The new Free- ing street performer may seem, it’s not quite the bastions are be- net software program, downloadable from freenet. real thing, because we are always to some degree yond digital tech- sourceforge.net, allows PCs on the Net to act as aware that with a single command we can turn nology’s reach. transient nodes that can swap files directly, with the machine off. no intermediary such as Napster. Whereas Nap- Furthermore, nothing digital can substitute for ster swappers can be identified, there’s no way to the neighborhood softball game, the county carni- tell who posts or downloads a file using Freenet. val, the city park. And no matter how “interac- Consumers can copy files directly from PC to PC tive” d-entertainment becomes, it still leaves us with total anonymity. The implications are far- pretty much sitting on our butts. Sure, enjoy it. reaching. Whistle-blowers could post incriminat- Then grab a loved one and go dance. ing documents without fear of reprisal, and dissi- —Mark Fischetti, contributing editor

TV, movies, Internet video, and music could morph into one big stream of d-entertainment that we can enjoy on any device, anywhere, anytime. But the devil is in the details by Peter Forman and Robert W. Saint John

he 1939 New York World’s Fair featured a formal debut of television broadcast, but the receiver inside the RCA Pavilion was way ahead of its T time. The appliance was a combination television-radio-recorder-playback- facsimile-projector set that, in hindsight, suggests that we humans have a fundamental desire to merge all media into one entity. Today this goal has a name: convergence, the union of audio, video and data communications into a single source, received on a single device, delivered by a single connection. Predicted for decades, convergence is ﬁnally wherever we are, whenever we want. All that is re- emerging, albeit in haphazard fashion. Wireless quired is that equipment makers and standards phones, personal computers and televisions are bodies agree on such details as broadband distri- beginning to take on one another’s functions. More bution, copyright protection and compatible dis- important, the patterns by which we are intercon- plays. No small task. necting these gadgets indicate that we are ready The big convergence is made up of three sub- for convergence to sweep us off our feet. Once it sidiary convergences: content (audio, video and does, all forms of digital entertainment will morph data); platforms (PC, TV, Internet appliance, and into one big stream of bits. We will be able to en- game machine); and distribution (how the content joy movies, TV shows, Internet video, and music gets to your platform). on our home theater, computer or wristwatch The World Wide Web, spurred on by the “killer

50 Scientific American November 2000 Creating Convergence Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. S P R E E C P I O A R L T TOM DRAPER DESIGN TOM app” of e-mail, has greatly accelerated the conver- muddy water is that the three elements of conver- If compatibility gence of entertainment content. And yet the Web’s gence are powerfully intertwined. The platforms, standards and rise has also brought the quick realization that however, are where technological choices are most data-protection content should be scalable so that it can be deliv- wide open. The number of competing standards schemes can be ered to all kinds of platforms, from wireless and architectures is enormous. How the competi- worked out, all phones to TVs. This has prompted rethinking, tion plays out will largely determine how com- d-entertainment will converge into and concern, about who creates and controls the plete, and how soon, convergence will emerge. a single source that content itself, which depends on how it is pack- can shine into aged and delivered to us. For example, America Fight or Switch your life on any Online (AOL), no more than an Internet packager screen, wherever and deliverer, is attempting to merge with Time he earliest example of converging platforms you are. Warner, one of the world’s biggest media con- Tinvolved crude attempts at interactive televi- glomerates. Unfathomable only a few years ago, sion. The most notable trial was Warner Amex’s the $180-billion combination already seems natu- QUBE system tested in Columbus, Ohio, in the ral. Unfortunately, Time Warner did little to assure 1970s. What it best demonstrated, at colossal exits rivals that the merger would not squelch com- pense, was that people did not want to communi- petition when, in May, it temporarily pulled Dis- cate back to the broadcaster. ney’s ABC network from its cable systems, which It took the Internet to “train” people to interact go to millions of homes. The move could influence with content. The most recent success story is not review of the merger by the Federal Communica- quite convergence, but it is a step in the right ditions Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade rection. In March, Disney’s ABC Television, in Commission. Concerns about distribution have conjunction with its Internet sibling Go.com, also been raised by Napster, software that allows launched the “enhanced TV” version of the game users to download digital music (the majority of show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? By logging which has not been licensed) directly from other on to the Millionaire Web site, viewers can play users’ computers through the Napster Web site along on their PC while they watch the show on [see “Music Wars,” on page 57]. TV. In the first month, 3.5 million visitors accessed Though not the desired results of convergence, the site. This approach is still a “two-screen” ex- these issues indicate that changes in d-entertain- perience, however, requiring a TV and PC in the ment are so unprecedented that they may require same room. Pundits argue whether the ultimate government oversight. What is clear in all the device will be the PC/TV or the TV/PC. Whichev- www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 51 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. INTERACTIVITY FEEDBACK

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM

BROADCAST DISC TELEVISION AND WIRELESS 00110101001012-D GRAPHICS 0010110010100 3-D GRAPHICS 0010010000111 INTERNET HOME NETWORKS COMPUTER GAME DATA MACHINE

5 11253 WIRELESS DATAPAD VIDEO SATELLITE CABLE AND WIRELESS TELCO PHONE AUDIO

ENCODING AND ENCRYPTION

The convergences er hardware leads the way, substantial hurdles significant number of people are still not served by of digital content, must be overcome. cable or satellite. And even with a new digital an- broadband Digital television is evolving along three paths: tenna, a viewer can’t easily seek out the best recep- distribution and enhanced resolution, multiplication of channels, tion by moving it around; a d-TV signal is either display platforms and interactive features. Some advances are being received with complete accuracy or not displayed create the “big” manufactured into the television sets themselves, at all. Some manufacturers and broadcasters (who convergence of d-entertainment whereas others are being worked into set-top box- have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars and information, es that connect TVs to cable television providers. on the transition) are petitioning the industry, the with feedback In 1995 the international Advanced Television FCC and Congress to change the standard to the supporting human Systems Committee (ATSC) issued a set of digital arguably more robust European COFDM (coded interactivity. television standards to address the issues involved. orthogonal frequency division multiplex), which But adoption will not come overnight. Digital in- they say would solve the problem. formation necessitates the costly replacement or Others, unconvinced, are not willing to switch to enhancement of nearly every piece of equipment COFDM equipment when digital transmitters and in the distribution chain, almost all of it analog, receivers based on 8-VSB are already in the mar- from production to broadcast to the television set. ketplace. They say a changeover would delay the In the U.S., the FCC imposed a deadline for all sta- rollout of d-TV by at least five years. In this envi- tions to make the changeover to d-TV by 2006, ronment, consumers are unlikely to replace their and Congress gave broadcasters free, extra spec- analog televisions with digital ones. Most experts trum to make the adjustment. The major net- expect the entire transition to take 10 to 15 years. works began various types of digital broadcast in Another issue is what to do with the extra band- 1998, but conversion has been slow, in part be- width, a matter not addressed by the ATSC mea- cause of political battles. For example, some broad- sure. Some industry leaders favor dedicating it to casters want to lease their extra bandwidth to high-definition television (HDTV), which has wireless communications companies, but Congress greater resolution than standard-definition televi- is telling broadcasters, in effect, “No. You got it sion (SDTV). Others feel that the extra bandwidth for free. Now get moving on digital.” should be used to provide multiple channels of One big technical concern is that the standard SDTV. Still others want to offer slightly higher res- mandated for modulation and transmission, olution for certain types of content along with known as 8-VSB (vestigial sideband), may be in- multicasting and interactivity.

adequate for reliable reception with antennas; a A television that can support all these formats CHRISTIE BRYAN

52 Scientific American November 2000 Creating Convergence Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. will be expensive. Economies of scale will be needed Babel. The industry has agreed, worldwide, on the to reduce cost, but until there is enough compelling method of compressing video so that it can be digital content, consumers will simply defer their transmitted faster and then decompressed so it purchases. Despite this situation, the d-entertain- looks as close to the original as possible. This is ment industry understands that content really is achieved through a codec (compressor/decompres- king. Feverish experimentation is under way to find sor) based on sophisticated algorithms. The stan- the successful content formulas that will pull con- dard codec for d-TV is MPEG-2, named after the sumers onto a fully digital platform. Motion Picture Experts Group that designed it. The U.S. is behind the rest of the developed MPEG-2, which works with any display platform, world in d-TV. Japan will be converting its analog has become the pervasive standard for digital tele- HDTV service to digital in 2002. The U.K. seems vision, digital cable, direct broadcast satellite and furthest along in Europe, broadcasting wide- digital videodisc (DVD). screen SDTV instead of HDTV. Unfortunately, The MPEG committee has been working on a Japan, Europe and the U.S. are pursuing different next-generation codec standard, MPEG-4, which TV standards, as they have done for decades. In in many ways is defined by convergence. It is the an ideal world we’d all be using the same stan- step-up needed to support high-quality, streaming dard, but politics and the not-invented-here syn- d-video on the Internet, including data that specify drome seem to disallow it. interactive elements. It can even stream video at Harder to find is true interactive television (ITV). very low bit rates (five kilobits per second and up) The ATSC and European DVB standards do not that can be handled by mobile wireless networks. yet address ITV, although Europe is implementing MPEG-4, an open standard, will drive interactive some systems. Progress may be sparked by OpenTV, d-video for future consumer electronics. a company in Mountain View, Calif., funded by big The Who Wants players such as AOL, Time Warner and News Seeking the Killer App-liance to Be a Million- Corp. It provides the software and middleware (the aire? Web site allows viewers to technical architecture) needed between an ITV ll this technology requires decoding and con- play along in real broadcaster and viewer and licenses it to cable op- Anection equipment more sophisticated than time as the hit TV erators. The software is used in nearly eight million that found in a standard television. Although some game show is set-top boxes worldwide for cable networks such as digital broadcast satellite receivers and digital cable broadcast, a high- the U.K.’s BSkyB and Germany’s PrimaCom AG. TV receivers are already shipping, they are not ac- profile step toward It is based in part on standard Web languages such tually capable of receiving d-TV broadcasts. Con- interactive media. as HTML and will soon adopt the newer XML language. The set-top boxes support interactive features such as electronic program guides, e- mail, online shopping, video-on-demand and custom advertising. Mean- while Britain’s Cable & Wireless Communications and others are using the Liberate ITV platform (based on HTML and JavaScript) to deliver interactive services over cable modems, such as grocery delivery and banking services, in addition to telephone, e-mail and digital television. The National Cable Television As- sociation predicts that the U.S. may catch up by next year, when 75 percent of cable systems will be wired with enough bandwidth for interactive services. Cable is not the only delivery solution for ITV, but it has the greatest penetration in the U.S. television mar- sumers still need a tele- ket. At the same time, a cross-industry alliance of vision with an integrat- computer and broadcast companies called the Ad- ed d-TV receiver. A vanced Television Enhancement Forum has been “killer” d-TV appliance is needed, and it could formed to try to provide a common development spring from any of three current television applica- environment for ITV using HTML, XML and tions: the DVD player/recorder, so-called personal JavaScript. More regional efforts include Europe’s televisions or game machines. DVB Multimedia Home Platform, the ATSC’s DVD players constituted one of the most suc- Digital TV Application Software Environment cessful product introductions in consumer elec- and Japan’s ITV standard. tronics history. After only two years, more than

ABC, INC. Not everything in d-TV is a potential Tower of four million players are in U.S. homes, and the

DATA FROM BROADCAST, WIRELESS AND SATELLITE

HUB SURROUND REMOTE, DEMODULATOR SOUND KEYBOARD OR VOICE GATEWAY CONTROL SERVER ENCODE/ DECODE

DECRYPTION

CPU

MEMORY DVD REMOVABLE DISPLAY DISC STORAGE CAMCORDER DATA FROM CABLE OR TELCO MASS BUFFER STORAGE

Homeowners will number will easily exceed 10 million by the end of ment platform is the widely popular video-game use a variety of 2000. A DVD can store more than two hours of console. The release of Sega’s Dreamcast in 1999, interfaces to enjoy medium-deﬁnition MPEG-2 digital video with with its 56K modem, marked the debut of a game and control an multiple tracks of high-quality audio, navigation machine that allowed players to compete with one CHRISTIE BRYAN incoming stream information and graphics. Some also come with another over the Internet. Sony raised the stakes of d-TV, d-audio, interactive features: the DVD release of Indepen- this fall with PlayStation 2. It has a DVD drive, d-video and data, managed centrally dence Day allows viewers to see alternative ver- Dolby Digital and DTS sound, and a CPU and and bused around sions of scenes not shown in the movie and to take graphics processor rivaling those of today’s PCs. the house over part in a space battle game. Players slated for Although it will not initially ship with a modem, it wires or through 2001 are certain to displace the VCR, as well as will connect to modems shortly. Even more inter- the air. the CD-ROM drives in computers, converging esting, Sony recently announced plans to license data, audio and video into one source on one the technology to other parties, so support could medium, at least for the PC. start showing up in TVs, set-top boxes, PCs and The personal video recorder, or personal televi- even other game machines. sion, is a second promising convergence appliance that emerged in 2000. It is a massive-storage hard The Entertainment PC drive for TVs made by companies such as TiVo and ReplayTV. A broadcast is cached in MPEG-2 he enticing television technologies could still format to the hard disk. The viewer can pause and Tbe thwarted by basic roadblocks. For exam- resume playback while continuing to record the ple, they would require an interface more power- live transmission in the background, allowing him ful than the standard TV remote control yet less or her to create instant replays—or skip over com- clumsy than the computer keyboard. None of the mercials. An individual can program in viewing technologies provide convenient interactivity. And preferences, such as “live sports” or “opera,” and an all-in-one device may remain forever on the the device will record such broadcasts in “virtual wish list if manufacturer competition forces con- channels” that can be viewed later. The machine sumers to erect a growing stack of peripherals also can scan electronic listings for similar pro- next to their television screens. Given these uncer- grams and automatically capture them. This kind tainties, convergence could just as likely be driven of “smart” recording, access to enhanced program by the PC and the Web. guides and “live pause” are three must-have func- With 1-gigahertz CPUs entering the market, 40- tions for future d-entertainment. gigabyte hard drives available for $150, powerful The third forerunner of the ultimate d-entertain- graphics processors to handle video manipulation

54 Scientific American November 2000 Creating Convergence Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. and display, easy on-line interactivity, and rewrit- does none of these. Economies of scale have led to able DVDs just around the corner, the PC is ready plummeting prices. And in a world of complicat- to take its place as a d-entertainment platform. ed, competing TV standards, it might make sense The argument over whether the PC or TV will to adopt a generic, programmable PC that can lead to a convergent appliance resembles the “thin” support them all, rather than buy and attempt to versus “fat” network/client debate of the mid- connect that stack of TV peripherals. Indeed, the 1990s. The proponents of thin—new- wave companies such as Sun, Oracle and Java—saw a world populated It might make sense to adopt a programmable PC with simple multimedia boxes de- void of hard drives, which would that can support competing TV standards, rather simply download applications (and than connect a stack of TV peripherals. thus entertainment) from the Net whenever desired. They squared off against the old guard—Microsoft, Intel, Dell, entertainment PC could be a cleverly repackaged Compaq—which wanted to continue to sell the fat TiVo Personal TV or PlayStation 2. computers stuffed with storage and software. In PCs also have the unique ability to produce and the d-entertainment world, the TV is a thin client, receive media streams over the Internet. Streaming the entertainment-savvy PC the fat alternative. audio and video, played “live” as the consumer re- Which wins will rest on the same unresolved is- ceives it, has empowered online radio stations and sues: Where are media files stored? Do power and a growing industry of companies such as IFilm control reside in the hands of the consumer or the and AtomFilms that distribute films by small inde- network? How much complexity will consumers pendent filmmakers. It has also allowed established tolerate in exchange for more features? d-entertainment companies such as MTV and There are some good arguments for the fat PC. Time Warner (through its subsidiary Entertaindom) It easily creates, stores and shares media; the TV to deliver content that has no other venue. Trailers

Winning the Distribution Battle usiness models,more than technology,may determine how d-entertainment reach- Bes you.But any long-term winner will have to provide transmission rates upward of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).Here are the options,which would have to improve: 112535

Cable TV.Companies have been laying hybrid ﬁber-optic/coaxial Fixed Wireless. Can provide ac- cable to increase capacity to at cess at up to 2 Mbps;a good op- least 6 Mbps but have been side- tion for rural customers who tracked with conventional com- Telephone Network. can’t get cable or DSL.The con- petition against broadcasters, Ubiquitous, but the standard 56 nection is made between radio telephone companies and kilobits per second (kbps) modem towers and a rooftop antenna. Internet service providers. can’t begin to download d-enter- Wireless is the only way to con- The eventual integration (like- tainment fast enough.An “always- nect digital PCS phones and ly through mergers) of broad- on”asymmetric Digital Subscriber handheld computers to the Net. Line (DSL) connection provides band, content and a two-way speeds up to 1.5 Mbps. Very high connection will make large cable bit rate DSL promises up to 60 companies the most formidable Mbps. DSL cannot handle trans- d-entertainment distributors. missions farther than three miles One drag: it will take at least from a switching center, however, three years for manufacturers to which leaves out many people. replace the 70 million analog TV converter boxes in homes with simple digital set-top boxes. Satellite. DirecTV provider Hughes Network Systems also offers DirecPC for In- ternet downloads at up to 400 Broadcast TV. kbps. Outgoing data must be sent Stations still depend on the limited 6 MHz/19.39 Mbps of bandwidth for each chan- via modem, however, producing nel. MPEG compression gives broadcasters the choice to send one high-deﬁnition noticeable delays. There are a few TV signal or four standard signals,or some combination of video,audio and data. But true, two-way interactive systems,

BRYAN CHRISTIE BRYAN a second connection is required for two-way interaction. but they are very expensive.

Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. for such films as Star Wars: Episode I, The Phan- PC is still unreliable, a function of its complex op- tom Menace and live video streaming directly from erating system. Even a cheap TV doesn’t crash or CBS’s Big Brother Web site (24-hour Web-cam freeze. The best computers still do. surveillance of unrelated inhabitants of a private home) are some of the Internet’s biggest hits. Coming Home Streaming media will play an important role in d-entertainment, but it won’t be a prime mover y now, we might conclude that there are far because of poor resolution; TV-quality video re- Btoo many technologies and trade-offs for con- quires much greater bandwidth than most convergence to be anything but a consumer night- sumers have on their PCs. Furthermore, the Inter- mare. Keep in mind, however, that the introduc- net’s current IP architecture is not robust enough. tions of the personal computer and the Internet Media streams suffer under network congestion were fraught with competing hardware and stan- and weak spots as they pass through servers and dards. That didn’t stop either from becoming routers that have not been scaled for this kind of wildly successful. demand. A few companies like Akamai provide In the near term, we can probably expect to get some relief by caching high-demand streams the most out of our convergence experience with a across many dedicated servers closer to end users, mix of separate devices, many connected by but it’s not enough to provide the end-to-end qual- “wire” to the Internet but not necessarily to one ity of service that broadcasters and viewers de- another. The devices will gradually take on command. The continued proliferation of broadband mon functions and become more powerful. Vari- ous “many-in-one” solutions with similar features will arise, most likely con- The roadblock to an entertainment PC could nected throughout the home by a be the PC itself. Even a cheap TV doesn’t crash high-bandwidth, wireless local-area network running off a powerful central or freeze. The best computers still do. server tucked away in the closet or basement. The server will maintain an al- connections, and initiatives to upgrade the Inter- ways-on broadband connection to the outside net such as IP version 6, will help resolve some of world over fiber-optic lines or satellite links. We these shortcomings. will live in a world of many devices, many net- Another problem is the proprietary architectures works and limitless scalable content, united by in- and codecs of software such as RealVideo, Quick- visible connectivity. Time and Windows Media. Hardware manufac- Like the platforms, the winning content of con- turers won’t build systems on software that is not vergence will be determined by the economies of open and a certified standard. Software makers will scale for the consumer, perhaps bolstered by the have to comply voluntarily if their products are to mergers and alliances of companies that provide work together in convergent fashion. the most compelling packages of content and de- If these advances occur, then an MPEG-4 stream livery. More interesting than “how we get there,” coming to your PC over a broadband connection though, will be what we do with convergence would be indistinguishable once we have it. History shows that when con- from cable TV—and you sumers are given new technological choices, the could store or edit those options that succeed are often different from what videos as well as distribute anyone imagined or intended. Although it’s still your own. The remaining far off, the outcome has already been given a roadblock could be the PC name, a term that will probably become the buzz- itself. For all its glory, the word of the next decade: emergence. SA

The Authors Further Information

PETER FORMAN (left) and ROBERT W. SAINT JOHN created convergence Video Compression. Peter D. Symes. software at Ligos Corp. in the late 1990s. Forman is president and CEO of Ligos McGraw-Hill, 1998. in San Francisco, which specializes in real-time, software-only video codec tech- The Guide to Digital Television. nology. He has been president of Intelligence at Large, a developer of Internet te- Edited by Michael Silbergleid and Mark lephony and videoconferencing; a vice president of Image G; and founder of New J. Pescatore. Miller-Freeman, 1999. Video Corp., a pioneer in personal computer video and audio codecs for media Digital Convergence. Andy Covell. authoring and training systems. Saint John is an independent video producer and Aegis Publishing Group, 2000. multimedia consultant in San Diego. His company, Nearly News Productions, fo- Sam’s Digital Television Report cuses on video production for videodiscs, the Internet and future d-video plat- (www.teleport.com/~samc/hdtv). forms. He has been director of technical marketing at Ligos and a digital video Consumer Electronics Association editor and has taught courses on video compression and 3-D graphics. (www. digitaltelevision.com). COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS OF COURTESY

MusicMusic WarsWars LISA PINES; NEWSMAKERS ( Internet distribution of quality d-audio is rapidly being perfected, but the precedent-setting legal battles have just begun by Ken C. Pohlmann

he technology behind digital music is developing more rapidly than the mu- The free down- sic business can handle. As headlines constantly remind us, the recording in- loading of music files through Web dustry is scrambling to cope with new formats and distribution modes that sites such as T Napster (above) threaten its hegemony in the delivery of recorded music. The rising popularity of the onto computers or Internet as a conduit for recordings has triggered irreversible changes in the way the portable MP3 public expects to experience music. Ostensibly “futuristic” concepts such as music- players like Rio (inset) has touched on-demand, access to record-label catalogues and the ability to surround oneself off a contest of with a steady stream of new music for free are already here. Music-as-data is creat- countermeasures to protect artists ing a new paradigm for the production and delivery of recordings that has befuddled and record labels. music’s own creators. And the challenges foreshadow those looming even larger on the horizon for d-movies, d-TV and, indeed, all forms of d-entertainment. The irony is that musicians, their record labels music is driven by how audio is produced and and consumers were all perfectly satisfied with the played and by how technology allows copyright now ubiquitous compact disc and CD players, protection to be breached. both cheaply manufactured, reliable and conven- Digital recordings sample an audio signal and ient to use. The interchangeability of discs between save the amplitude of each sample as a digital computer and stereo systems made the CD family “word.” A combination of sampling rate and a nearly ideal audio carrier. But technology never word length determine the final sound quality: the rests. The battle over the network distribution of higher the sampling rate, the higher the frequency www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 57 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Consumer B plays song on Consumer A stores ing.. his computer using music search MP3 file on his hard Bee Gees player such as Winamp or Consumer A inserts drive or Web site music CD into his RealJukebox computer and uses copying software to OR ”rip” a digital song my mix track into an MP3 file Burns MP3 song onto a blank CD Consumer B uses online search engine to find MP3 files on Web sites or uses file-sharing software such as OR Napster to request a song title; it www.mywebsite.com searches for Napster users online at Downloads MP3 file in- the moment and lists the drives to portable MP3 player where the MP3 song can be found. such as Rio or Rave He then downloads an available MP3 file of the song onto his hard drive

Copying songs response; the longer the word length, the lower can now transform CDs into MP3 files (a process over the Internet is the noise. The industry standard for CD dictates a known as ripping) using programs called MP3 free and easy with 44.1-kilohertz (kHz) sampling rate and 16-bit rippers or CD grabbers. The user inserts a CD into the aid of MP3 word length. That yields a bit rate of 1.41 million his computer and uses an MP3 encoder to con- CHRISTIE BRYAN and Napster soft- bits per second (Mbps), which delivers adequate dense it into a tidy MP3 file. The individual can ware, available fidelity. But it does not allow speedy transmission post the ripped file on his own computer or Web gratis online. over the Internet. Depending on Net traffic, a sin- site, making it publicly available. gle CD track lasting three minutes might take 90 minutes to download over a typical 56K modem. Ripping Mad about MP3 One solution is to reduce the sampling rate, but fidelity (specifically, frequency response) degrades. hat’s where the trouble begins. Converting A more cunning approach is to reduce the word Tyour own CDs to MP3 is not illegal if you use length. This increases noise; perceptual coding the copy for your own personal use—say, on your methods, however, enable engineers to shorten the MP3 player. But publicly redistributing music word length considerably with good results. An without permission from the copyright holder vio- encoder ignores the parts of a d-music signal that lates copyright law. Organizations such as the Re- are inaudible and reduces the data needed to con- cording Industry Association of America (RIAA) vey sounds. Depending on bit rate, the final fideli- contend that posting MP3 files constitutes copy- ty can range from nearly indistinguishable from right infringement, and they have confronted large the original to unlistenable. MP3-swapping Web sites, such as the infamous The family of these perceptual coding algorithms Napster. Using freely downloadable Napster soft- that dominates the audio industry has been devised ware, individuals can locate MP3 songs on the by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). hard drives of other people currently logged on to One of the MPEG standards defines a “Layer 3” Napster and copy them free—and quickly, with a coder, known as MP3, which uses stereo bit rates fast modem connection. Because the copies reside ranging from 64 to 320 kilobits per second (kbps). on thousands of Web sites that come and go A rate of 128 kbps achieves a compression ratio of through connections to Napster, it is difficult to 11:1 over a CD recording and permits fairly rapid assign blame. So the RIAA and bands such as Me- transmission over average Internet connections. A tallica have sued Napster for contributory copy- rate below 128 kbps generally introduces audible right infringement. distortion, whereas rates above 192 kbps should Of course, one clever idea begets another. A sound identical to an original CD source. Although program called Gnutella allows two users to swap low rates (such as 64 kbps) might be necessary in MP3 files directly over the Internet, without hav- today’s era of telephone modems, higher rates (192 ing to be routed through a central server such as kbps or better) will become the norm as more Napster. Gnutella was developed by Nullsoft broadband connections are established. Whatever (which also created WinAmp, the most popular the bit rate, MP3 reduces d-music files to more MP3 player software) and released as a down- manageable sizes. At 128 kbps, that same three- loadable beta version. Nullsoft is owned by Amer- minute CD track would take about eight minutes ica Online (AOL), which intends to merge with to transmit via a 56K modem. And a 20-gigabyte Time Warner, owner of Warner Music—a vocal hard drive could hold 300 digital albums, trans- critic of MP3. Not surprisingly, the Gnutella site forming a PC into a digital jukebox. was deemed an “unauthorized freelance project” The spread of MP3 coding has triggered funda- and was shut down by its own administrators. mental change in the music industry. A consumer One thousand copies had already been released,

58 Scientific American November 2000 Music Wars Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. however. The genie had left the bottle, and Gnu- also allows files to be electronically watermarked, tella clones started popping up everywhere. so illegally copied files could be traced to their The proliferation of bootleg MP3 files and pro- source. D-music files can be encrypted and de- grams like Napster and Gnutella spotlight the effi- crypted without affecting their fidelity. Water- ciency of Internet distribution of d-music and the marking, however, embeds a code into the audio difficulty in controlling that distribution. Despite signal, and great care must be taken to avoid audi- the legal war, hardware manufacturers are begin- bility. This is particularly important because even ning to embrace the format. New CD players play the record companies envision a near future when discs holding MP3 files as well as regular CDs. customers can log on, listen to music samples, and Meanwhile portable MP3 players such as Rio and then purchase and download their selections onto Rave have become extremely popular. They have MP3 players or burn them into their own record- nonvolatile flash memory cards (the same as those able CDs. More than 200 companies from the used in digital cameras) that store files down- music content, consumer electronics, information loaded from a PC. A player with 64 megabytes of technology and wireless telecommunications sec- memory holds about 66 minutes of music coded tors have signed on to use SDMI. at the quality level of 128 kbps. SDMI backers hope to avoid the disastrous Decentralized peer-to-peer networks, such as gaffe that led to the decryption of digital video- Freenet, go Gnutella one better. They employ intel- discs—the hot new video format. DVD-Video ligent routing and caching so that a file can move discs are encrypted with the Content Scrambling from PC to PC anonymously, making it virtually System (CSS). A 40-bit key is needed to descram- impossible to identify who posts or downloads a ble the video and audio information. Every manu- transmitted file. Lawsuits, injunctions and reversals facturer has its own unique key. As a result, every have roiled about Napster and other MP3 trading DVD-Video disc has 400 of the 40-bit keys resi- sites all year. The challenge confronting the record- dent on the disc. DVD-Video technology licensees ing industry is how to prevent unauthorized copying while still offering the consumer an Internet product he or she is willing to pay for. One popular download site, MP3.com, has settled lawsuits and reached distribution agreements with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and BMG Entertain- ment, allowing d-music from these record labels to be stored on the service. But in September it lost a lawsuit to Universal Music, the largest label of all. The recording companies will reportedly share with their artists an undisclosed amount of money from the settlements and awards. It is to everyone’s advantage that issues such as these get worked out, because they will be re- played in larger relief when quality digital video AP Photo goes online. Gnutella, for example, allows for the swapping of not just audio files but video files. This is a hotly contested area, as lawsuits over the DENNIS COOK publication of the DVD-Video encryption protocol appear to be heading for the Supreme Court. were supposed to encrypt their keys, but one li- Musicians Roger Security and the DVD Breach censee didn’t. A Norwegian group called MoRE McGuinn of the (Masters of Reverse Engineering), founded by Byrds (left) and he music industry has also responded to the teenagers, reverse-engineered Xing Technologies’s Lars Ulrich of Tpopularity of unregulated MP3 files by devel- DVD-Video player, unlocking its key. Then MoRE Metallica (center) oping its own Secure Digital Music Initiative was able to work out more than 170 keys by trial express distaste to Hank Barry about (SDMI) specification, to improve on the Serial and error before giving up out of boredom. Al- his song-swapping Copy Management System (SCMS) copy protec- though MoRE has been hit with several lawsuits, Web site, Napster, tion used in the current CD format. SCMS is no one imagines that the decryption key can once at a Senate Judicia- weak: a single bit designates whether a disc can be again be made secret. Even if SDMI avoids such ry Committee hear- copied or not. This discourages casual digital pira- obvious missteps, in today’s Wild West Internet ing held in July cy, but when a CD is ripped, the copy-prohibit bit environment, any scheme of this sort is seen as a concerning copy- is not carried forward. In the SDMI protocol, mu- provocation to cocky hackers. right violation. sic data will be encrypted and authenticated, so The unrestrained availability of MP3 files cer- users will not be able to convert a CD track into tainly challenges the status quo. Supporters of an MP3 file that could be posted on the Internet Napster, Gnutella, Freenet and their brethren envi- without the decryption key. sion an end to the era in which a few large compa- Furthermore, SDMI-compliant devices would nies dominate music sales. They foresee a democ- not play illegally copied SDMI files. The protocol ratization of music in which small labels are com- www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 59 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. petitive in a secure, downloaded virtual market. But its lack of backers and incompatibility with Thousands of independent artists could sell their the DVD juggernaut will probably relegate it to a music directly to consumers with no need for small niche. record labels for distribution, making a much DVD-Audio is a technology upgrade made in a wider range of recordings commercially viable. tradition of evolution that is comfortable for the Such a renaissance might lower costs for con- hardware and recording companies. But it seems sumers and increase income for artists and their clear that public demand dictates that the industry boutique, often self-run, labels. embrace online d-entertainment. As we advance to Another transmission option, real-time stream- broadband and wireless Internet delivery, music’s ing, has been less vexing. Data-reduction algo- accessibility will only increase, forcing the industry rithms reduce file size and bit rate sufficiently to al- to explore new business models. The choices will low the music to be played as fast as it is received. probably include purchase, pay-per-listen and This is how Internet radio stations and Webcasts monthly subscription. One scenario, proposed by operate. Listeners log on and download the contin- Magex, the digital commerce subsidiary of National ually broadcast file into a buffer player, available Westminster Bank, includes a onetime fee (a “micro- free online from companies such as RealNetworks. payment” of a few cents) for a single play, a larger In the best cases, music plays out one end of the fee for a set period (say, a 10-hour unit of play) buffer as it streams into the other end, although fits and an even greater fee for unlimited use. and starts are still common today. The low bit rate Or perhaps access to d-music will be free, and, as in broadcast television, revenues will come from advertising or corporate sponsorship. Com- The music challenges foreshadow those panies might clamor for the glamour. Just as the looming even larger for d-movies, d-TV, Hollywood film studios fought videotape and now profit enormously from it, it is conceivable indeed all of d-entertainment. that a shrewd adaptation to new technology might allow for even greater profit. required for streaming results in low fidelity, so The distribution technology that will shape our even though these files could be recorded onto an audio future is already in hand. Direct satellite individual’s hard drive, streaming is not seen as a broadcast to cars with small roof-mounted anten- threat to the record labels. Indeed, streaming has nas will begin in 2001. The merging of cellular become a valuable tool for labels and independent telephones and the Internet, yielding wireless Web artists to preview their work to customers. access, is profoundly changing telecommunications. And downloading of d-music files is essen- Needed: New Business Models tially an unstoppable force. The only pitfall to prosperity is the possible lack of cooperation lthough MP3 is stealing the headlines, the re- among the many manufacturers and media com- A cording industry is also quietly upgrading its panies to deliver the future’s promise. traditional media. The forthcoming DVD-Audio If they can deliver, we can envision a day when, format hopes to piggyback on the spectacular suc- as we sleep, our automated agents search Internet cess of DVD-Video. DVD-Audio eschews data re- catalogues to find music that we might enjoy. As duction in favor of no-compromise, high-fidelity we drive to work, that music seamlessly accompa- coding, as well as surround sound. A DVD-Audio nies us, unless we tune into one of 200 music chan- disc might be coded at a sampling frequency of nels beamed down by satellite. At work, we log on 192 kHz and a word length of 24 bits, far exceed- to free Webcast radio stations, streaming music or ing the performance of a CD. Whether the average music videos. In the evening we settle into our listener can appreciate the improved sound quali- home theater and bask in superb DVD-quality ty—or will pay for it—remains to be seen. New sound and pristine HDTV video. Then, late at generations of universal players play both DVD- night, we use a Napster-like program to listen to a Video and DVD-Audio discs. live bootleg feed from a rock concert in Tokyo. A similar super-audio compact disc (SACD) for- We revel in that guilty pleasure and resolve that mat, introduced by Philips and Sony, also seeks to we’ll make reparations by paying to download the provide higher performance and surround sound. concert when it’s officially posted tomorrow. SA

The Author Further Information

KEN C. POHLMANN is director of the music engineering tech- THE MP3 AND INTERNET AUDIO HANDBOOK. Bruce Fries nology program at the University of Miami and author of Princi- and Martin Fries (contributor). TeamCom, 2000. ples of Digital Audio, 4th edition (McGraw-Hill, 2000). He is a DVD DEMYSTIFIED. Jim Taylor. Second edition. McGraw- contributing technical editor to Sound & Vision and Mobile Enter- Hill, 2000 (available October 30). tainment. Freelance writer Wes Phillips contributed to this article. www.mpeg.org; www.dvdforum.org; www.sdmi.org COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR OF COURTESY

Digital video cameras and editing equipment are transforming the way movies are made—and even which movies get made by Peter Broderick

he digital revolution in moviemaking is well under way. New digital tools— Increasingly, filmmakers shoot docu- from cameras to editing software—are changing not only how movies are mentary and fiction made but also which movies are made and who makes them. The technolo- features with digital T video cameras, such gy is in place. The already impressive quality of reasonably priced digital video as that used for Paper cameras will continue to improve, as will the power of desktop editing tools. The Chasers (above). These cameras major hurdle that remains is a traditional distribution system that is unable to han- improve access to un- dle the new wave of digital moviemaking. predictable situations. www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 61 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. CHARGE- ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL COUPLED CONVERTER Digital Video Prism splits DEVICES Camera light (CCDs)

ENCODER

DV CCD CODEC CHIP

IEEE 1394 CONNECTOR

Information sent for editing

igital video cameras capture images on silicon chips rather than Don the 16- or 35-millimeter film that spools through a traditional film camera (opposite page).The data go from the chip to a videotape in the camera.The moviemaker can connect the camera to a comput- Edited version er with an IEEE 1394 cable,move the data to the computer’s hard disk recorded and then edit the images without any degradation in quality. For now, onto tape the finished movie is usually transferred to film for showing to audiences on a traditional theater projector. But the data will often be transmitted to cinemas via satellite or fiber-optic cables when digital projectors become widespread. COMPUTER

So far the digital revolution has had the greatest Movie viewed impact on the independent production sector. Op- on monitor or erating without the infrastructure and inertia of recorded to VCR the major Hollywood studios, independent pro- ducers have the flexibility to quickly embrace new opportunities and are highly motivated to find ways to reduce production costs. Signal can be I have been a part of this development through encrypted for satellite Next Wave Films, a company of the Independent distribution Film Channel that provides finishing funds and other support for independent filmmakers, whether they are shooting digitally or on film. Between 1998 SATELLITE and 1999 we saw the percentage of digital submis- TV AND VCR sions double, rising to over 34 percent of all re- quests for finishing funds. During the first six months of 2000, 51 percent of finishing fund submissions were shot on video, and 66 percent of the SATELLITE features added to our database originated on video. It’s not surprising that the earliest adopters of digital production technologies are the filmmakers with the most limited financial resources. No development has lowered the cost of moviemaking as dramatically as digital cameras and postproduction software for editing and special effects. In- dependent moviemakers can make features they could never afford to shoot on film. Moviemaking was previously one of the most expensive art forms. Unlike a poet or a painter, a filmmaker needed substantial financial resources and expensive equipment. Now, for the first time, independent filmmakers can afford to own the means of both production and postproduction. DIGITAL When aspiring filmmakers ask how much money PROJECTOR they need to make a digital movie, we can now

FILM ACETATE-BASED NEGATIVE FILM Film processed

raditional movie cameras record 24 images per second on acetate- Tbased film that has three layers of silver halide emulsion sensitized to red,green or blue.After the film is exposed and processed,a telecine machine transfers the negative to videotape. Next, the information (images or sound) on this videotape is input into a computer-based, TELECINE nonlinear editing system,usually an Avid.The movie is edited digitally on this system, which produces an edit decision list (EDL) indicating precisely which pieces of the original negative will be used and in which order. The negative is cut accordingly. Then release prints are made from the final negative and distributed to movie theaters. Film transferred to tape VIDEOTAPE RECORDER say, “Whatever you have is probably enough.” In- dependents with digital cameras and desktop com- VIDEOTAPE puters have the freedom of novelists to be spontaneous, to improvise, to strike out in new directions and to start over. The spectrum of budgets for digital movies is very wide. The upcoming Star Wars prequels are being shot with high-definition cameras and are likely to cost more than $100 million. Lars von Trier’s latest digital feature, Dancer in the Dark, cost about $13 million. Other established directors have made digital features in the $2- to $8-million range, including Mike Figgis (Time Code), Spike Lee (Bamboozled) and Wayne Wang (Center of AVID the World). Many novice filmmakers have directed first features for less than $10,000. Some have Negative cut even been made for under $1,000. Shot with a according to consumer digital video camera on a $900 budget, edit decision the thriller The Last Broadcast is in home video list (EDL) and television distribution in the U.S. and abroad. Release from Avid prints made In general, the lower the budget, the greater the financial benefit of shooting a feature digitally. FILM The cost of film stock and processing makes up a PROJECTOR higher percentage of the budget of less expensive movies.

A New Model for Financing

igital equipment has transformed the eco- Dnomics of low-budget movie production [see illustration on page 68]. In the traditional model, a writer creates a script, and then the search be- GROUND TRANSPORTATION gins for third parties willing to provide the money

GEORGE RETSECK to make it into a movie. After two or three years

www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 63 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. SHOOTING FILM VS. SHOOTING DIGITAL VIDEO the supplicants usually give up if they haven’t raised the money. If they do find financing, they will probably have to trade substantial creative control for it. This often involves giving the financing entity—whether a Hollywood studio or an independent company—final approval of the script, the stars and, ultimately, the film itself. In the new model of affordable digital moviemaking, filmmakers conduct a no-nonsense re- UNPROCESSED DV TAPE source assessment before writing the script: they FILM determine how much money they have access to, what equipment they can use, and which cast and crew will join the team. The filmmaker then writes Process a script that can be made into a movie within the at lab framework of available resources. This approach allows filmmakers to devote their time to making movies rather than raising money. Transfer film to tape The concept of making films with available resources was central to the ultralow-budget feature movement that began in the early 1990s. Shot on Edit on film before the advent of digital video, influential home system microbudget features maximized the use of available resources: El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez had free access to a dog and a school bus, both of Edit on which figure prominently in the film), Clerks Avid (Kevin Smith set his film, and shot it, in the con- system venience store where he worked) and The Broth- ers McMullen (Edward Burns shot his movie primarily in his parents’ house, where his mother cooked for the cast and crew). These features in- Create an edit Finish movie spired filmmakers across the U.S. and overseas to decision list (EDL) and put back to make films for under $100,000 rather than spend DV tape years trying to raise millions. The arrival of digital tools accelerated the decline of the budgets of first features by dramatically reducing the amount of Go back to film negative and cut it cash required. These new tools also provided film- Option: makers with more creative possibilities. transfer DV to film New Creative Options on the Digital Set

Make a print n a film set, the camera is rolling only a small from negative Opercentage of the time because of the expense of stock and processing and the amount of time required to light and set up each shot. On a digital U IP set, the camera is recording a much greater per- Ship to theaters -SH HEAVY centage of the time. Directors often use two cameras, something that is unaffordable on most con- DIGITAL PROJECTOR ventional film shoots. And because digital video production often necessitates a streamlined ap- Load film proach to crew and equipment, the resulting aes- thetic choices frequently make lighting simpler and less time-consuming. On some very low-budget features shot on film, the ratio of footage shot to footage used in the final cut is as low as 3:1. On comparable digital features, the shooting ratio could be as high as 50:1. This lets filmmakers work with actors in ways that would be impossible on film. Directors can shoot rehearsals, capturing inspired moments that would otherwise have been lost. Instead of filming only a few takes of a scene, a director can shoot as

many takes as he or she needs to achieve the high- CHRISTIE BRYAN

66 Scientific American November 2000 Moviemaking in Transition Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. est level of performance. On a digital set, the ac- cause the video master would already be sufficient tors usually do not stand around for hours be- for cable and broadcast television, as well as for tween scenes waiting for the lights to be rigged. satellite, home video and Internet distribution. Experimentation is now affordable throughout the production process. Digital playback, for ex- Independent Enthusiasm,Studio Caution ample, makes it possible to view what has been shot on the set immediately (rather than waiting lthough digital moviemaking has been rapidly one or two days to see film dailies). The director A gaining momentum in the independent sector, can try many variations on a scene and use video change at the studio level has been much slower. playback to see what is worth pursuing. This is not surprising, given that studios have an Digital cameras also allow filmmakers to take institutional investment in a production process advantage of the real world. Using an inconspicu- that has been the standard for decades. ous digital camera and a small crew, a director can Director George Lucas has done more to make shoot a fictional story in a nonfiction environ- the studios seriously consider using digital tools ment. Michael Rehfield, the director and star of than anyone else in the filmmaking community. Big Monday, made his feature on the streets and in His special effects company, Industrial Light & the subways of New York. Unlike studio films shot Magic, has pioneered many breakthroughs and on location in Manhattan using carefully choreo- continues to push the limits of movie magic. In the graphed extras in diligently policed cocoons, Big spring of 1999 Lucas sped the arrival of digital Monday incorporated actual street life in the frame, giving it the authenticity of a documentary. Using an inconspicuous digital camera and Director Paul Wagner used a small dig- a small crew, a director can shoot a fictional ital camera to shoot key scenes in Tibet for his feature Windhorse, which is ex- story in a nonfiction environment. tremely critical of the Chinese occupa- tion of that country. The authorities would never projection by insisting that The Phantom Menace have permitted such a movie to be shot there, but be projected electronically in several theaters [see they mistook the filmmakers for tourists making a “Digital Cinema Is for Reel,” on page 70]. home video. He has also been a catalyst in speeding the spread Digital tools have enabled directors to transform of high-budget digital production. By announcing the production process. Instead of having to shoot that the second and third installments of the new a movie during a single period, digital moviemak- “Star Wars” trilogy will be shot with high-definition ers can shoot and edit, write new scenes, and keep cameras, he signaled his conviction that $100-mil- shooting. For the first time, independent filmmak- lion features could be made digitally. His commit- ers have “affordable time.” This allows the movie ment spurred Sony and Panavision to jointly devel- to evolve in an organic way—the director can dis- op new high-definition digital cameras. In addition card the worst material and build on the best. If to having roughly twice the resolution of tradition- the project is not working, it can be abandoned at al video, these cameras produce 24 progressively any point and a new production initiated. If direc- scanned images a second. Ideal for capturing mate- tors own the digital camera and are working with a small crew and dedicated actors, they can take advantage of unpredictable factors the way The lightweight documentary filmmakers do. Last fall I asked a digital video director when he was going to finish shooting his camera allows digital feature. He replied, “Tonight, if it rains.” camera operators In addition, digital production can eliminate to shoot practically the high cost of creating optical effects on film. anywhere at a The power to create both spectacular and subtle moment’s notice. effects on desktop computers is increasing by At the left, Don leaps and bounds. Next Wave Films received an Cheadle scores in ultralow-budget science-fiction film with amazing Manic, shot this past June and July. desktop effects that would probably have cost at least $1 or $2 million if it had been made with a special-effects house. Digital filmmakers can also avoid or postpone another major cost of traditional film production—making a print. They can project their movie digitally until they find a distributor willing to finance the transfer to film for distribution in movie theaters. If theatrical distribution is not possible,

NEXT WAVE FILMS NEXT WAVE they would not need to pay for a ﬁlm transfer, be-

www.sciam.com Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. A FILMMAKER'S PATH TO FINANCING A FEATURE The Desktop Studio FILM DV t is now possible for all of us to try to become desktop IScorseses. Less than $2,500 will buy a desktop studio SCRIPT that can be used to make numerous movies.The components of the most basic,entry-level digital studio include: Director Needs name actor determines resources DV camera.High-quality cameras start at under $800 for to get money; a 1-chip MiniDV or Digital 8 camcorder.(Upgrade option: needs money available to get a 3-chip Sony PD-150;$3,700) name actor Desktop computer. The Apple iMacDV Special Edition Assembles crew comes with a monitor,128 MB of RAM,a 30-GB hard drive Attends (capable of storing more than two hours of DV material), a lot of FireWire ports (which allow your digital video and audio meetings to go from your camcorder directly into your computer with no loss of quality) and free iMovie 2 software (a sim- Time goes by ple-to-use nonlinear editing program):$1,500.(Upgrade option: Apple G4/450 MHz with full-featured Final Cut Pro editing software and Adobe After Effects effects software,including two 19-inch monitors;around $7,000)

Project is Cost of Shooting Film Project is green-lighted abandoned vs. Shooting Video

blablablahlablablahblablabl ablahlablablahblablablablah he differences in cost between shooting a movie on lablablahblablablablahlabla blahblablablablahlablablah Tfilm and shooting on video are significant.The following breakdown compares the average cost of shooting and preparing to edit one hour of 35mm film versus Executives get one hour of DV. veto power to approve script and casting Shooting 35mm, editing on video Film stock (5,400 ft of new Kodak 5274 stock, $.576/ft) $3,110.40 Processing ($.115/ft) 621.00 Prep for telecine 60.00 Script changes Telecine ($200/hr., 5:1 ratio, including tape stock) 1,000.00 Makes movie Tape stock 3 (one hour BetaSP & /4") 73.20 Total cost $4,864.60 Makes film Shooting MiniDV, editing on video Edits on Avid system Tape stock (camera original) $10.00 Edits movie Tape stock (backup tape) 10.00 Total cost $20.00

Executives Executives require require more rial designed to be transferred to film at 24 frames changes changes per second, these cameras avoid many of the artifacts that can bedevil video-to-film transfers. TEST SCREENING Time Code was the first live-action digital feature to be funded and released by a major studio. Its solid visual quality and the favorable critical reception may open the minds of more studio executives to digital production. But it is much too early to declare film dead. Hundreds of millions of moviegoers around the world have been brought up on celluloid. The re-

cent success of ﬁlms shot on Imax demonstrates the CHRISTIE BRYAN

68 Scientific American November 2000 Moviemaking in Transition Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. important role celluloid image quality can play. tually, once bandwidth has increased substantially, Hollywood does not want to jeopardize its relation- films will be delivered online. Viewers with high- ship with its global audience. Even if home video speed World Wide Web access and connections is more lucrative, theatrical distribution is the en- linking their computers to their televisions will be gine that drives the train of ancillary revenues. able to watch these movies at home with reason- The major studios will be very cautious in their ably good image and audio quality. use of digital production tools. Until executives are confident that they can shoot digitally and ultimately achieve the equivalent If independents don’t create new distribution of a film look in theaters (whether via 35- millimeter prints or digital projection), they mechanisms, they could be marginalized. will move slowly. Some features will be hy- brids, mixing film and digital video. Others will Independents will seek to reinvent distribution use digital video to achieve distinctive looks that by using the Web in tandem with other digital do not emulate film in any way. routes. Digital projection systems, which have already created opportunities at film festivals, will Can Digital Tools Transform Distribution? enable the development of a network of microcinemas. More portable and affordable digital projec- s more filmmakers make digital movies, there tors will be used in cafés, museums, community Awill be a growing supply of exceptional fea- centers and on campuses to show movies on a dai- tures that cannot find theatrical distribution be- ly, weekly or monthly basis. Microcinemas can op- cause screens in conventional movie theaters will erate with much lower overhead than movie the- continue to be devoted to Hollywood product. The aters and can cater to regular audiences seeking the number of independent features made annually in best new movies from outside Hollywood. Film- the U.S. could easily double in the next few years. makers also hope to make greater inroads via digi- This could greatly exacerbate the current crisis in tal broadcast satellite and cable. independent feature distribution, doubling the odds If independents don’t create new distribution against finding theatrical distribution if no more mechanisms, they could be marginalized. Although theater screens become available to independents. it will be easier for them to make features than in Independents now have an unprecedented op- analog times, it will be harder to get those features portunity to develop new routes to reach audi- seen in theaters. But if they can fashion new distri- ences instead of relying on a distribution system bution routes, the diversity and quality of movies that serves them poorly and the studios well. This available to audiences will soar. The digital revolu- will not be easy, because the well-funded gate- tion in production could usher in a digital renais- keepers who control access to traditional distribu- sance in distribution. SA tion networks will fight to retain their market dominance. But independents have several things going for them. Public awareness of independent filmmaking has increased, thanks to greater press The Author coverage, high-profile film festivals like Sundance and Toronto, and the expanding reach of cable PETER BRODERICK is president of Next Wave channels devoted to independent film. The supply Films, which finances digital features and provides fin- of excellent digital features will continue to grow. ishing funds to independent filmmakers. He has taught courses on independent production at the Uni- And then there is the Internet. It will be key in versity of California, Los Angeles, and given presenta- developing new distribution models and enabling tions on digital moviemaking at Cannes, Sundance, independents to build more direct connections to Toronto and other film festivals. Mark Stolaroff and audiences not satisfied with a steady diet of Holly- Tara Veneruso collaborated closely with Broderick on this article. wood fare. And they will be able for the first time to aggregate audiences across national boundaries. Further Information Previously, if distributors in a particular country did not believe a large enough audience existed for Books a film, no one in that territory had a chance to see The IFILM DV Filmmaker’s Handbook. Maxie Collier. Son #1 Media, 1998. Available at www.dvfilmmaker.com it (outside of film festivals). Digital Moviemaking. Scott Billups. Michael Wiese Productions, Anyone with Internet access can now purchase a 2000. Available at www.mwp.com/pages/booksdigitalmovie.html film online and have it delivered through the mail on videocassette or DVD. Independents from Magazines Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) to the team DV. On the Web at www.dv.com RES. On the Web at www.resmag.com that made The Blair Witch Project have already Videography. On the Web at www.videography.com demonstrated the power of the Internet to build awareness of movies playing in theaters. These Web Sites techniques will be modified to market digital www.2-pop.com movies not released theatrically to potential view- www.nextwavefilms.com

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR OF COURTESY ers across the country and around the world. Even-

www.sciam.com Scientiﬁc American November 2000 69 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. S P R E E C P I O A R L T Digital Cinema Is for Reel Digital projection works, but it’s not at a theater near you—yet by Peter D. Lubell

ince his first Star Wars film 23 years ago, AD TK George Lucas has been a leader in apply- S ing technology to the cinema. His most recent movie, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, contains almost 2,000 digital-effects shots. Yet Lucas took the digitization of The Phantom Menace a step further. During its premiere in the summer of 1999, a few showings were digitally projected. Audiences were amazed at the outstanding audio and the clarity and brightness of the pictures. The d-projectors per- formed well, but the technology must come down in price before its improved audio and visual presentation reaches a mainstream audience. For traditionally projected movies, multiple negative copies are made from a positive master print of the edited film. The negatives produce the thousands of positive prints that are shipped to theaters for projection. Digital cinema also starts with a master print. Each frame of a film is scanned and converted into digital format, and the final edited product is an extremely large data file, about 1,000 gigabytes on average. (If the movie is filmed digitally, the scanning step is unnecessary; see “Moviemaking in Tran- sition,” on page 61.) Ideally, the file, once compressed, would be transported electronically to theaters via broadband distribution—either fiber-optic cables or satellite transmission. In the 1999 demonstrations, hard drives were physically delivered to the test theater locations. Later demonstrations of lower-resolution Disney films used digital videodiscs (DVDs) as the portable storage medium. The 1999 tests used competing projection technologies from Hughes-JVC Technology and the DLP division of Texas In- struments. The DLP system, which had fewer technical problems, now appears to be the front-runner. Disney chose DLP’s technology for the digital release of several movies (including Tarzan, Toy Story 2 and Mission to Mars) at 12 North Amer- ican locations and many others overseas at the end of 1999. A d-projector uses the trichromatic red-green-blue (RGB) system, first proposed by Thomas Young in 1801, that is the basis for both color photography and television. All color im-

Digital Cinema Is for Reel Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. DIGITAL MICROMIRROR DEVICE (DMD) (R) lines would offer ship- Digital projectors COLOR-SPLITTING ping advantages, includ- from Texas PRISMS MIXED ing simultaneous de- Instruments feed R,G,B DMD (G) livery to the theaters. light to prisms that Cisco Systems and direct red (R), green 20th Century Fox (G) and blue (B) wavelengths to the demonstrated elec- appropriate digital tronic transfer via micromirror device the Internet this sum- (DMD). Meanwhile MICROMIRROR mer at Supercomm, a pixelated information ARRAY communications-ori- from the movie file is ented computer con- sent frame by frame ference held in Atlanta. to the DMDs. A DMD (B) Downloading the com- DMD fits in the palm pressed 42-gigabyte file of your hand, and its PROJECTION LENS of the animated film Titan tiny mirrors, each 16 square microns, turn A.E. took about two hours independently on HIGH-INTENSITY over high-speed lines. micromechanical WHITE XENON LIGHT Unfortunately, these benefits hinges, according to accrue mainly to the movie studios. their digital Digital projectors cost $250,000 each— instructions. The much more than the $50,000 for a current reflected components ages, as observed by human eyes, commercial film projector. Theater operators would intermingle before are composed of elements of these colors. be burdened with substantial conversion costs. reaching the The DLP projector employs three digital micro- Even if d-projectors sold for $100,000, retrofitting projection lens. mirror devices (DMDs), one each for red, green a 10-screen multiplex would cost from $1 million and blue. Prisms split high-energy white light, ob- to $1.5 million, excluding audio adjustments. The tained from a high-intensity (5,000-watt) white studios (and manufacturers) have proposed sever- xenon source, into the three colors and direct each al economic models for cost sharing, such as no- to the appropriate DMD. Each DMD is a 1,280- cost equipment loans and dual-tier (film vs. digi- by-1,024 array of digitally controlled mirrors tal) admission pricing. None have been warmly re- (3,932,160 mirrors in all!). Each mirror reflects ceived by theater owners, who see an expensive varying color intensities as obtained from the data technology being forced onto their niche market. file to project its component of an image. Digital projectors will improve. Whether they A d-projector fits within the same envelope as a are used is not a matter of technical performance standard 35-millimeter film projector and can pro- but of business practice. Theater operators must vide the same resolution. The 1999 d-projectors find digital distribution and projection attractive reportedly produced resolutions approaching 2,000 both artistically and financially. Until they do, d- horizontal lines, with contrast ratios (white to cinema is still a few years away. Even George Lu- black) of 1,000:1, matching contemporary 35-mil- cas, who is shooting Episode II using Sony digital limeter color prints. These numbers considerably videotape and editing the film digitally, expects to exceed the U.S. performance parameters of high- exhibit his final product in the traditional manner— definition TV. D-cinema has a long way to go, projected celluloid film. SA however, to meet the standards of the 70-millimeter prints used for big-budget blockbusters such as SHERRI A. LIBERMAN The Phantom Menace (typically 3,000 lines and The Author ratios of 1,200:1). But d-cinema holds financial promise as well. PETER D. LUBELL is a telecommunications con- Currently so-called saturation distribution through- sultant at Communications Strategies in Albertson, N.Y., and adjunct professor at the Polytechnic University of New York. He has also out the U.S. requires up to 5,000 prints at $2,000 worked for Home Box Office and Rainbow Media. each, for a total of $10 million—not including shipping costs and the logistics of timely delivery. Prints are usually good for only 30 showings before Further Information replacement. In contrast, the 19 hard drives, each holding 18 gigabytes, used to store The Phantom Making Digital Cinema Actually Happen—What It Takes and Menace master print cost about $260,000 and will Who’s Going to Do It. Steven A. Morley in 140th Annual last indefinitely—and copies can be made cheaply SMPTE Technical Conference Proceedings, Pasadena, Calif., and immediately, given enough available memory. pages 448–462; October 1998. Digital distribution via satellite or fiber-optic GEORGE RETSECK

72 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Digital Humans Wait in the Wings Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. S P R E E C P I O A R ll Humans L T Wait in the Wings Characters, scenes and entire movies have been crafted digitally. But can animators create realistic humans to star in computer-generated ﬁlms? Actors want to know by Alvy Ray Smith

hen movie star Richard Dreyfuss presented a technical Academy Award to me and my colleagues several years ago, he looked at us with a wry Wbut wary smile and said, “We’re both indispensable to each other. Don’t forget that—the people who made Toy Story. We’re all going into the 21st century together ... I hope!” Actors in the audience laughed, some of them nervously. Dreyfuss’s barely disguised fear fed on the growing claim by computer scientists that simulated actors like the characters in Toy Story will someday replace real ones as they become ever more humanlike. Zealots would replace Dreyfuss with a simu- lacrum that walks, talks, gestures, thinks and emotes of acting and the representation of actors. For the Sebastian Caine, just like the man himself—presumably without hir- foreseeable future, actors will be needed to infuse perhaps the most ing him at his substantial rates. characters—whether played by themselves or their believable digital Hollywood can rest assured that actors won’t be computer avatars—with credible actions, expres- human yet, was replaced by computer-generating beings in the ex- sions, voices and thoughts. modeled on actor panding world of d-entertainment. At least not The worlds they act in, however, are becoming Kevin Bacon by Sony Pictures soon. But completely computer-generated movies increasingly digital, with real-world believability Imageworks for are here and are already altering the actor’s role. improving fast. The movie Titanic used three-di- Hollow Man by Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first movie to mensional computer graphics to tell a story that anchoring virtual be made entirely by computer. No live-action film- could not otherwise be told on the screen. Com- muscle to bone; ing was needed. Three other “cameraless” movies puters allowed the filmmakers to show scores of adding eyes, skin have followed: Antz, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. people falling off a huge, capsizing Titanic in ways and blood vessels; All were created by Pixar Animation for Disney ex- that would be too dangerous, contrived or costly and controlling cept Antz, made by Pacific Data Images for Dream- to re-create on a real ocean, in a water-tank stu- fine joint Works. Although fascinating, these movies still look dio, or with models in miniature. In this year’s movements. like cartoons—wonderful, three-dimensional car- ocean disaster, The Perfect Storm, filmmakers at toons that concoct a “real” world, but cartoons Industrial Light & Magic engineered ferocious just the same. The ultimate challenge is to craft a 100-foot storm waves. These couldn’t be filmed digital, believable Richard Dreyfuss or Julia Rob- on real riotous seas or simulated in any other way. erts—a d-Dreyfuss or d-Roberts, if you will. And yet, despite their technical success, whether Supposing that we filmmakers can fashion a computer-generated movies succeed at the box of- convincing human character without an actor re- fice is a different question. The adolescent girls who quires a leap into the controversial computing reli- made Titanic so successful weren’t flocking to the- gions of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and aters for the graphics. The emotional, rich human COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS COURTESY artificial life—the digital “realization” of every- characters are what people most love. thing. We are wiser to distinguish between the art Some of today’s computer graphics are being

The ferocious seas done just for the sake of computer graphics. Con- on miles of film, which is edited into a movie reel engulfing actor sumers apparently like what they see, and the film- that is projected at 24 frames per second at your Mark Wahlberg in making business will go where the money is. But local movie theater. In traditional cel animation, The Perfect Storm as the technology matures, we will get back to the seen in classics from Fantasia to Pinocchio, anima- were simulated by fundamentals of good story and character, with tors draw characters with pencil on paper every Industrial Light & computers used in sophisticated ways audiences third frame or so. Artists called inbetweeners fill in Magic using computational won’t even be aware of. the missing frames. Each drawing is traced in ink fluid dynamics How far can computer simulation go? Can we onto a sheet of clear celluloid, or “cel,” and “opa- for waves and create believable humans on screen? Building a quers” fill in the outlines with colorful, opaque turbulence; rule- completely simulated person requires solving im- paints. Meanwhile an artist paints a background based particle pressive problems, such as how to convey con- scene, perhaps elaborately if it will be used for dynamics for sciousness, emotion (if indeed the two are separa- many frames. Character cels and a background are ripples, foam and ble, as University of Iowa neuroscientist Antonio stacked in register, and each combination is ex- spray; and fractal- Damasio wonders), physical nuance and acting, posed on a single frame of film in a conventional based shaders that just for starters, not to mention the philosophical movie camera. The camera is advanced one frame, add surface question of qualia—how a character knows “blue- and the whole process repeats thousands of times. textures and even scatter light inside ness.” We might someday make an artificial Mari- Modern, digital cel animation began in 1990 water drops. lyn Monroe (the usually favored example), because with a Pixar system used by Disney to make The she, as I, is a biological machine that is ultimately Rescuers Down Under and later stormed theaters explainable in physical terms, at least to a much with Disney blockbusters such as The Lion King. In finer degree than is possible today. But achieving this technique, the pencil drawings and inbetween- this understanding is still a statement of faith. No ing are crafted by artists as before, but computers one can predict whether the virtual actress will ever are used to complete all the other steps. Comput- exist or if she would be cheaper or more versatile er-controlled cameras do the filming. Yet the than the real item. We might run into some funda- biggest advantage is digitizing the logistics. This mental logical roadblock, as mathematicians did unsung aspect of making animated films—keeping with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. track of the hundreds of thousands of elements in various stages of completion—is a true leap for- Kevin Bacon Driving Kevin Bacon ward, saving great time and effort. Digital cel animation still has a two-dimensional ather than fantasize about a magical Second look. Clay animation is an attempt to conjure a 3-D RComing called “emergence” or preach about world and has only recently been used in feature- world domination by machines, as some of my col- length films, such as this past summer’s hit Chick- leagues have done, I offer what we might reason- en Run. The elements in each frame are modeled ably attain in a current lifetime—an integration of in clay, and the animator must painstakingly move the best of both worlds, human and machine, artis- a chicken’s leg, say, a fraction of an inch for every tic and technical. frame to make the creature appear to walk. In a conventional movie, cameras capture actors Claymation will never look lifelike, however,

74 Scientific American November 2000 Digital Humans Wait in the Wings Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. A head-on crash because clay models are clay models. 3-D comput- (bottom frame) er graphics animation (sometimes called simply 3-D was concocted by animation) is an attempt to fabricate a believable layering computer- world with no drawings, models or live actors on generated images: (from top) a film. In geometric terms, special software models virtual Andrea each character, object and background as well as Gail; the rendered their shading, lighting, movement and motion ocean; a simulated blur. Wrapping a picture onto a surface fashions side splash; the complex, textured objects. All characters, sets, lo- bow slam into the cations and visual effects, plus location sound and oncoming wave; sound effects, are manufactured digitally, and the and lighting from editing and mixing of the components proceed rigging lamps. digitally, too. For now, dialogue and music are usually recorded by live people, but these, too, could eventually come from brawny computer chips. Frames are stored in a computer’s hard drive and are transferred to conventional film once the movie is done, purely so it can be shown on projectors at movie theaters. As theaters change over to digital projection [see “Digital Cinema Is for Reel,” on page 70], they will simply download the digital movie via satellite or run a digital videodisc. In this computer-generated (cameraless) movie, animators construct a virtual person by building a skeleton, covering it with muscles and skin, and making the character move in nearly lifelike fashion. The most complex attempt at a human yet was seen this past August in Hollow Man, which featured a completely digital (but skinless) Kevin Bacon, created by Sony Pictures Imageworks. Despite the remarkable feat of Hollow Man, it may still take another two decades before a plausible Kevin Bacon can be created without filming the real actor as at least a model for his virtual self. To generate some of the movie’s effects, Bacon had to wear a green bodysuit so animators could film his movements and then map them onto the computer-generated model. More important, he acted out Hollow Man’s character. That hints strongly at the most likely role of actor and animator, of man and machine, in computer-generated movies: real actors driving realistic representations of human beings, perhaps even of themselves. I am sure that the acting abilities of animators and actors can be melded, because we have already done it. Woody, the cowboy in Toy Story and Toy Story 2, is not just voiced by Tom Hanks. He seems to act like Tom Hanks would in various situations. Hanks would get “into character” when he read Woody’s lines: his eyes opened wide at surprise, his shoulders dropped at disappointment. Pixar video- taped Hanks during these sessions, and the anima-

tors used his visual cues as inspiration for Woody. BROS. WARNER © 2000 To a small degree, Woody became a computer-generated Tom Hanks in chaps and yet still took on his own persona, because the animators infused conception, an animator is just that special kind of his character with their own great acting talents. talented actor who can make us believe that a col- Here lies a fascinating new avenue for actors. lection of colored polygons has heart, gets angry Indeed, when John Lasseter, Pixar’s principal artis- and outfoxes the coyote. tic director, searches for new animators, he says he This is not a strange concept. An actor on stage doesn’t look for drawing ability or knowledge of or screen is an animator of his own being. He computer modeling and certainly not for program- makes us believe that the body, voice and mind we ming experience. He looks for acting skill. In this see are those of an entirely different person—in www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 75 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Scene development Hanks’s case, anyone from Apollo 13 astronaut and so on. We often represent a curved surface in Toy Story 2 Jim Lovell to the maladroit Forrest Gump. with a very fine approximation of tiny polygons, so included (left to Anyone who has played Doom, Quake, Ultima the total number of polygons is used as a good right) the original Online or any other such group online video game measure of the geometric complexity of an object storyboard sketch, has represented himself or herself by a graphical and hence a scene. When we were at Lucasfilm, my in pencil; a crude computer graphics character—an avatar. People readily represent colleagues Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull and Rob realization of themselves, and many choose an avatar of the op- Cook first came up with the notion of 80 million characters, as wire posite sex. Some choose animals or objects. The polygons per frame as the reality threshold. The in- frames or outlines; quality of these impostors suffers greatly because dustry has quoted this estimate for years, saying, a rendering check of the bandwidth-starved Internet and micro- “Reality begins at 80 million polygons.” with colored processor limitations, but the point is that humans Using film’s 24 frames per second, the reality polygons, typically already commonly drive self-manifestations. For threshold is thus 1.9 billion polygons per second. tiny triangles and the cameraless movie, think of an actor driving a The rate of 30 frames per second for television or quadrilaterals (not first-rate avatar. Think of Kevin Bacon driving a videotape implies 2.4 billion polygons per second. visible); and the realistic representation of Kevin Bacon. Today’s hottest computers can handle only mil- final rendering at movie-screen Why bother? Because the computer-generated lions of polygons per second. Generating reality in resolution with Kevin Bacon can dive from a cliff into the ocean at real time would be marvelous, of course, but the full lighting of Acapulco, or off a neuron into his own brain, with- movie business would be happy just to reach reality. textures and out getting hurt or shrinking really small. To measure how distant real time still is, consider patterns. this: Toy Story took an average of seven hours of Reaching 80 Million Polygons computation for each frame. Toy Story 2 required several hours per frame, too, and some of its most o already there are actors, called animators, complex frames took more than 50 hours. Sdriving somewhat credible representations of When it was complete, Toy Story 2 had only human beings. What’s missing from the fully cam- doubled its predecessor’s complexity, to between eraless movie vision is realism—a significant chal- four million and 39 million polygons per frame. lenge. Can it be met? What did increase by a factor of six in those four The now famous Moore’s Law captures the dy- years was total rendering time per frame, at least namic of the ongoing digital revolution. Though it for some frames. Pixar’s Don Schreiter re-rendered is usually applied to the exponential increase in frames from both movies for this article, on the the density of transistors on an integrated circuit, same modern hardware, for a direct comparison. let me express it in an uncommon way: everything Frames from the newer film took six to 13 times as good about computers gets 10 times better every long to compute. Averages provided by Pixar’s Bill five years, or “10x in 5.” Circuit designers believe Reeves, taken over all frames of both movies, indi- that Moore’s Law still has about 10 more years’ cate a ratio closer to 5:1. usefulness—another factor of 100—before a quan- Even at 80 million polygons per frame, we can’t tum-mechanical wall bars further improvement. really claim to have replicated reality. True reality Moore’s Law prorated to four years drops the might be fractal in complexity: the closer you look, factor 10 to roughly six. Applied to pictures, it the more an object looks the same—remaining just seems to tell us that the three million to 17 million as complex. But most of us will accept that level of polygons used per frame in 1995 to create Toy Sto- visual complexity as realism. It is a mistake to ry–level complexity should have become 18 mil- think that true realism is even our goal. Movies are lion to 102 million polygons per frame by the time never real. Dialogue is pieced together, sets feature Toy Story 2 reached completion in 1999. A poly- false fronts, lighting is artificial, and editing plays gon is the smallest unit of geometry that is typically with time. What “realism” means is a convincing manipulated. Digital filmmakers craft every object representation of reality. Usage of the representa- and character by modeling its surface, gluing to- tions might be totally surreal. As I have often said, gether good old Euclidean spheres, cylinders, cones reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.

76 Scientific American November 2000 Digital Humans Wait in the Wings Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. My colleagues calculated the figure of 80 million Overall, the shading portion of the “other 90 polygons by considering what the human eye sees percent” of reality should ease greatly when the in an image. Assume a scene you are to view is di- Moore’s Law factor reduces hours of rendering time vided into an array of tiny squares, each modeled to seconds. But human viewers add the requirement in the computer by one point of light, called a pic- of accuracy. Look at a brown chair closely; it is not ture element, or pixel. For reference, the frames in all “brown”—there are blemishes and specks of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 had 1.4 million pixels, other colors. Society has a word for an almost-but- and A Bug’s Life had 1.8 million. Monsters, Inc. not-quite-human: monster. The computer graphics (Pixar’s next) will have two million. A pixel represents, with a single color, the average Richard Dreyfuss should talk with his attorney of all the light rays hitting one little square from the projected scene. That bundle of about protecting his representation. Does light rays can portray about four levels of surfaces. Each level comprises about eight he or his avatar command the higher salary? polygons. Thus, there are 32 polygons for each bundle’s pixel, or 32 million polygons for community currently opts for simplifying humans— each million pixels of frame resolution. We consid- making them obvious cartoons—rather than risk ered frames with 2.5 million pixels; hence, 80 mil- our perceiving them as monstrous. Or it makes lion polygons per frame. them purposely monstrous, as in Hollow Man. Or it goes for animal representation, as with the A New Reality mouse in Stuart Little. Barbara Robertson, a long- time commentator on the computer graphics scene, ur logic has held up empirically—and re- suggests that the eponymous mouse holds the title Omarkably, considering the arbitrariness of for best artificial actor in a live-action film so far, fac- our argument. But the number of polygons per toring in complexity of representation as well as act- frame will vary with the final resolution of the im- ing ability. Perhaps the Academy of Motion Pictures ages. What is needed is an estimation for achiev- Arts and Sciences should designate an award for this ing maximal reality, from the viewer’s perspective, new category—for an avatar and its actor-animator. independent of the number of pixels in a frame. Ac- Solving these problems requires new tools that cording to this perspective (encouraged by my Pixar can model intricately detailed representations with- colleagues Reeves, Catmull, Oren Jacob and Galyn out becoming hopelessly complex. Physical mod- Susman), polygon counting or any geometric eling could help, once the complex physics of form measure misses the point. Geometric complexity and motion are better translated into manageable does not equal realism—it constitutes only an esti- computer routines. Instead of an animator having mated 10 percent of it. So what makes up the rest? to laboriously animate the action of a pogo stick, Shape and shade, together, are one big factor. for example, he could use a program with a model Shape is a 4-D concept that covers the geometry of of how a spring works to compute the frames. an object or character plus its motion. The tree- Motion capture will help, too, as it did in Hol- lined street of Toy Story 2 is much more realistic low Man. Put a human in a bodysuit highlighted than the one in Toy Story because of subtle move- with fiduciary marks, film him doing a twist off a ments of the leaves; this contributes more to the be- diving board, and use the frames to guide the ani- lievability than does the geometric accuracy of the mator. This sounds powerful, but it is not well un- still objects. Shading colors the objects and includes derstood. If you just sample a human’s motion their illumination as well as their material and tex- point by point, it won’t look right. Animators have tural makeup. Lighting has arisen as a particularly compensated for this with classic animation tricks challenging task within shading. Direct computa- of anticipation, squash, stretch and exaggeration. tion of the physics is too hard; Mother Nature does Now we need software that automatically does

PIXAR ANIMATION it in parallel and real time, but computers cannot. these things for motion-captured 3-D models.

www.sciam.com Scientiﬁc American November 2000 77 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Believability A technique called image-based rendering will posite Al Pacino for his next ﬁlm, Simone, the leaped from Toy allow us to measure reality itself more accurately. Screen Actors Guild (SAG) protested, saying it Story (left) to Toy We currently use two different methods to make would cost an actor a job. Although no such char-

Story 2. Geometric pictures with computers: geometry (polygons) and acter could be lifelike given the current state of PIXAR ANIMATION complexity sampling (digitizing an object into a set of pixels). technology, the rancor indicates resistance to what doubled, and computation time The place where these two worlds intersect is im- will be a fundamental change soon enough. Rather rose by a factor of age-based rendering. In this approach, a camera- than protesting, SAG should be figuring out how 10, to improve man runs his camera over an object (a vase, say) to represent all the creative talent behind a movie, lighting and from all angles. Each frame is digitized. A comput- not just the brand-name actors. Animators, by my texture and to add er, in a very hairy calculation, figures out by trian- argument, are actors and should be in SAG. subtle motions, gulation where each colored pixel “lives” in 3-D Actors and avatars are two separate things. Dig- such as the flutter- space, thus creating a 3-D model of the object or ital filmmakers are replacing representations, not ing of leaves, that at least of its surface. This advances computer acting. The acting talent will always be integral. greatly enhance graphics’ fundamental imaging element, the 2-D Richard Dreyfuss should relax and contemplate a the sense of reality. pixel, into a 3-D pixel, often called a voxel. screen body of his that doesn’t necessarily age. The As the number of controls for a character in- cameraless movie needs him. He should start talk- creases from the hundreds (Woody in Toy Story) ing with his intellectual-property attorney about into the thousands (Al in Toy Story 2) to the hun- protecting his representation. Does he or his avatar dreds of thousands or even millions required for command the higher salary? The essential problem believable humans, we will need powerful tools becomes interfacing the actor to the realistic model like these that can be applied with a simple click. and the actor adapting to that mode of acting. An- Our society is definitely in the midst of an enter- imator-actors are exploring this area now. It took tainment revolution. Animation will begin to ap- us 20 years from initial conception to reach the proach, if not supplant, live action. Is Hollywood first completely computer-generated movie. Per- ready? Maybe not. When (false) rumors surfaced haps the next 20 will bring us the completely be- in August that writer-director Andrew Niccol lievable cameraless movie—created together by would cast a computer-generated leading lady op- artists and technicians. SA LOUIS FABIAN BACHRACH FABIAN LOUIS The Author Further Information

ALVY RAY SMITH, co- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. founder of Pixar Animation, Antonio Damasio. Harcourt Brace, 1999. is a digital photographer in Building a Better Mouse. Barbara Robertson in Computer Graphics World, Vol. 22, No. Seattle. He has a Ph.D. in 12, pages 32–40; December 1999. computer science, has been Visible Difference. Barbara Robertson in Computer Graphics World, Vol. 23, No. 7, pages director of computer graphics 26–34; July 2000. research at Lucasﬁlm and Films notable for their graphics and special effects: graphics fellow at Microsoft. The Rescuers Down Under (Disney, 1990). The Lion King (Disney, 1994). Toy Story Smith has garnered two Acad- (Disney, 1995). Titanic (Fox-Paramount, 1997). A Bug’s Life (Disney, 1998). Antz (Dream- emy Awards for technical Works, 1998). Stuart Little (Sony, 1999). Toy Story 2 (Disney, 1999). Chicken Run achievement. (DreamWorks, 2000). Hollow Man (Sony, 2000). The Perfect Storm (Warner, 2000).

78 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Digital Humans Wait in the Wings Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. S P R E E C P I O A R Your OwnVirtual L T Storyworld True interactive entertainment will arise once engineers and artists create virtual realities that can unfold improvisationally by Glorianna Davenport

t is a muggy summer day in 2004. I am driving my new car—an FEV (full en- Virtual dog tertainment vehicle)—along the traffic-clogged highway that leads to the kids’ named Duncan learns tricks in I summer camp. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I notice a BMW convertible much the same quickly gaining on us. I grumble to myself and pull into the slow lane to let it pass way as his real- life counterpart. by. For me, driving is the usual tedious task. But for my kids, Jamie and Joy, the trip is an adventure of their own choosing. From their position in the back seat, the kids see Suddenly, a police car in hot pursuit appears on the the speeding sports car as a Tyrannosaurus rex on holo-window as a screeching pterodactyl chasing the run, legs thrashing and tongue flailing. As the the thunder lizard. The T. rex looks over its shoul- dinosaur roars past the holographic side “win- der, stops and exhales a steamy sigh as the flying dow,” Joy slaps it with her lollipop, which sticks to reptile perches on its tail. “Got him!” Jamie yells the screen. The FEV’s onboard computer responds in satisfaction, as lightning and dark clouds invig- to her assertive gesture by sending a message to the orate the scene of Jurassic capture.

WEBB CHAPPELL speeder’s dashboard display: “Hey, slow down.” Does a family car that entertains passengers with

www.sciam.com Scientiﬁc American November 2000 79 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Evolution of Interactive Entertainment lectronic entertainment has been inviting us to interact since the 1950s,but most forms Estill lack the capacity for improvisation or serendipity. Merging elements such as “smart” stages and synthetic actors with sophisticated graphics will give rise to virtual storyworlds that go far beyond anything we see today.

1953 1972 1977 1983 Winky Dink and You (CBS) Early experiment Adventure (Will Dragon’s Lair (Don Bluth, in interactive TV. Crowther and Don Cinematronics) Woods) Viewers place Pong (Atari) Laser-disk technology Pioneering example of plastic sheet over Passive viewer becomes enables the step to the interactive ﬁction.Text- the monitor,and interactive player who visually stunning illusion of a based story unfolds on cartoon characters uses a handheld dial to 3-D world.Player controls a hu- the computer screen as lead them through control a graphical manlike character rather than player types commands drawing exercises. Ping-Pong paddle on a an inanimate object. to initiate the next action TV screen. in puzzle-solving game.

an interactive fantasy world seem far-fetched? The your car windows. As media technology moves technology is almost at hand. Global Positioning from the specialized spaces of the theater and liv- System (GPS) receivers, which employ a network ing room into the total surround of everyday life, of satellites to locate precise latitude and longitude, d-entertainment will be available wherever we are, are available in many new vehicles, and automo- whenever we are receptive and on whatever de- bile manufacturers are scrambling to connect driv- vices are present. ers to the Internet. Within the next 10 years ultra- By its nature, interactive technology will also of- thin, holographic monitors could replace windows, fer a wealth of choices about how a story unfolds, and miniature video cameras could track events on so no two people’s entertainment experience need the road and inside the car. Special software would ever be the same. Writers will not have to script then translate the vehicles’ relative movements, and entire tales ahead of time, because the people who the passengers’ actions, into digital fantasy—a vir- enter the story will become the characters whose tual storyworld. Although it is only one possible decisions move the story along. A writer may future scenario, the FEV heralds a new era of inter- shape the initial circumstances, but the story will active d-entertainment. unfold improvisationally. The story environ- Engineers have attempted to create interactive ment—and characters within it—will respond to entertainment since the 1950s [see timeline personal messages, news and other forms of infor- above], but most of today’s choices still force some mation. What this kind of virtual storyworld will kind of undesirable trade-off. If you want a com- require is a database network that is embedded pelling narrative, you must usually accept the pas- with enough story elements and decision-making sive experience of cinema or television. If you pre- algorithms to generate various serendipitous ac- fer to make decisions, as with computer and video tions with unique content. games, you generally sacrifice a good story line. The future of interactive d-entertainment will Smart Stages and Animated Actors bring convergence of fixed narrative and personal choice, combined with the computer graphics ca- nother necessary component of the virtual sto- pabilities it takes to render the story in real time. Aryworld is an interactive stage where the ac- Several innovations are key to these imminent tion can take place. This stage is where content advances. Increasing bandwidth is beginning to al- can be found, made and shared as needed; where low people to choose personalized entertainment informational messages can be sent and received; from central distribution networks, such as and where virtual characters can engage in their movies-on-demand. Novel input devices, such as own business or interact with the audience. No touch screens and speech-recognition tools, are such milieu exists, but a new type of cyberspace changing the way we can communicate with the portal—currently under development at the Internet or other networks. New types of audio Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media and visual displays are enabling ever more realistic Laboratory—may be a promising first step. Called sensory environments. And miniaturized wireless Happenstance, it is an animated computer graph- technologies are making computing and commu- ics landscape that manages information according nications mobile, bringing d-entertainment to to the preferences and situation of a particular user. your handheld computer, your watch and even As we know from cinema, landscapes provide

80 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Your Own Virtual Storyworld Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Sim City (Will Wright,Maxis) Doom (id Software) Introduces interactivity with no 3-D action game The Spot preordained outcome.Players try popularizes multi- (American Cybercast) to build successful cities based on player gaming. First interactive Web-based soap choices of utili- People all over the opera,or Webisodic.Viewers ties,housing, world play one an- submit ideas about what they industries other in real time,via think characters should do next. and so on. the Internet.

1989 1993 1995 2000

Big Brother Back to the Future: (CBS/Endemol Entertainment) The Ride (Universal Cyberdome Theater Audience members affect story line Studios Florida, (Boeing) by voting to banish residents of a Berkshire Rideﬁlms) Myst (Cyan) Audience members house where people are living Convergence of Inserts puzzle- control outcome of unscripted lives.Viewers can sensory perception, solving story such as theater experience by watch an around-the-clock other than sight and Adventure into a directing 3-D graphical Webcast of the goings-on. sound,with a theater graphically vivid images,using a ﬁve- experience. computer world. button keypad in the armrest of each seat.

the illusion of continuity in space and time. Graph- such as a T. rex from a BMW. Human actors— ical representations of weather, plants and other playing the part of characters that they design— features of the natural environment provide the could enter the story via their personal computers same illusion in the cybersurround of Happen- or other input devices. A third set of actors—semi- stance. Your window into this world is your com- autonomous, virtual beings that are part of the en- puter monitor, and you use a mouse and keypad to vironment—could also work to move the story navigate and send commands, but the similarity to forward. current graphical interfaces ends there. This eco- Creating convincing synthetic actors is no easy logical interface translates common computer ac- task. A satisfying interactive narrative requires char- tivities, such as conducting Internet searches, into acters that can convey emotion and improvise ac- movement through the landscape. tions. They must have minds of their own, and they If you decide, for instance, that you’re hungry must be able to surprise us. Such characters con- for Chinese food, you could type a query that gets trast sharply with the best of those from the current attached to an icon of a tree seed. You could then generation of computer games. These dronelike be- plant the seed in the cybergarden of Happenstance ings can execute impressive, programmed actions, to begin a search for nearby restaurants. Today’s but they cannot improvise, and they cannot develop ); Internet browsers would list the query results as relationships with the players. hyperlinked blocks of text, but inside Happen- Media Lab researcher Bruce Blumberg is trying

Dragon’s Lair Dragon’s stance the results appear as leaves sprouting on a to scale the technological barrier between drones tree. Before you can examine the leaves, a volcano and actors by giving virtual beings the “brainpow- begins erupting in the distance—a signal that news relevant to your search is

) about to arrive. Happenstance is pro- People who enter the story become characters ); LEISURE, DIGITAL INC. ( grammed to search for serendipity; the whose decisions move the story along. Pong

Big Brother query for Chinese food has also brought you documentary ﬁlm elements about China. A er” to respond to unscripted situations. He creates cinematic editor-in-software directs a graphical se- computer models of cognitive processes—sensory quence that pans away from the tree and zooms in perceptions, learning, emotions and motor skills— on the cloud of smoke that is emerging from the and installs them in animated characters. Most re- volcano. The cloud moves overhead, and details cently Blumberg’s team designed Duncan H. Terri-

); OF DAVID COURTESY WINTER ( from the ﬁlms rain down into a river that identiﬁes er, a virtual sheepdog that they hope will one day them by their keywords. emulate his real-world counterpart, a lively Silky ); FROM AMERICA ONLINE ( SCREEN SHOT Winky Dink Even a stage as smart as a future-generation Terrier named Sydney [see illustration on page 79].

Myst Happenstance cannot tell a story with all the com- Duncan’s brain is a catalogue of action “tu- plexity one would want. For interesting narratives ples”—probabilistic statements that guide his be- to unwind, characters must be added to the mix. havior—that the programmers based on the ethol- ); CYAN, INC. ( Imagine a fortune-teller sitting beside the tree of ogy of how real dogs behave and learn. Each tuple

Sim City Chinese restaurants or a dog fetching various sto- deﬁnes a particular action and the conditions un- ry elements from the river. Some characters could der which it should begin and end. Some tuples COURTESY OF EDWIN BRIT WYCKOFF ( WYCKOFF OF EDWIN BRIT COURTESY MAXIS, INC. ( be mapped from nonhuman elements of real life, encode appropriate reactions to emotions, to phys-

www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 81 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. ical needs or to sensory perceptions. The key to pers by. The possibilities for surprise behaviors making Duncan’s responses expressive, Blumberg grow when you add sheep and wolves to Dun- says, is adding a modifier to each programmed ac- can’s world, each of which are individually pro- tion: “If you see food, then eat it quickly until it’s grammed. Perhaps ironically, computer power gone,” or “If you get kicked, then run away will probably not be the biggest challenge in devel- whimpering until you are a safe distance away.” oping characters more advanced than Duncan. Each tuple also has a value that derives from its The biggest hurdle will be figuring out how to in- consequences. Gobbling a dog biscuit results in a tegrate motivation, emotion and learning abilities change in hunger, which in turn reduces the value in a convincing way. Characters such as Duncan of eating. are the first step toward creating synthetic actors Much of Duncan’s programming makes him in- who can enliven the interactive, virtual story- stinctively inclined, as are real dogs, to please his worlds of the future. master. Duncan “watches” you from a large video monitor; software translates your presence and Getting There your voice into sensory perceptions that Duncan can understand. You stand before him on a surf- erging smart, iconic stage sets and synthetic boardlike device that monitors the direction in Mactors within a vast computational network which you shift your weight to move you through will open the door to interactive d-entertainment the virtual Scottish moors where Duncan lives. scenarios that we cannot imagine now. But as the Like a real dog, Duncan initially has no idea simple case of Duncan shows, programming all that performing actions in response to specific ver- the imagery that could result from the various serendipitous interactions among characters is itself a daunting task. The d-entertainment in- A convincing interactive character must dustry will also have to agree on standards convey emotion and improvise actions. that encourage the building of infrastructure and the mass-production of new devices that bal commands will lead to good things. Rather he can all work together. discovers this reality through experience. (Indeed, Even if engineers and artists can develop the Duncan is trained using a technique borrowed technology, infrastructure and ideas, the economics from real dog training, called clicker training.) Ini- will still need to be worked out. Who will con- tially, Duncan randomly chooses actions to per- tribute to these evolving stories, and who will pay form such as “sit” and “shake.” When he does for them? One possible strategy would be the use something that you want to encourage, you click a of microtransactions: you pay for the parts of the button that sends him a signal of praise—a virtual story you watch, and you are paid for your contri- doggie biscuit. Because sitting led to a good thing, butions. Another possibility would be to market a its value is increased, making it more likely that theater experience in which the audience controls Duncan will choose that action in the future. Dun- the story as a group. In contrast to today’s passive can’s statistical memory also keeps track of what cinema experience, a storytelling database could al- seems to be true about the world when he per- low a movie experience to be generated at run forms the action and tries to find contexts in time. The pieces could be chosen based on the which he is most likely to get a treat. So if you give computed sum of the audience members’ collective Duncan a verbal cue right as he is beginning to sit, prior theater experience. Stored on a theater key and if you preferentially reward him in those cas- card, this list of prior experiences would ensure es, he will eventually learn that sitting when you that the new theater experience was different from say “sit” is a more reliable strategy for getting a everything any audience member had already seen. treat than simply doing it when you happen to be A virtual storyworld where interactive d-enter- around. tainment waits for us around each bend of our dai- Duncan’s 30-odd tuples, which represent both ly lives might be years off. But projects like Duncan learned and innate behaviors, are always compet- and Happenstance, as well as near-term possibili- ing. Just when you think that you have Duncan’s ties such as the FEV, are beginning to take us there. full attention, he may chase a squirrel that scam- Along the way, we get to enjoy the ride. SA

The Author Further Information

GLORIANNA DAVENPORT is director of interactive cinema at the Massachu- Visit the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- setts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, which she co-founded in 1985. Be- nology Media Laboratory at www.media. fore that time she was a sculptor and a maker of Super 8 films. In 1978 she began mit.edu teaching filmmaking at M.I.T. in the film school and helped to introduce video to Read about the history of Pong at www. the curriculum. Earlier this year she co-founded Media Lab Europe in Dublin. pong-story.com/intro.htm Davenport and her group currently focus on the creation of media forms for Find information about Myst at http://

emerging digital technologies. sirrus.cyan.com/Online/Myst/MystHome WEBB CHAPPELL

82 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Your Own Virtual Storyworld Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. n late November a humble Iowa cow is slated to give birth to the world’s ﬁrst cloned endangered species, a baby bull to be named Noah. Noah is a gaur: a member of a species of large oxlike animals that are now rare in their homelands of India, In- Idochina and southeast Asia. These one-ton bovines have been hunted for sport for generations. More recently the gaur’s habitats of forests, bamboo jungles and grasslands have dwindled to the point that only roughly 36,000 are thought to remain in the wild. The World Conservation

Union–IUCN Red Data Book lists the gaur as endangered,

and trade in live gaur or gaur products—whether horns,

hides or hooves—is banned by the Convention on Interna- tional Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

But if all goes as predicted, in a few weeks a spindly-legged little Noah will trot in a new day in the conservation of his kind as well as in the preservation of many other endangered species. Perhaps most important, he will be living, mooing proof that one animal can carry and give birth to the exact genetic duplicate, or clone, of an animal of a different species. And Noah will be just the first creature up the ramp of the ark of endangered species that we and other scientists are currently attempting to clone: plans are under way to clone the African bongo antelope, the Sumatran tiger and that favorite of zoo lovers, the reluctant-to-reproduce giant panda. Cloning could also reincarnate some species that are already extinct—most immediately, perhaps, the bucardo mountain goat of Spain. The last bucardo—a female—died of a smashed skull when a tree fell on it early this year, but Spanish scientists have preserved some of its cells. Advances in cloning offer a way to preserve and propagate endangered species that reproduce poorly in zoos until their habitats can be restored and they can be reintroduced to the wild. Cloning’s main power, however, is that it allows researchers to introduce new genes back into the gene pool of a species that has few remaining animals. Most zoos are not equipped to collect and cryo- preserve semen; similarly, eggs are difficult to obtain and are damaged by freezing. But by cloning animals whose body cells have been preserved, scientists can keep the genes of that individual alive, maintaining (and in some instances increasing) the overall genetic diversity of endangered populations of that species. Nevertheless, some conservation biologists have been slow to recognize the benefits of basic assisted reproduction strategies, such as in vitro fertilization, and have been hesitant to consider cloning. Although we agree that every effort should be made to preserve wild spaces for the incredible diversity of life that inhabits this planet, in some cases either the battle has already been lost or its outcome looks dire. Cloning technology is not a panacea, but it offers the opportunity to save some of the species that contribute to that diversity. A clone still requires a mother, however, and very few conservationists

SLIM FILMS (illustration); LYNDA RICHARDSON Corbis (orangutan); MARTIN WENDLER Peter Arnold, Inc. (ocelot); GERRY ELLIS Minden Pictures (panda); KENNETH W. FINK Photo Researchers, Inc. (bongo); FRANS LANTING Minden Pictures (cheetah); ROLAND SEITRE Peter Arnold, Inc. (gaur); JOHN CANCALOSI Peter Arnold, Inc. (goat) Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. CloningCloning Noah’sNoah’s ArkArk Biotechnology might offer the best way to keep some endangered species from disappearing from the planet

by Robert P. Lanza, Betsy L. Dresser and Philip Damiani

Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. would advocate rounding up wild fe- Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in we are now working to understand. male endangered animals for that pur- Worcester, Mass., had to fuse skin cells They are also a function of the vagaries pose or subjecting a precious zoo resi- taken from a male gaur with 692 enu- of assisted reproduction technology. dent of the same species to the rigors of cleated cow eggs. As we report in the Accordingly, we expect that the first assisted reproduction and surrogate current issue of the journal Cloning, of few endangered species to be cloned motherhood. That means that to clone those 692 cloned early embryos, only will be those whose reproduction has an endangered species, researchers such 81 grew in the laboratory into blasto- already been well studied. Several zoos as ourselves must solve the problem of cysts, balls of 100 or so cells that are and conservation societies—including how to get cells from two different sufficiently developed to implant for the Audubon Institute Center for Re- species to yield the clone of one. gestation. We ended up inserting 42 search of Endangered Species (AICRES) blastocysts into 32 cows, but only eight in New Orleans, which is led by one of A Gaur Is Born became pregnant. We removed the fe- us (Dresser)—have probed the repro- tuses from two of the pregnant cows for ductive biology of a range of endan- t is a deceptively simple-looking pro- scientific analysis; four other animals gered species, with some notable suc- Icess. A needle jabs through the protec- experienced spontaneous abortions in cesses. Last November, for example, tive layer, or zona pellucida, surrounding the second or third month of the usual Dresser and her colleagues reported the an egg that hours ago resided in a living nine-month pregnancy; and the seventh first transplantation of a previously ovary. In one deft movement, a research cow had a very unexpected late-term frozen embryo of an endangered animal assistant uses it to suck out the egg’s nu- spontaneous abortion in August. into another species that resulted in a cleus—which contains the majority of a The statistics of the efficiency of clon- live birth. In this case, an ordinary house cell’s genetic material—leaving behind ing reflect the fact that the technology is cat gave birth to an African wildcat, a

THE NUCLEAR TRANSFER (CLONING) PROCESS

ZONA PELLUCIDA PIPETTE NEEDLE (protective layer) CHROMOSOME POLAR BODY

EGG

Recipient eggs are coaxed to The polar bodies and chro- Once the chromosomes and Skin cells called ﬁbroblasts mature in a culture dish. mosomes of each egg are polar body are removed, all are isolated from the animal Each has a remnant egg cell drawn into a needle. A that remains inside the zona to be cloned and grown in called the polar body. pipette holds the egg still. pellucida is cytoplasm. culture dishes.

only a sac of gel called cytoplasm. Next still as much an art as it is a science— species that has declined in some areas. he uses a second needle to inject anoth- particularly when it involves transplant- So far, beyond the African wildcat er, whole cell under the egg’s outer layer. ing an embryo into another species. Sci- and the gaur, we and others have ac- With the ﬂip of an electric switch, the entists, including those of us at ACT, complished interspecies embryo trans- cloning is complete: the electrical pulse have had the highest success rates clon- fers in four additional cases: an Indian ) fuses the introduced cell to the egg, and ing domestic cattle implanted into cows desert cat into a domestic cat; a bongo the early embryo begins to divide. In a of the same species. But even in this in- antelope into a more common African photographs few days, it will become a mass of cells stance we have had to work hard to antelope called an eland; a mouﬂon large enough to implant into the uterus produce just a few animals. For every sheep into a domestic sheep; and a rare of a surrogate-mother animal previous- 100 cow eggs we fuse with adult cattle red deer into a common white-tailed ly treated with hormones. In a matter of cells, we can expect only between 15 and deer. All yielded live births. We hope ); PHILIP DAMIANI ( months, that surrogate mother will give 20 to produce blastocysts. And only that the studies of felines will pave the

birth to a clone. roughly 10 percent of those—one or way for cloning the cheetah, of which illustrations In practice, though, this technique— two—yield live births. only roughly 12,000 remain in south- which scientists call nuclear transfer— The numbers reﬂect difﬁculties with ern Africa. The prolonged courtship be-

is not so easy. To create Noah, we at the nuclear transfer process itself, which havior of cheetahs requires substantial ( GRACE LAURIE

86 Scientific American November 2000 Cloning Noah’s Ark Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. territory, a possible explanation for gust 1999 Dayuan Chen of the institute with AICRES and Louisiana State Uni- why the animals have bred so poorly in and his co-workers published a paper versity) and their colleagues announced zoos and yet another reason to fear in the English-language journal Science the birth of a bongo after moving very their extinction as their habitat shrinks. in China announcing that they had fused early embryos from a pregnant female panda skeletal muscle, uterus and mam- bongo to an eland surrogate mother. Panda-monium mary gland cells with the eggs of a rabbit Most of the mountain subspecies of and then coaxed the cloned cells to de- bongo—a medium-size antelope with ne of the most exciting candidates velop into blastocysts in the laboratory. vertical white stripes—live in captivity. Ofor endangered-species cloning— A rabbit, of course, is too small to According to the World Conservation the giant panda—has not yet been the serve as a surrogate mother for a giant Union–IUCN, the mountain bongo is subject of interspecies transfer experi- panda. Instead ACT and the Chinese endangered, with only 50 or so remain- ments, but it has benefited from assist- plan to turn to American black bears. ing in a small region of Kenya. In con- ed reproduction technology. Following As this issue of Scientific American goes trast, the 1999 Bongo International the well-publicized erotic fumblings of to press, ACT is finalizing plans to ob- Studbook lists nearly 550 mountain the National Zoo’s ill-fated panda pair, tain eggs from female black bears killed bongo living in zoos throughout the the late Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the during this autumn’s hunting season in world. The lowland bongo subspecies San Diego Zoo turned to artificial in- the northeastern U.S. Together with the is slightly better off: it is listed as “near semination to make proud parents of Chinese, ACT scientists hope to use threatened” and has a population of its Bai Yun and Shi Shi. Baby Hua Mei these eggs and frozen cells from the late perhaps several thousand scattered was born in August 1999. Hsing-Hsing or Ling-Ling to generate throughout central and western Africa. Giant pandas are such emblems of en- cloned giant panda embryos that can be A coalition of conservation organiza-

NUCLEUS SKIN CELL SKIN CELL

NUCLEUS

An entire skin cell is taken The skin cell is injected un- Each injected egg is exposed The skin cell’s nucleus, with up into the needle, which is derneath the zona pellucida, to an electric shock that fus- its genes, enters the egg cyto- again punched through the where it remains separate es the skin cell with the egg plasm. Within a few hours, zona pellucida. from the egg cytoplasm. cytoplasm. the fused cell begins to divide.

dangered species that the World Wild- implanted into a female black bear now tions in the U.S. and Kenya is now plan- life Fund (WWF) uses one in its logo. living in a zoo. A research group that in- ning to send mountain bongo that have According to a census that is now al- cludes veterinarians at Bear Country been bred in captivity to two sites in most 20 years old, fewer than 1,000 U.S.A. in Rapid City, S.D., has already Kenya. And in a new approach to rein- pandas remain in their mountainous demonstrated that black bears can give troducing a species, AICRES is working habitats of bamboo forest in southwest birth to transplanted embryos. They rein Kenya to transfer frozen bongo em- China. But some biologists think that ported the successful birth of a black bryos into eland surrogates. Cloning the population might have rebounded a bear cub from an embryo transferred could support these efforts and possibly bit in some areas. The WWF expects to from one pregnant black bear to another yield more bongo for reintroduction. complete a census of China’s pandas in last year in the journal Theriogenology. But what about animals that are al- mid-2002 to produce a better estimate. AICRES scientists hope to take ad- ready extinct? Chances are slim to nil In the meantime, we at ACT are dis- vantage of the success with bongo ante- that scientists will soon be able to clone cussing plans with the government of lope that one of us (Dresser) had while dinosaurs, à la Jurassic Park, or woolly China to clone a giant panda. Chinese at the Cincinnati Zoo. In 1984 Dresser mammoths. The primary problem is the scientists have already made strides to- and Charles Earle Pope of the Universi- dearth of preserved tissue—and hence ward the goal of panda cloning. In Au- ty of Alabama at Birmingham (now DNA. A group of researchers unearthed

www.sciam.com Scientiﬁc American November 2000 87 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. WHAT ABOUT ROVER AND FLUFFY? he list of domesticated animals that scientists have species. We expect to be able to apply the information we ob- been able to clone so far includes sheep, cattle, goats tain from cloning cats and dogs to preserving endangered fe- Tand laboratory mice—and now, we expect, the gaur. lines and canines. Compared with that menagerie, you’d think that cloning an ACT and several other companies now offer pet cloning kits ordinary dog or cat would be a snap. Unfortunately, this has that veterinarians can use to preserve samples from a client’s not been the case. Both of our research groups have created pet for possible future cloning. The kits contain materials for cloned cat embryos and have implanted them into female collecting a skin specimen and sending it back to a laboratory. cats, but as this article goes to press, neither of our teams has Research assistants there use the tissue to establish a collection yet obtained a full-term pregnancy. Dogs of pure, dividing cells called a cell line, which have presented even more problems. will be the source of donor cells for cloning. But we anticipate success soon. At Ad- ACT extracts eggs for the cloning proce- vanced Cell Technology (ACT),we have under- dure from reproductive tracts taken from an- taken a research program that uses cloning imals that have been spayed by veterinari- technology to propagate pets as well as serv- ans. We remove the ovaries and carefully ice animals such as seeing-eye dogs for the puncture all visible follicles to release the blind, hearing dogs for the deaf, search-and- eggs. Then we collect the eggs and place rescue dogs,and animals used for social thera- them in a specialized maturation medium py. Together with Louisiana State University, that contains hormones, proteins and nutri- the Audubon Institute has teamed up with a ents. Once fully matured, the eggs are ready company called Lazaron BioTechnologies in for the nuclear transfer procedure [see illus- Baton Rouge,La.,to clone pet dogs and cats. tration on pages 86 and 87]. A surprising number of people are interest- So far our main focus has been the domes- ed in cloning their favorite deceased pet in tic cat, primarily because its reproductive the hope of getting an animal with similar be- physiology has been well studied, and em- ) bottom

havioral characteristics.A good deal of a cat or bryo transfers of early- and late-stage em- ( dog’s demeanor is thought to be genetically bryos have resulted in the birth of live kit- determined. Although one can argue that SERVICE ANIMALS and pets tens. Both ACT and the Audubon Institute there are already plenty of cats and dogs in might soon be cloned. In a new have been able to establish systems for Phoenix PicturesPhoenix the world that need homes, people still use ﬁlm, The 6th Day, grieving pet prompting cat eggs to mature in the lab and

owners go to a company called EWAN traditional breeding methods to try to repro- have consistently produced cloned embryos C RePet to copy their animals. duce a particularly desirable animal. Cloning that are being transferred to recipients. ); ROB M top

could offer a more efficient alternative.It could be particularly But dogs are a different story. The dog’s reproductive physi- ( important in the case of service animals.Currently,for instance, ology is unique among mammalian species. Dogs ovulate an male seeing-eye dogs are neutered at an early age so that they immature egg that has a very long maturation time. This can concentrate better during their expensive and rigorous means that we need a different maturation system from the training. So, unfortunately, even if a dog turns out to be very one we have used in cats and that we have fewer eggs to work BIOS Peter Arnold,BIOS Peter Inc. good at his job,he can’t be bred to produce more like him. with in the end. So Fluffy will probably have a leg up on Rover Our efforts to clone pets could also pay off for endangered when it comes to cloning. —R.P.L.,B.L.D.and P.D. KLEIN/HOBERT what they had hoped would be a well- rection. ACT is arranging a collabora- microsome to add a Y chromosome preserved mammoth last year, but re- tion with Alberto Fernández-Arias and from a closely related goat species. The peated freezing and thawing over the José Folch of the Agricultural Research technology has been used by other re- eons had poked holes in the creature’s Service in Zaragoza, Spain. Fernández- searchers to manipulate human chromo- DNA, and molecular biologists have Arias froze tissue from the last bucardo. somes, but it has never before been used not yet found a feasible way of filling in He and Folch had tried for several years for cloning. A nonprofit organization such genetic gaps. to preserve the mountain goat, which in called the Soma Foundation has been es- A similar difficulty has hobbled ef- the end was wiped out by poaching, tablished to help fund such efforts. forts by Australian scientists to clone a habitat destruction and landslides. Last thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a wolflike year they transferred embryos from a Why Clone? marsupial that died out in the 1930s. subspecies related to the bucardo to a Researchers at the Australian Museum domestic goat, yielding live kids. loning endangered species is contro- in Sydney are attempting to clone cells But even if interspecies nuclear trans- Cversial, but we assert that it has an from a thylacine pup that was preserved fer succeeds for the bucardo, it will yield important place in plans to manage in alcohol in 1866, but the DNA is in only a sorority of clones, because we species that are in danger of extinction. such poor condition that they say they have tissue from just one animal, a fe- Some researchers have argued against it, will have to reconstruct all of the ani- male. ACT plans to try to make a male maintaining that it would restrict an al- mal’s chromosomes. by removing one copy of the X chromo- ready dwindling amount of genetic di- The recently extinct bucardo may some from one of the female bucardo’s versity for those species. Not so. We ad- prove a more promising target for resur- cells and using a tiny artificial cell called a vocate the establishment of a worldwide

88 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Cloning Noah’s Ark Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. ); giant panda ( Minden Pictures ) ocelot ( ); FRANS LANTING bongo Peter Arnold,Peter Inc. ( ); MARTIN WENDLER Photo Researchers,Photo Inc. gaur ( Peter Arnold,Peter Inc. ); CHARLES V. ANGELO cheetah ( ); ROLAND SEITRE bucardo Minden Pictures ( GERRY ELLIS GERRY Peter Arnold,Peter Inc. Left to right,Left clockwise: JOHN CANCALOSI JOHN CANCALOSI network of repositories to hold frozen cells that could be used for cloning. CLONING CANDIDATES include (clock- tissue from all the individuals of an en- Other critics claim that the practice wise from upper left) the cheetah, bongo, dangered species from which it is possi- could overshadow efforts to preserve giant panda, bucardo, gaur and ocelot. ble to collect samples. Those cells—like habitat. We counter that while habitat the sperm and eggs now being collected preservation is the keystone of species ly enterprise in the case of large animals. in “frozen zoos” by a variety of zoolog- conservation, some countries are too Another argument against cloning en- ical parks—could serve as a genetic trust poor or too unstable to support sustain- dangered species is that it might siphon for reconstituting entire populations of able conservation efforts. What is more, donor money away from habitat main- a given species. Such an enterprise the continued growth of the human tenance. But not all potential donors are would be relatively inexpensive: a typi- species will probably make it impossible willing to support efforts to stem the tide cal three-foot freezer can hold more to save enough habitat for some other of habitat destruction. We should recog- than 2,000 samples and uses just a few species. Cloning by interspecies nuclear nize that some who would otherwise not dollars of electricity per year. Currently transfer offers the possibility of keeping donate to preserve endangered species at only AICRES and the San Diego Zoo’s the genetic stock of those species on all might want to support cloning or Center for Reproduction of Endangered hand without maintaining populations other assisted reproduction technologies. Species maintain banks of frozen body in captivity, which is a particularly cost- The time to act is now. SA

The Authors Further Information

ROBERT P. LANZA, BETSY L. DRESSER and PHILIP DAMIANI Preservation of Endangered Species and Populations: share an interest in reproductive biology and animals. Lanza is vice A Role for Genome Banking, Somatic Cell Cloning, president of medical and scientiﬁc development at Advanced Cell Tech- and Androgenesis? Graham E. Corley-Smith and Bruce P. nology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass. He founded the South Meadow Brandhorst in Molecular Reproduction and Development, Pond and Wildlife Association in Worcester County and is a member of Vol. 53, No. 3, pages 363–367; July 1999. the conservation commission of Clinton Township. Dresser is senior Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities. Nor- vice president for research at the Audubon Institute and director of the man Myers, Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina G. Mittermeier, Audubon Institute Center for Research of Endangered Species and the Gustavo A. B. da Fonseca and Jennifer Kent in Nature, Vol. Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center, all in New Or- 403, No. 6772, pages 853–858; February 24, 2000. leans. Damiani, a research scientist at ACT, is also a member of the In- Vanishing before Our Eyes. E. O. Wilson in Time (special ternational Embryo Transfer Society’s committee on cryopreservation. report on Earth Day 2000), pages 29–34; April–May 2000. www.sciam.com Scientiﬁc American November 2000 89 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. TheVASIMR by Franklin R.Chang Díaz

e dream of going to the stars. R As young children growing up Win the 1950s, my friends and I were awestruck by the possibility of space travel. As I have learned over the years, our fascination was not unique to my Costa Rican upbringing. Indeed, many of my co-workers today, coming from different parts of the globe, recount similar childhood longings. In the past 50 years, I have had the opportunity to witness the development of the ﬁrst ships that have transported humans beyond Earth. In the past 20, I have been fortunate to ride on some of these rockets and to get a ﬁrsthand glimpse of wonders I could only imagine before. It would seem as if we are des- tined to burst off our fragile planet and move into the cosmos in a new human odyssey. Such a mighty undertaking RADICALLY NEW ROCKET engine, just three meters long, produces an exhaust of unprecedent- will dwarf the westward European ex- ed speed: 300 kilometers per second. The window on the right reveals the glowing plasma inside. For

pansion of the 16th century. FRANCIS PAM a cutaway view, see page 92.

Step 3 MAGNETIC COILS generate ﬁeld that conﬁnes the ionized gas in a “mirror”

Step1 INJECTOR feeds hydrogen or helium gas

WINDOW

Step 5 Step 4 VACUUM CHAMBER ICRH ANTENNA captures hot gas as it heats gas to escapes magnetic 10 million kelvins conﬁnement Step 2 HELICON ANTENNA ionizes gas QUARTZ TUBE

Yet we lack the ships required to ven- Plasma rockets are one such technolo- terial nozzles has proved impractical. In ture far into the vastness of space. With gy. Utilizing ionized gases accelerated by VASIMR the concept is finally poised today’s chemical rockets, a trip to Mars electric and magnetic fields, they in- to become a reality. would take up to 10 months in a vulner- crease performance far beyond the lim- able and limited spacecraft. There would its of the chemical rocket. My research Newton’s Rocket be little room for useful payload. Most team has been developing one of these of the ship’s mass would be taken up by concepts, the Variable Specific Impulse he principle of rocket propulsion propellant, which would be spent in a Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), Tstems from Newton’s law of action few short bursts, leaving the ship to since the early 1980s. Its genesis dates and reaction. A rocket propels itself by coast for most of the journey [see “How back to the late 1970s, when I was in- expelling material in the direction op- to Go to Mars,” by George Musser and volved in the study of magnetic ducts posite to its motion. The material is Mark Alpert; Scientific American, and their application to controlled nu- usually a gas heated by a chemical reac- March]. If people were to travel to clear fusion. In such ducts, a magnetic tion, but the general principle applies Mars under these conditions, their bod- field insulates a hot plasma from its equally well to the motion of a simple ies and minds would suffer consider- nearest material surface, letting it reach garden sprinkler. ably. Months of exposure to weightless- temperatures of hundreds of millions of Rocket thrust is measured in newtons ness would weaken their muscles and kelvins. and is the product of exhaust velocity bones, and the persistent radiation of I theorized that a duct, properly (relative to the ship) and the rate of outer space would damage their im- shaped, could form a magnetic nozzle propellant flow. Quite simply, the same mune systems. and convert the plasma energy to rock- thrust is obtained by ejecting either To be safe, human interplanetary et thrust. Such a structure functions like more material at low velocity or less at spacecraft must be fast, reliable and able a conventional rocket nozzle but can high velocity. The latter approach saves to abort in the event of malfunction. withstand much higher temperatures. on fuel but generally entails high ex- Their propulsion systems must be capa- Further investigation suggested that the haust temperatures. ble of handling not just the cruise phase system could also generate a variable To gauge rocket performance, engi- of the journey but also the maneuvering exhaust, adaptable to the conditions of neers use the term specific impulse (Isp), near the origin and destination planets. flight, just as an automobile transmis- which is the exhaust velocity divided by Whereas chemical propulsion can con- sion matches the power of the engine to the acceleration of gravity at sea level tinue to provide excellent surface-to- the needs of the road. Although the (9.8 meters per second per second). Al- orbit transportation, new technologies idea of variable exhaust dates to the though thrust is directly proportional to are required to send humans to the plan- early rocket pioneers, its implementa- Isp, the power needed to produce it is

ets and ultimately to the stars. tion in chemical rockets with ﬁxed ma- proportional to the square of the Isp. SAMUEL VELASCO

92 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 The VASIMR Rocket Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. MAGNETIC mirror been given to the ship. Thus, for a slow traps the particles so ship, an appropriately slow exhaust they can be heated to PARTICLE PATH better utilizes the power source. As the 10 million kelvins. It consists of two ring ship speeds up, a faster (hotter) but lean- electromagnets that set er exhaust gives better results. Under up a bulging magnetic CPT, the ship starts at high thrust for ﬁeld between them. In rapid acceleration. As its speed increas- VASIMR, a third mag- es, Isp gradually increases and thrust net extends the mirror decreases for greater fuel economy. A and provides for a car does exactly the same thing when it ELECTROMAGNET magnetic “nozzle” that starts in low gear and steadily shifts up. pushes particles out. Bouncing Back and Forth

FIELD DIRECTION ASIMR embodies a class of mag- Vnetic ducts called magnetic mirrors. The simplest magnetic mirror is produced by two ring electromagnets with current flowing in the same direction. The magnetic field is constricted near the rings but bulges out in between VELOCITY them. Charged particles move in a helix along field lines, orbiting around them FORCE at a specific radius, the Larmor radius,

JUAN JUAN VELASCO and at the so-called cyclotron frequen- NEAR THE CENTER of the mir- NEAR EACH MAGNET, the field lines tilt. A cy. As one might expect, for a field of a ror, the field lines are parallel, so component of the force now pushes the parti- given strength, the heavier particles (the the magnetic force is radial. Parti- cles away from the magnet. (If the particles are ions) have a lower cyclotron frequency cles travel at a constant speed along moving toward the magnet, they may be stopped and larger Larmor radius than the light a helix of nearly constant radius. and reversed.) In this region, the helix tightens. ones (the electrons) do. Also, strong fields lead to a high cyclotron frequency Therefore, the power required for a giv- particles in the best chemical rockets. and small Larmor radius. In VASIMR, en thrust increases linearly with Isp. In Usually, by design, the power output the ion cyclotron frequency is a few chemical rockets this power originates of the engine is kept at a maximum, so megahertz (MHz), whereas its electron in the exothermic reaction of the fuel thrust and Isp are inversely related. In- equivalent is in the gigahertz range. and oxidizer. In others, it must be im- creasing one always comes at the ex- The particles’ velocity has two com- parted to the exhaust by a propellant pense of the other. Therefore, for the ponents: one parallel to the field (corre- heater or accelerator. Such systems de- same propellant, a high Isp rocket deliv- sponding to the forward motion along pend on a power source elsewhere in ers a greater payload than a low Isp one, the field line) and the other perpendicu- the ship. Solar panels are generally but in a longer time. If a rocket could lar (corresponding to the orbital mo- used; the abundant power requirements vary thrust and Isp, it could optimize tion around the line). When a particle of human space exploration, however, propellant usage and deliver a maxi- approaches a constricted (hence strong- will favor nuclear reactors [see box on mum payload in minimum page 97]. This is especially true for mis- time. I call this technique sions beyond Mars, where sunlight is constant power throttling relatively feeble. (CPT). It is similar to the In our quest for high fuel efficiency, function of an automobile 105 10 FUEL 1,000 hence high Isp, my research team has transmission in climbing a moved away from chemical reactions, hill or the feathering of a THRUST in which the temperature is only a few propeller engine in moving thousand kelvins, and entered the realm through the air. 104 1 100 Temperature (kelvins) Temperature

of plasma physics, in which the temper- One way to visualize CPT (newtons) Thrust

ature is high enough to strip the atoms is by considering the way in Specific Impulse (seconds) of some (if not all) of their electrons. which the ship acquires ki- SPECIFIC IMPULSE Fuel Consumption (grams per second) Consumption Fuel The temperature of a plasma starts at netic energy from the ex- 103 0.1 10 SANTIS

about 10,000 kelvins, but present-day haust. If this process were E laboratory plasmas can be 1,000 times totally efficient, the exhaust 104 105 106 107 hotter. The plasma is a soup of charged particles (as viewed by a Plasma Temperature (kelvins) JOHN D particles: positive ions and negative elec- ground observer) would LIKE A CAR GEARSHIFT, and unlike other rockets, trons. At these temperatures the ions, leave the ship at rest; the VASIMR can adjust its output. By increasing its tem- which constitute the bulk of the mass, ship would be moving at perature, it boosts its specific impulse (blue) and remove at velocities of 300,000 meters the exhaust speed. All the duces fuel consumption (yellow)—at the price of less per second—60 times faster than the exhaust energy would have thrust (red). The power is a constant 10 megawatts. www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 93 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. PAM FRANCIS PAM

LOOKING DOWN THE BARREL of the rocket, you see the plasma coming straight at you. The window is 15 centimeters across. er) field, its perpendicular velocity in- posite effect and the particle accelerates. at the field constrictions. The particles creases, but its parallel one is reduced Because no energy has been added, the bounce between them until something proportionately to keep the total ener- acceleration comes at the expense of ro- disrupts their parallel velocity such that it gy constant. The reason has to do with tational motion. The magnetic field does overcomes the trap or until one of the the direction of the force exerted by the no work on the particle; it is simply a constrictions is reduced. With enough field on the particle. The force is always vehicle enabling this energy transfer. parallel velocity, the particle will push perpendicular to both the particle’s ve- These simple arguments hold as long through and accelerate on the other locity and the field direction. Near the as the field constriction is slow and grad- side. Sudden changes in the velocity of a center of the mirror, where the field lines ual compared with the particle motion— trapped particle, which may be enough are parallel, the force is radial and so a condition known as adiabaticity. In to untrap it, can be brought about by has no effect on the parallel velocity. But their curling motion around the field random events such as collisions with as the particle enters the constriction, lines, the particles are guided by them, other particles, interaction with electro- the force tilts away from the constric- but like fast-moving vehicles on a slip- magnetic waves, or plasma instabilities tion, resulting in an imbalance that de- pery highway, they can follow only lines and turbulence. The magnetic field of celerates the particle [see top illustration that do not curve sharply. Earth is a natural mirror. Charged parti- on preceding page]. If the particle is exit- A magnetic mirror can trap particles if cles from the ionosphere bounce back ing the constriction, the field has the op- they are sufficiently slow to be reflected and forth between the North and South

BILLOWING CLOUDS OF WATER VAPOR pour off the magnets, which are kept at liquid-nitrogen temperature.

Poles. Some of them penetrate deep into wave oven heats food. Two wave pro- here, however, are slightly lower-fre- the upper atmosphere, creating the spec- cesses come into play. First, neutral gas quency ion cyclotron oscillations, so tacular auroras seen at high latitudes. in the injector stage becomes a dense named because they resonate with the VASIMR uses three such magnetic struc- and comparatively cold (about 60,000 natural rotational motion of the ions. tures, linked together: a forward plas- kelvins) plasma through the action of The wave’s electric field is perpendicular ma injector, which ionizes the neutral helicon waves. These are electromagnet- to the external magnetic field and ro- gas; a central power amplifier, which en- ic oscillations at frequencies of 10 to 50 tates at the ion cyclotron frequency. The ergizes the plasma; and an aft magnetic MHz, which, in a magnetic field, ener- resonance energizes the perpendicular nozzle, which finally ejects it into space. gize free electrons in a gas. The electrons motion of the particles. This effect, quickly multiply by liberating other elec- known as ion cyclotron resonance heat- Beam in the Power trons from nearby atoms in a cascade of ing (ICRH), is widely used in fusion re- ionization. Although the details are poor- search. The central stage is ultimately re- ost plasma rockets require physi- ly understood, helicons are widely used sponsible for the high Isp of the rocket. Mcal electrodes, which erode quick- in semiconductor manufacturing. One might wonder how a boost in ly in the harsh environment. In contrast, Once made, the plasma flows into the the ions’ perpendicular motion could VASIMR uses radio antennas. The radio central stage, where it is heated by fur- impart any useful momentum to the waves heat the plasma just like a micro- ther wave action; the waves of choice rocket exhaust. The answer lies in the www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 95 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. physics of the magnetic nozzle, the final 40 electron volts per electron-ion pair. MARS TRAJECTORY stage of VASIMR. The diverging field (An electron volt, or eV, is a unit of en- here transfers energy from the perpendi- ergy commonly used in particle physics.) To get to Mars,the ship must first break cular motion to the parallel motion, ac- This energy expenditure is not available free of Earth’s gravity. Using low gear celerating the ions along the exhaust. for propulsion; most of it is frozen in (maximum thrust and an Isp of 3,000 Being much more massive, the ions the creation of the plasma. The parti- seconds),VASIMR builds up speed. drag the electrons along, so the plasma cles’ kinetic energy, which is what ulti- EARTH ESCAPE exits the rocket as a neutral fluid. In mately generates the thrust, must be VASIMR, this nozzle expansion occurs added to this initial investment. In the over a distance of about 50 centimeters. early prototype of VASIMR, at high Isp, Escape Once the expansion is complete, the the kinetic energy is about 100 eV per (t + 30 days) Low Orbit plasma must detach from the rocket. ion. Thus, a total energy expenditure of (t + 0 days) Recent studies by Roald Sagdeev of the 140 eV yields 100 eV of useful energy, University of Maryland and Boris Breiz- or about 70 percent efficiency. Later man of the University of Texas highlight VASIMR designs will reach exhaust en- 25 Earth Radii the basic physics. The model involves ergies of 800 to 1,000 eV for the same the Alfvén speed, named after Swedish initial investment, leading to greater effi- Unlike ordinary rockets VASIMR never physicist Hannes Alfvén, who first de- ciency. At low Isp, as more plasma is gen- coasts.It shifts to higher gears,reaching scribed it. Disturbances in a magnetized erated for higher thrust, the kinetic ener- an Isp of 30,000 seconds 75 days into the plasma propagate along the field at this gy per particle gets uncomfortably close flight,and then starts to decelerate. speed. In a magnetic nozzle the Alfvén to the ionization energy, with consequent speed plays a role similar to that of the reductions in efficiency. In the end, how- INTERPLANETARY CRUISE Orbit Insertion (t + 246 days) sound speed in a conventional nozzle. ever, efficiency must be evaluated in the it The transition from sub-Alfvénic to context of the overall mission. Some- rb O s it r rb super-Alfvénic flow delineates a bound- times brief bursts of high thrust may in a O M th r ary beyond which the flow downstream fact be the most efficient approach. a E has no effect upstream—which ensures The gas ionization involves other in- that the detachment exerts no drag on efficiencies. Neutral atoms lingering in the rocket. The VASIMR nozzle is de- this initial plasma cause unwanted pow- signed to expand the plasma past this er losses if they remain mixed with en- boundary, to a point where the energy ergetic ions. In an effect known as charge Crew Landing content of the field is small compared exchange, a cold neutral atom gives an (t + 115 days) with that of the plasma flow. The plas- electron to a hot ion. The resulting hot 25,000 Earth Radii ma then breaks free, carrying with it a neutral is oblivious to the magnetic After flying by Mars to drop off the as- small amount of the field. A similar be- field and escapes, depositing its energy tronauts,the ship lowers itself into orbit. havior is thought to occur in nature on nearby structures. The cold ion left when solar flares detach from the mag- behind is virtually useless. MARS ORBIT INSERTION netic field of the sun. The energy expen- To avoid this, we are studying a radi- diture in the field distortion only mini- al-pumping technique, in which the mally taxes the performance of the cold neutrals are siphoned out before rocket. Our studies show that plasma they wander into the power-amplifica- detachment occurs one to two meters tion stage. They may be reinjected down- away from the nozzle throat. stream of the nozzle throat, where the ions are already moving in the right di- Final Orbit Partitioning the Power rection and charge exchange actually (t + 250 days) 5 Mars Radii helps the plasma to detach from the he throttling that makes VASIMR rocket. Charge exchange is a serious VASIMR can turn around if some- Tdistinctive is done mainly by chang- problem in fusion research today. thing goes wrong early in the cruise. ing the relative fraction of power going Although the helicon is able to ionize to the helicon and ICRH systems. For nearly any gas, practical considerations EMERGENCY ABORT high thrust, power is routed predomi- favor light elements such as hydrogen nantly to the helicon, producing more and helium. For example, the ICRH ions at lower velocity. For high Isp, more process is easiest in light gases, whose power is diverted to the ICRH, with cyclotron frequencies at reasonable fields Returrn (t + 169 days) concomitant reductions in thrust. We (about one tesla) are compatible with are also studying two other exhaust existing high-power radio technology. Abort variation techniques, including a mag- Fortunately, because hydrogen is the (t + 44 days) netic choke at the nozzle throat for high most abundant element in our universe, Isp and a plasma afterburner for high our ships are likely to find an ample sup- thrust at very low Isp. ply of propellant almost everywhere. An- A key consideration is the efficiency other important engineering challenge is SANTIS of the engine over its operating range. the generation of strong magnetic fields. E

Creating a hydrogen plasma costs about We are investigating new high-tempera- JOHN D

n space, power is life. In the spring of 1970 the Apollo 13 from “nuclear batteries”—radioisotope thermoelectric gen- astronauts managed to stay alive by judicious use of their erators (RTGs),which rely on the heat generated by the nat- Iprecious battery power. Had their return flight taken ural radioactive decay of plutonium. Such devices have longer,they would have met with disaster.The electrical re- proved crucial to robotic space missions but are too ineffi- quirements of human spaceflight are set by basic survival cient for human flight.Far better would be a nuclear reactor, needs:rapid transportation and life support.The space shut- which relies on the fission of uranium in a chain reaction. tle consumes about 15 kilowatts in orbit; the International For each kilogram of fuel, a reactor produces up to 10 mil- Space Station, 75 kilowatts. Estimates for a Mars habitat lion times more power than an RTG does. range between 20 and 60 kilowatts—not including propul- To measure the performance of power sources,space en- sion.For a baseline Mars mission,a VASIMR engine would re- gineers use a parameter called alpha, which is the ratio of quire about 10 megawatts.Higher power means faster tran- power plant mass in kilograms to electrical output in kilo- sits.A 200-megawatt VASIMR would get to Mars in 39 days. watts. Low alphas correspond to high efficiency and high For human forays into near-Earth space, chemical fuels power.Present solar arrays,operating near Earth,have alpha and solar panels provide sufficient power.But for Mars and values of 20 to 100. RTGs manage an alpha of 200. But for beyond,chemical fuels are too bulky and the sun’s rays too uranium reactors,alphas can be as low at 0.5. weak. A 10-megawatt solar array, for example, would be Reactors are inherently safer than RTGs, because the reac- about 68,000 square meters at Mars and 760,000 at Jupiter. tor and fuel can be launched separately and assembled in an Such gigantic panels are impractical; in comparison,the so- orbit far from Earth.Even critics who call for a ban on nuclear lar panels on the space station are 2,500 square meters. power in Earth orbit have acknowledged its importance for There is only one source up to the task:nuclear. deep-space missions [see “Nuclear Power in Space,”by Steven In the past,nuclear electricity has generally been obtained Aftergood et al.;SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,June 1991]. —F.R.C .D.

ture superconductors, based on bismuth a 12-megawatt system. The ship would ty by virtue of its variable exhaust. Its strontium calcium copper oxide com- climb on a 30-day outward spiral from magnetic field and hydrogen propellant pounds. The magnets will use the cryo- Earth and cruise through interplanetary would act as a radiation shield. genic hydrogen propellant to cool them. space for 85 more days, accelerating VASIMR could serve as a precursor Early VASIMR experiments, which I much of the way and then decelerating to the great dream of those of us in the began in the 1980s with Tien-Fang Yang for arrival at Mars. The trip would be space program: a fusion rocket. Such a and others at the Massachusetts Insti- twice as fast as one involving chemical ship would have 10 to 100 gigawatts at tute of Technology, have led to the pres- rockets. A crew module would detach its disposal. Although controlled fusion ent research program. The centerpiece and land using chemical rockets, while remains elusive, the efforts to achieve it today is the VX-10 prototype at the the mother ship would fly by the planet have been relentless and the progress National Aeronautics and Space Ad- in a fuel-efficient trajectory to rejoin it steady. Future generations will use it for ministration Johnson Space Center in four months later. To protect the hu- rapid access to the planets and beyond. Houston. Two smaller experiments at man crew, the Mars vehicle would be We now find ourselves preparing the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and provided with a robust abort capabili- groundwork for achieving that vision. SA the University of Texas support the investigations. We also have partnerships with Rice University, the Princeton Plas- ma Physics Laboratory, the University The Author of Michigan, the University of Mary- FRANKLIN R. CHANG DÍAZ was scheduled to make his first spaceflight on the ill-starred land and the University of Houston, as Challenger in January 1986, but at the last minute his team was moved up one flight. Since then, well as with private industry and with he has flown five missions, highlights of which include the deployment of the Galileo probe to NASA centers in Huntsville, Ala.; Cleve- Jupiter, the first two tests of space tethers and the final shuttle-Mir docking. In addition to his as- land; Greenbelt, Md.; and Norfolk, Va. tronaut career and his plasma research (in which he has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Insti- We are now formulating plans to test tute of Technology), he has worked in mental health and drug rehabilitation programs. VASIMR in space. A proposed mid-2004 demonstration involves a 10-kilowatt Further Information solar-powered spacecraft, which will ELECTRICAL PROPULSION IN SPACE. Gabriel Giannini in Scientific American, Vol. 204, No. 3, also study Earth’s radiation belts. In an- pages 57–65; March 1961. other test, a VASIMR engine will try to ION PROPULSION FOR SPACE FLIGHT. Ernst Stuhlinger. McGraw-Hill, 1964. neutralize the atmospheric drag on the THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE VASIMR ENGINE. F. R. Chang Díaz et al. in Proceedings of the International Space Station. Recent ex- International Conference on Electromagnetics in Advanced Applications, paper 99-102. perimental results and rapid progress in Torino, Italy, Sept. 13–17, 1999. For copies of this paper and the next, visit spaceflight. nasa.gov/mars/technology/propulsion/aspl on the World Wide Web. the miniaturization of radio-frequency THE PHYSICS AND ENGINEERING OF THE VASIMR ENGINE. F. R. Chang Díaz, J. P. Squire, R. equipment bode well for such space tests. D. Bengtson, B. N. Breizman, F. W. Baity and M. D. Carter. American Institute of Aeronau- As a natural progression, a possible tics and Astronautics, conference paper 2000-3756; July 17–19, 2000. VASIMR human Mars mission involves www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 97 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Drugs AIDSAIDS for by Carol Ezzell, staff writer Africa Photographs by Karin Retief/Trace Images

he client, a pretty woman in her 30s with a cap of short, straight hair, takes T the small plastic envelope of pills and tucks them into her purse. It is only when she stands up to give her counselor an emotion- filled hug that one can see the reason for her visit to the clinic: a bulge underneath her dress an- nounces her pregnancy, which is now in its eighth month. Her counselor and the doctors and nurses at this facility in Khayelitsha, a black township outside Cape Town, South Africa, are the only ones who know that the woman, who here will be called Millicent, is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The father of her child is no longer in her life, and she says that her mother—who is dependent on her—would “die” if she knew. Millicent is afraid to tell friends because if her secret leaked out, she could be killed: just days before Millicent’s clinic visit, a 25-year-old woman in Soweto had been found shot through the head with a brown- paper note next to her body bearing the hand- scrawled message “HIV Positive AIDS.” And that was not the first such incident. Despite the stigma and secrecy, Millicent has hope for the future—or at least her baby’s future—in the form of a bag of white capsules with blue stripes, the antiretroviral drug AZT. Millicent is part of a pilot program administered by the French organization Médecins Sans Fron- tières (Doctors Without Borders) to use anti-

98 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 AIDS Drugs for Africa Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Most of the 35 million people infected with the AIDS virus live on the African continent, where drugs that ﬁght the virus are rare. Will the world let them die?

professor of economics and demogra- phy at the Harvard University School of Public Health. He adds that AIDS “lies at the intersection of some of the most important issues of our day,” including poverty, globalization and lack of health care infrastructure. Beyond drug costs is the testing necessary to measure the success of antiretroviral drugs in individual patients and to monitor the emergence of viral resistance. These tests are expensive, require frequent doctor visits and can be difficult for laboratory technicians to perform. In addition, few leaders of sub-Saharan African countries have supported the use of antiretroviral COUNSELOR PATRICIA QOLO hugs a client, here called Millicent (seen from behind, drugs: indeed, South African President at left), after discussing how Millicent can protect her unborn baby from contracting Thabo Mbeki continues to claim that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Millicent, who is HIV-positive, lives in the town- HIV cannot be the sole cause of AIDS. ship of Khayelitsha (above) outside Cape Town, South Africa. She is taking part in a He has also asserted that AZT and oth- pilot program to receive AZT (far left) to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. er antiretrovirals are too toxic for pregnant African women, even though stud- retrovirals to prevent HIV-infected moth- AIDS treatments from reaching areas of ies elsewhere in the world have shown ers from passing on the virus to their the world such as Africa that have the that the drugs can cut the odds of moth- unborn babies. Mother-to-child trans- greatest need for them. Drug prices over- er-to-child transmission by half, with mission is one of the driving forces be- all have been a flash point in the run-up few side effects. hind the AIDS pandemic in southern to this month’s presidential elections in Besides these obstacles, unsettling Africa. According to a report by the the U.S. As this issue of Scientific Amer- questions about the ramifications of South African Department of Health, ican went to press, five global pharma- making antiretroviral therapy widely nine out of 10 children in the world ceutical companies were meeting with available could make even a Good Sam- who are infected with HIV live in sub- the World Health Organization (WHO) aritan squirm. Who will care for all the Saharan Africa. in the latest in a series of talks to dis- orphans if a country can afford to give Antiretroviral drug regimens for pre- cuss making their AIDS drugs more af- antiretroviral drugs only to pregnant venting HIV-infected mothers from fordable for poor nations. As part of women who will later die along with passing on the virus to their infants in the process, the companies—Boehringer the babies’ fathers? And if people in de- the womb or at birth are now routine Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Glaxo veloping countries don’t take their med- practice in the U.S. and most developed Wellcome, Merck & Company and icines consistently and correctly, could countries. But the Médecins Sans Fron- Hoffmann–La Roche—offered this past they breed super-resistant strains of HIV tières clinic is one of only a small num- May to cut their prices for antiretrovi- that could make their way to the devel- ber of programs to offer them in all of ral drugs to Africa by 80 percent, al- oped world? Africa. Even fewer clinics and hospitals though critics have derided the effort as on the continent have enough drugs and too little too late. Living in the Real World procedures in place to provide anti-HIV Pharmaceutical prices aren’t the only medicines to the rest of the population impediments keeping more Africans uch questions are merely hypotheti- of infected men, women who aren’t from receiving the drugs, many argue. Scal in the shanties of corrugated met- pregnant, and children. “I wish the problem of AIDS treatment al, scrap wood and plastic sheeting that The high cost of the drugs is a criti- around the world could boil down to stretch as far as the eye can see from the cally important factor in preventing high drug prices,” says David E. Bloom, highway ramp to Khayelitsha. Uncount- www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 99 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. ed tens of thousands live in dire poverty Germany, announced it would provide Tshabalala-Msimang. Instead the coun- in this apartheid-era relic on the out- the drug without charge for a period of try’s plan for addressing HIV and AIDS skirts of Cape Town. More flock here five years to “developing economies.” through 2005 emphasizes prevention, from the rural areas every day to build At the XIII International AIDS Confer- treatment for opportunistic infections 8-by-10-foot “informal dwellings” while ence, which was held in July in Durban, and support for home-based care. “We they search—mostly without success— South Africa, the company reported are beginning to flesh out a program to for work. Instead many get HIV, and that nevirapine (sold under the trade target households [affected by AIDS] only a very lucky few can hope to do name Viramune) reduced the rates of and ask how can we support them,” she anything about it. mother-to-child transmission to 14 per- explains. In August, South Africa and The AZT in Millicent’s purse was cent among a group of 652 pregnant Namibia turned down an offer to 24 paid for by the South African govern- women. Ten percent of babies born to a sub-Saharan countries from the Export- ment, purchased from producer Glaxo similar number of women taking a Import Bank of the United States to Wellcome for the discounted price of combination of AZT and a drug called provide $1 billion in annual loans for nearly three rand ($0.40) per 100-mil- 3TC, or Epivir, became infected. buying anti-AIDS drugs, saying they ligram capsule. That’s less than the cost The nevirapine regimen requires only were burdened with enough debt. of a can of Coke in Cape Town; in New a total of three doses of medicine: two The reluctance of the South African York City, a single AZT pill can go for to the mother (one during labor and an- government to use antiretroviral drugs upward of $5. other a day or two after delivery) and to prevent babies from being born with Médecins Sans Frontières has so far one to the newborn. In contrast, AZT HIV baffles and saddens many within administered AZT to 1,400 HIV-posi- must be taken for months. So far, how- and outside the country. Even if South tive pregnant women in Khayelitsha as ever, South Africa—which has one of Africa chose not to accept Boehringer part of a pilot program. The first babies the highest proportions of HIV-infected Ingelheim’s donation of nevirapine, it were born in March 1999, so the physi- residents in the world—has not taken could buy the drug for $4 per pregnant cians cannot yet determine the pro- up Boehringer Ingelheim on its offer, al- woman. “I not only weep, I feel a sense gram’s effectiveness. (The earliest that though the provincial government of of injustice and wrong” over the fact meaningful antibody tests can be con- the Western Cape is expanding the AZT that nevirapine is not being given to all ducted on infants is at 18 months.) program pioneered by Médecins Sans pregnant South African women with Another drug, nevirapine, may turn Frontières to five additional townships. HIV, Judge Edwin Cameron of South out to be just as effective as AZT, and “We don’t believe that the only way Africa’s Constitutional Court—who is its maker has offered it to Africa and to to manage mother-to-child-transmission himself HIV-positive—proclaimed in a other poor regions for free. Last July, is antiretroviral medication,” contends speech at the Durban AIDS conference. Boehringer Ingelheim in Ingelheim, South African Health Minister Manto The government’s stance has also

SWALLOW THIS:THREE DAYS OF ANTIRETROVIRAL DRUGS he 16 leading antiretroviral drugs now on the market in drug regimens,showing the number of pills per day a person Tthe U.S. are used in a dizzying array of combinations, de- on each regimen would be required to take.(Nucleoside ana- pending on factors such as whether a patient has taken any logues and nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors of them before, the side effects the patient has experienced, prevent HIV from copying its genetic material; protease in- and the other conditions he or she has. Multiple-drug com- hibitors block the production of new viral proteins.) Which bos have been shown to be more effective than one or two regimens might best be suited for conditions in Africa—and drugs used on their own. Below is a selection of three typical affordable for use there—is still under debate. —C.E. REGIMEN 1 REGIMEN 2 REGIMEN 3 (three pills twice a day) (seven pills twice a day) (13 pills twice a day) Viracept Agenerase Zerit (nelﬁnavir) (amprenavir) (stavudine; d4T)

Viramune (nevirapine) Retrovir Center for AIDSCenter Research, School of Medicine University York New Epivir Combivir (zidovudine; AZT) (lamivudine; 3TC) (AZT and 3TC) Norvir Ziagen (ritonavir) (abacavir) Epivir

One nonnucleoside reverse One protease inhibitor (Viracept) Two protease inhibitors (Agenerase and Norvir) plus two transcriptase inhibitor (Vira- plus three nucleoside analogues. nucleoside analogues. Norvir must be refrigerated or mune) plus two nucleoside Viracept must be taken with a kept cool and be taken with a meal. Agenerase should analogues. meal or a light snack. not be taken with meals high in fat. DAN WAGNER;DAN OF IRENE FRANCK PILLS COURTESY

100 Scientific American November 2000 AIDS Drugs for Africa Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. prompted legal action from a Durban- NURSE VALERIE SHOSHA draws blood for an HIV based group called Treatment Action test from a pregnant woman in the Khayelitsha Mid- Campaign (TAC). The organization has wife Obstetric Unit near Cape Town (below). The wom- filed a legal proceeding to compel South an tested negative and received counseling on how to Africa to provide antiretrovirals to every avoid infection in the future. If a woman tests positive on the initial screening test, the result is confirmed us- pregnant woman infected with HIV. ing a second test (right), in which two blue dots indi- But TAC is against free drugs on the cates the presence of antibodies against HIV. grounds that pharmaceutical company donor programs are not sustainable: they are usually limited to a specific period and sometimes carry restrictions on what the drug can be used for. TAC has exchanged letters with executives at Pfizer, for instance, in attempts to get the company to slash its price for fluconazole, which is popular in the U.S. as a single-dose treatment for vaginal yeast infections. Fluconazole, or Diflucan, is not an antiretroviral drug, but it is the only medicine effective against crypto- coccal meningitis, a potentially fatal opportunistic disease that strikes people with AIDS. It is also the drug of choice for treating thrush, yeast infections of the mouth and esophagus that can make it difficult and painful for someone with AIDS to swallow. A 200-milligram dose of fluconazole can cost up to $20 in the U.S., but generic drug manufacturers in Thailand are now producing it for $0.60 per treatment dose ($0.30 per maintenance dose). Pfi- than $20 per day for a patient in the U.S. pass laws on various grounds to over- zer has offered to provide the drug for Protease inhibitors block an enzyme that ride the treaty’s patent protections and free to patients who can’t afford it, but HIV uses to break a large precursor pro- offer “compulsory licenses” to compa- only in South Africa and only for cryp- tein into the smaller units it needs to nies within their borders to enable the tococcal meningitis, not thrush. TAC build new copies of itself. The first-line firms to make the same products for the objects to the restrictions; it worries that treatment for HIV infection in the U.S. domestic market. The companies would the company will continue to donate the usually includes a protease inhibitor, have to pay the patent holder royalties, drug only until its patent expires in a such as indinavir, plus two drugs that, but in most instances they could still sell little more than two years and that pa- like AZT, work by shutting down HIV’s the products more cheaply. tients will then be left paying an uncer- ability to copy its genetic material. A The pharmaceutical companies are tain price. “What we want is what we year’s course of treatment with such a fighting the compulsory licensing idea, asked for—a price reduction” to the combination costs roughly $12,000 in which they say will erode the signifi- Thai price or lower, maintains Zackie the U.S. cance of patents, cut into research fund- Achmat of TAC. Failing that, TAC is The drug industries of India and ing, and possibly lead to poor, and per- petitioning Pfizer to grant a voluntary Brazil routinely ignore treaties designed haps dangerous, reproductions of their patent license enabling South Africa to to encourage companies from different products. Instead the five companies in import generic fluconazole. countries to honor one another’s pat- negotiations with WHO—which togeth- In a letter to TAC, Pfizer responded ents. Last May, President Bill Clinton er make most of the antiretrovirals li- that it will ensure that patients in the signed an executive order saying that censed for sale in the U.S.—appear to be free-drug program receive the medicine the U.S. government would not interfere sticking to their proposal for dropping “for as long as they need it” and that if African nations flouted patents held their prices by 80 percent. the company will “evaluate the success by U.S. pharmaceutical companies by That isn’t good enough for David of the program after two years.” importing generic AIDS drugs made in Berman of Médecins Sans Frontières, such countries. who would like to see drug companies Sticker Shock: It’s Contagious Moreover, the international agree- sell the medicines at just slightly above ment on Trade-Related Aspects of Intel- cost. An 80 percent reduction would s the debate over fluconazole contin- lectual Property Rights (TRIPS) offers a bring the cost of a year’s worth of a com- Aues, some countries—principally In- way for African countries to obtain bination of antiretroviral drugs from dia, Thailand and Brazil—are producing generic versions of antiretroviral drugs roughly $12,000 to $2,400, whereas generic versions of antiretrovirals, in- legally. According to TRIPS, which per- the same medicines in generic form im- cluding the especially pricey new pro- tains to the 137 members of the World ported from Brazil would come to only tease inhibitors, which can cost more Trade Organization, governments can $1,000. (To put that into perspective, www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 101 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. of regional buying clubs so na- Cost Comparison of Selected AIDS Drugs tions could buy medicines en bloc and negotiate better prices. Rich Drug Name U.S.Price South Africa “Best” Price U.S.Price as Multi- (wholesale) Price ple of “Best” Price countries would end up footing the bill for the R&D, whereas Didanosine $1.80 $0.70 $0.50 (Brazil) 3.6× poorer ones would pay only as (ddI;Videx) much as the drugs cost to make. Efavirenz $4.40 $2.40* $2.30 (Brazil) 1.9× (Sustiva) Beyond Drug Prices Fluconazole $12.20 $4.10* $0.30 (Thailand; × 40.6 ut drug costs aren’t the only (Diflucan) maintenance dose) Bsignificant contributors to the Lamivudine $4.50 $1.10 $0.50 (India) 9× bottom line when it comes to (3TC;Epivir) AIDS treatment. “If it were simply a Nevirapine $4.90 $3.00* $2.10 (India) 2.3× matter of making drugs avail- (Viramune) able, people would already have Stavudine $4.90 $2.50* $0.30 (Brazil) 16.3× them,” asserts Jeffrey Sturchio, (d4T;Zerit) executive director of public affairs Zidovudine $1.70 $0.40 $0.20 (Brazil/India) 8.5× for Europe, the Middle East and (AZT;Retrovir) Africa for Merck. Merck sells the protease inhibitor indinavir, which Combivir $9.80 $1.50 $0.70 (Brazil) 14× (lamivudine is trade-named Crixivan. “Access plus zidovudine) to antiretrovirals is just one part of a very complex situation,” agrees *Price the South African government pays to the pharmaceutical company—it is much lower than Stefano Vella, president of the In- the price charged to the private sector. ternational AIDS Society and SOURCE: Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders chair of the HIV Clinical Research Program at the Italian National consider that developing countries gen- cause the drugs are priced so high, he Institute of Health in Rome. erally spend $4 per person each year on contends. “So price reductions here Because HIV mutates readily, a given health care.) He also doesn’t buy the shouldn’t affect research.” set of antiretroviral drugs doesn’t work quality argument or the assertion that The 80 percent proposal doesn’t im- for an individual forever. Patients must cheap drug prices for Africa and other press health minister Tshabalala-Msi- be monitored so they can switch to an- developing countries would hinder the mang, either. “I have a budget of two other drug regimen when the viral strain search for new pharmaceuticals. “Right billion rand to treat the health issues of infecting them becomes resistant. Moni- now Africa represents only 1 percent of the entire country,” she says. She calcu- toring involves tests to measure a pa- the global pharmaceutical market” be- lates that an 80 percent price reduction tient’s number of CD4 cells—the im- for a typical course of mune cells targeted by HIV—as well as antiretroviral drugs would assays for viral load, the concentration U.S.Markets for Leading HIV Antiviral Drugs work out to 17,000 rand of HIV in the person’s blood. per person per year. Even These tests can be expensive; in India, Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (in millions) if she used her budget ex- for example, they run about $1,000 per Combivir (lamivudine plus zidovudine)...... $478.40 clusively to buy the med- patient per year. But Praphan Phanu- Zerit (d4T;stavudine)...... $315.90 — Epivir (3TC;lamivudine)...... $260.20 icines which would, of phak of the Thai Red Cross AIDS Re- Sustiva (efavirenz)...... $178.60 course, be impossible to search Center in Bangkok claims that Viramune (nevirapine)...... $108.10 do—she would be able to viral load monitoring is less important Ziagen (abacavir)...... $107.50 purchase only enough for than some have asserted and that CD4 Videx (ddI;didanosine)...... $78.60 roughly 120,000 individu- testing can be done more cheaply by di- Retrovir (AZT;zidovudine)...... $55.00 als. According to her de- luting the laboratory reagents required. Hivid (ddC;zalcitabine)...... $9.70 partment’s estimates, South In the meantime, physicians in the Rescriptor (delavirdine)...... $7.40 Africa currently has 4.2 U.S. and Europe are increasingly turn- Retrovir IV...... $0.70 million people living with ing to tests of the genotype, or genetic Total...... $1,600.10 HIV—more than 10 per- makeup, and phenotype, or susceptibili- Protease Inhibitors (in millions) cent of the population. ty to various drugs, of a person’s partic- Viracept (nelfinavir)...... $440 Harvard’s Bloom also ular strain of HIV to determine which Crixivan (indinavir)...... $234 calls the behind-closed- antiretrovirals will work best for that Norvir (ritonavir)...... $101 doors negotiations of the individual. Genotyping involves search- Fortovase (saquinavir soft capsules)...... $80 Agenerase (amprenavir)...... $48 five drug companies and ing a patient’s HIV samples for muta- Invirase (saquinavir hard capsules)...... $30 WHO “shortsighted.” As tions known to render the virus resist- Total...... $933 an alternative, he propos- ant to certain medications. Phenotyp- For 12-month period ending February 2000 es tiered pricing structures ing, which is even more difficult and expensive, requires growing the virus in SOURCE :Chemical Market Reporter, April 17,2000 according to a country’s wealth and the formation the laboratory in the presence of a panel

102 Scientific American November 2000 AIDS Drugs for Africa Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. of drugs to find out which works best. veloping countries will have an even is already a lot of resistance circulating.” Many laboratory technicians in the harder time, according to reports from “We do not have much time to set up developing world, however, lack the several of the first programs to offer a systematic approach” to using anti- equipment and training to perform CD4 antiretrovirals in such areas. retrovirals in Africa or patients “will all and viral load tests, much less genotyp- Papa Salif Sow of the Infectious Dis- be resistant,” warns Eric Goemaere, di- ing and phenotyping assays. This defi- eases Clinic at the University Hospital rector of the Khayelitsha clinic outside ciency supports those who argue that Center in Dakar, Senegal, reported at Cape Town. He says some of his pa- Africa is not yet equipped to manage this past July’s AIDS conference that he tients already report having taken a few patients on antiretroviral drugs. was able to get 64 of the 75 patients he antiretroviral pills that they have been “I don’t think we can wait for Afri- can governments to be able to do viral- BENJAMIN NTWANA, coordina- load and CD4 tests at each health cen- tor of the antiviral drug program at ter,” counters Christopher Ouma, who the Khayelitsha Midwife Obstetric runs a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic Unit, talks to a client in the program in Nairobi, Kenya. Ouma says that if who gave birth four weeks ago antiretroviral drugs become more af- (left). The woman, who is HIV-pos- fordable for Africa, Asia and other de- itive, received packets of AZT (be- veloping regions, the necessary labora- low) to take during the last few tories and staff training will follow. “If weeks of her pregnancy. The baby will be tested at nine and 18 months drugs are more widely available, we to determine whether the drug can spur governments to increase infra- blocked transmission of the virus. structure,” he predicts. In July the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $50-million donation to boost the medical infrastructure of Botswana. The grant will be spread over five years and will be co- ordinated with a matching commitment from Merck in the form of program management and antiretroviral medicines.

Sticking with the Program

nother hurdle for widespread anti- Aretroviral drug use in Africa is the sheer difficulty of most of the AIDS was treating with antiretroviral drugs able to obtain on a sporadic basis on drug regimens. Under the regimen used to take 80 percent of their medications, the black market. to prevent mother-to-child transmission but it required intensive follow-up. And Goemaere and his colleagues are cur- in Khayelitsha, for instance, a woman in Brazil, Silvio Aquino of the Munici- rently putting together a network of swallows three AZT pills twice a day pal Department of Health in Rio de physicians in his area who are now pre- during the last two months of pregnan- Janeiro said that only 67 percent of pa- scribing antiretrovirals and are working cy and then takes the drug every three tients he followed went for regular CD4 to ensure that the doctors have greater hours during labor. But to counter her tests, and a mere 40 percent showed up supplies of the drugs. He hopes that as own HIV infection with antiretrovirals, for viral-load testing, meaning they people find out about the treatment she would need to consume as many as could have undetected viral resistance. program—which will start in 2001— 26 pills every day according to a rigid No data on the prevalence of drug re- more will come forward to be tested for dosing schedule for years on end [see il- sistance in Africa following antiretrovi- HIV and that the denial and stigma sur- lustration on page 100]. Some medi- ral therapy have been published, ac- rounding being HIV positive will di- cines must be taken with a meal, some cording to Christiane Adje of Project minish. “AIDS did not ‘exist’ in Khaye- on an empty stomach, some must be Retro-CI in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. But litsha last year,” Goemaere likes to say. kept cool—and missing a single dose she says that of 68 patients she has treat- “Now it does.” SA can pave the way for the virus to be- ed in her program, which is part of the come drug-resistant. United Nations AIDS Program’s AIDS Adhering to such a schedule is hard Drug Access Initiative, 39 have devel- Further Information enough when someone has plenty of oped genotypic resistance after eight food, clean water and electricity for re- months and 25 have developed pheno- Beyond Our Means? The Cost of Treat- frigerating the heat-sensitive medica- typic resistance. (Genotypic and pheno- ing HIV/AIDS in the Developing World. tions. But between having one’s life dic- typic resistance can occur in the same Panos Institute, London, 2000. Something to Be Done: Treating HIV/ tated by a medication regime and the patient.) “These findings are very impor- AIDS. David E. Bloom and River Path As- side effects of the drugs, even people in tant for Africa,” comments John Nken- sociates in Science, Vol. 288, No. 5474, the affluent North cannot or do not ad- gasong, who is also part of the project. pages 2171–2173; June 23, 2000. here to the plan perfectly. People in de- “Before the drugs arrive properly, there www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 103 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Like a story by Victor Hugo as told to Neil Simon, the events leading up to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction involved accidental encounters among larger-than-life figures, especially two who did not exactly get along—but had to TheOdd Couple and theBomb by William Lanouette

104 Scientific American November 2000 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. n the eve of World War II, European physicists in 1919 for Berlin, where he studied and worked with Albert Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard both moved into Einstein. Initially, the two shared some ideas and several the King’s Crown Hotel, near Columbia Univer- patents for an electromagnetic refrigerator pump [see “The Osity in New York City. Although they had previously ex- Einstein-Szilard Refrigerators,” by Gene Dannen; Scientific changed letters, they met by chance at the hotel in January American, January 1997]; two decades later their relation- 1939. The encounter led to one of the more colorful—and ship would take on vast historical significance. contentious—partnerships in the history of science. When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the wary Szilard Each man was a refugee from European fascism, and each fled to London. That same year, he conceived the idea for a nu- possessed essential pieces to the puzzle that would ultimately clear “chain reaction” that, according to his 1934 patent ap- release the energy of the atom. They quickly realized, howev- plication, might produce “electrical energy” and possibly “an er, that a joint effort would require them to overcome deep explosion.” Such chain reactions would eventually take place differences in their worldviews, work styles and basic person- in nuclear power plants and in nuclear weapons. First, howev- ) alities. Had Fermi and Szilard failed to persevere in their often er, an element that could foster a chain reaction would have to uncomfortable collaboration, the world’s first controlled nu- be discovered. After four years of failed experiments at the ); clear chain reaction would not have been developed by 1942, University of Oxford and then at the universities of Rochester and the Manhattan Project would not have built the first and Illinois in the U.S., Szilard, too, came to Columbia. atomic bombs by 1945. As Szilard later reflected, “If the na- Fermi was a rigorous academic whose life centered on a letter from Einstein to F.D.R. Szilard and Fermi tion owes us gratitude—and it may not—it does so for having brilliant physics career; he had little interest in politics. A stuck it out together as long as it was necessary.” homebody, he soon moved his family from the King’s Crown to a house in suburban New Jersey. He awoke at 5:30 each Crossed Paths morning and spent the two hours before breakfast polishing his theories and planning the day’s experiments. Rare among he 38-year-old Enrico Fermi had just arrived in New 20th-century scientists, Fermi was a gifted theoretical physi- TYork from Rome. The trip included a stop in Stockholm cist who also enjoyed working with his hands. When not lec- to receive the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics, for work in which turing, he toiled in the laboratory with his dedicated assis- he had bombarded the element uranium with neutrons, which tants, making and manipulating equipment. created new transuranic (heavier-than-uranium) elements. An unemployed “guest scholar” with no classes or lab of ); COURTESY OF ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY ( ); LABORATORY OF ARGONNE NATIONAL COURTESY Fearing new racial laws in fascist Italy, Fermi and his Jewish his own, the bachelor Szilard rarely taught, published infre- wife decided against returning home. Instead he accepted one quently and dabbled in economics and biology. He lived in of four American offers and took a job at Columbia. hotels and faculty clubs and enjoyed soaking for hours in the mushroom cloud Leo Szilard, a 40-year-old Hungarian Jew, came to New bathtub to dream up fresh ideas. (One later inspiration was

ILLUSTRATION BY JENNIFER JOHANSEN;ILLUSTRATION AIP EMILIOVISUAL SEGRÈ ARCHIVES ( ( CORBIS York by a more circuitous route. He left his native Budapest that the National Science Foundation should pay second-rate

CONTENTIOUS COLLABORATION between Leo Szilard (opposite page, left) and Enrico Fermi (right) had a multiplicity of consequences, involving Albert Einstein, President Franklin D. Roo- sevelt and the realization of the atom bomb.

Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. scientists not to conduct research.) Szi- neutrons. Having no charge, a neutron lard read newspapers avidly, speculated hurled at an atom might stealthily pene- constantly about financial, political and trate the nucleus without being repelled. military affairs, and always kept two Szilard imagined that if a neutron hit a bags packed for hasty escapes from any nucleus and split the atom, the breakup new eruptions of fascism. might release the binding energy that A late sleeper, he often appeared at holds the atom together. Some of that Columbia only in time for lunch, after atom’s neutrons might in turn be re- which he would drop in on colleagues, leased, which could hit and split other posing insightful questions and suggest- atoms. If more than one neutron was re- ing experiments they should try. “You leased from each split atom, the process have too many ideas,” future physics could exponentially expand, with mil- Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi finally lions of atoms splitting in a fraction of a said to him. “Please go away.” second and freeing vast amounts of en- The late Massachusetts Institute of ergy. (Szilard would later learn that Technology physicist Bernard Feld Bohr’s news enabled Fermi likewise to worked with Fermi and Szilard as the envision a chain reaction, although he latter’s research assistant at Columbia. considered one extremely unlikely.) He summed up the two men: “Fermi While Szilard was filing his patent in would not go from point A to point B 1934, Fermi was in Rome, becoming until he knew all that he could about A the world’s expert on neutron bombard- and had reasonable assurances about B. ment of atoms. He found that by pass- Szilard would jump from point A to ing the neutrons through paraffin wax point D, then wonder why you were he could slow them down, increasing wasting your time with B and C.” the chance that they would be absorbed Within days of the chance meeting be- by the target nucleus. His work with tween Fermi and Szilard at the King’s uranium was puzzling. Sometimes the neutron source, which gave much clear- Crown Hotel, Danish physicist Niels nucleus absorbed neutrons. (Because er results. Bohr landed in New York with impor- atomic identity is governed by the num- The two men then attempted to work tant word from Europe: physicist Lise ber of protons, the neutron absorption together—with a resounding clash of JENNIFER JOHANSEN Meitner, a Jew who had fled from Ger- produced only heavier variants, or iso- individual styles. Szilard shunned man- many to Stockholm, had determined topes, of uranium.) But sometimes neu- ual labor in favor of brainstorming, but that Berlin chemists Otto Hahn and tron bombardment created entirely new Fermi expected all his team members to Fritz Strassmann had caused uranium elements. German chemist Ida Nod- participate in hands-on experiments. to undergo “fission” via neutron bom- dack, following Fermi’s experiments in Although the men respected the other’s bardment. They had split the atom. (In journal reports, suggested a chemical abilities, they bristled in the other’s com- 1966 the three would win the Enrico analysis of the new species to see if they pany. Recognizing their mutual need, Fermi Award for this work.) Bohr’s re- were the fragments of split atoms. But however, they reached out to Columbia’s port helped Fermi come to a more com- Fermi, concentrating on the physics of physics department chairman, George plete understanding of his own 1934 bombardment and absorption, did not Pegram, who agreed to coordinate their uranium experiments; in addition to cre- pursue the implications of those new el- separate work. Pegram’s shuttle diplo- ating transuranic elements, he had un- ements. Had he done so, he might have macy harnessed Fermi’s precision and knowingly split atoms. recognized nuclear fission years before Szilard’s prescience. With Anderson, To Szilard, the news was more omi- Meitner. the combative colleagues succeeded in nous. He realized that uranium was the At Columbia in the spring of 1939, determining that by using slow neu- element that could fuel the chain reac- Fermi and Szilard each tried experi- trons “a nuclear chain reaction could tion described in his 1934 patent appli- ments aimed at a better understanding be maintained.” cation. Betting on his political insight, he of fission. Szilard offered Canadian had assigned that patent to the British physicist Walter Zinn a radium-berylli- Building the Chain Admiralty in secret, lest he alert German um neutron source he had just ordered scientists to the possibility of atomic ex- from England. With it, Zinn and Szilard lthough collisions between Fermi plosives. The discovery of fission con- showed that more than two neutrons Aand Szilard were all too common, firmed Szilard’s fears that an atom bomb escaped during fission. Fermi and his as- collisions between neutrons and nuclei could soon be a decisive reality. sistant Herbert Anderson tried a similar were at first too rare. Passing the neu- The notion of the nuclear chain reac- experiment using a more powerful trons through so-called moderators, tion had first come to Szilard while he radon-beryllium source, with inconclu- such as Fermi’s paraffin, helped to slow was standing on a London street corner sive results. Szilard guessed that the them, making their collision with an in 1933. The neutron had been discov- source was too strong, enabling some atom’s nucleus more likely. By 1939 ered only the previous year, and physi- neutrons to pass right through the nu- physicists also knew that “heavy water” cists now thought of the atom as resem- cleus and making it hard to know if was an efficient moderator. Ordinary, or bling a solar system, with negatively they were counting neutrons from fis- “light water,” consists of two hydrogen charged electrons orbiting a nucleus of sion events or merely the original neu- atoms and an oxygen atom, the familiar positively charged protons and neutral trons. Szilard loaned Fermi his English H2O. In heavy water, two heavy iso-

106 Scientific American November 2000 The Odd Couple and the Bomb Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. tor. Szilard recommended that the test results remain secret. Fermi, ever the professional scientist, objected to the breach of the long-standing academic tradition of peer-reviewed journal publication. “Fermi really lost his temper,” Szilard would later recall. “He really thought this was absurd.” Pegram once again interceded, however, and Fermi reluctantly agreed to self-censorship under these special circumstances. With the graphite moderator, Fermi thought there might now be at least a ray of hope for a self-sustaining chain reaction. On the question of how realistic that hope was, Fermi and Szilard had also shown distinctly different modes of thinking. Szilard fretted that the Ger- mans were ahead in a nuclear arms race; in the American vernacular that Fermi enjoyed trying out, he reacted to Szilard’s speculation with “Nuts!” Fermi thought that any atom bombs were perhaps 25 to 50 years away and told colleagues that actually creating the self-sustaining chain reaction was “a remote possibility” with perhaps a 10 percent chance. “Ten percent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it,” Isidor Rabi replied. Szilard noted how differently he and Fermi interpreted the same information. “We both wanted to be conservative,” Szilard later recalled, “but Fermi thought that the conservative thing was to play down the possibility that this may happen, and I thought the conservative thing was to assume that it would happen and take the necessary precautions.” These precautions included Szilard borrowing $2,000 to support Fermi’s research. Nevertheless, in the summer PATENT awarded to Szilard in England for the chain reaction idea was assigned to the British Admiralty and remained secret until after the war. A U.S. patent for the actual of 1939 Fermi showed his relative lack reactor was awarded jointly to Fermi and Szilard. of concern over the implications of nuclear research by leaving for the Univer- sity of Michigan to study cosmic rays. topes of hydrogen, called deuterium, that is used as pencil lead—could be a The world’s first successful design for a unite with the oxygen. (Heavy water is moderator. But German scientists gave nuclear reactor was thus created neither still used as an effective moderator for up on it because it absorbed too many in a lab nor a library but in letters. natural uranium fuel in today’s nuclear neutrons; they instead concentrated on Szilard, typically, urged starting “large reactors, whereas light water is used for heavy water, always in short supply. Szi- scale” experiments “right away.” Fermi, enriched uranium fuel.) But heavy water lard, who often personally took trains to typically, remained skeptical. Szilard was expensive and scarce. The large- Boston or Buffalo to procure raw mate- proposed stacking alternating layers of scale experiments that Szilard had in rials for Fermi’s experiments, realized graphite and uranium in a lattice, the mind would require a more common that commercial graphite also contained geometry of which would define neu- and affordable moderator. He would small amounts of boron—a voracious tron scattering and subsequent fission discover one that his German counter- absorber of neutrons. He ordered cus- events. Fermi countered with a homoge- parts had overlooked. tom-made, boron-free graphite, which neous design in which the uranium and As Szilard had feared, German atom- eventually led to one of the most caustic graphite would be mixed like gravel. bomb research was well under way by Fermi/Szilard confrontations. The suggestion angered Szilard, who the spring of 1939. Both German and Anderson measured neutron absorp- concluded that Fermi preferred it only American physicists also recognized tion in the pure graphite and found that because it was an easier configuration that graphite—the soft form of carbon it would indeed make a good modera- about which to make calculations. Fer- www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 107 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. “MARCH OF TIME”/TIME“MARCH OF PIX

EINSTEIN AND SZILARD confer over the letter that would of the physicists is actually a re-creation of their meeting, taken convince the U.S. to develop nuclear weapons. This photograph in 1946 for the “March of Time” film Atomic Power. mi responded that further reflection had about the chain reaction. “I haven’t New Deal adviser and had access to the convinced him of Szilard’s lattice idea. thought of that at all,” Einstein replied, president. World War II began on Sep- Once sold, Fermi applied his substantial seeing at last a mechanism that might tember 1, and in October, when Roo- ingenuity to determining the lattice’s make real the mass-energy conversion sevelt finally received the letter, he physical properties and coordinating the of his famous equation. agreed that some action was needed “to personnel necessary to make a reactor. Szilard made two visits to Einstein, see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” To the second to discuss a letter for him to that end, he created a federal Uranium Friends in High Places sign. “Szilard could do anything, except Committee, with Szilard and other émi- he could not drive a car,” recalls his sec- gré scientists as members. Within weeks zilard recognized that despite his and ond-trip chauffeur, a fellow Hungarian they had gained a commitment of SFermi’s brainpower, they would still refugee scientist. “And I could drive a $6,000 for research at Columbia. need help from important allies for their car. And, therefore, I drove Szilard to After the war, Einstein said he had “re- collaboration to succeed. They would the summer place.... Einstein was a de- ally only acted as a mailbox” for Szilard. get it from an unlikely trio: Franklin D. mocrat in that he invited not only Szi- In 1940, however, Einstein was once Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover and Albert lard for a cup of coffee but also his driv- again forced to play a decisive role when Einstein. er.” Edward Teller was thus present the U.S. Army almost denied Fermi and During the summer, Szilard learned when Einstein, wearing an old robe and Szilard security clearance. Investigators, that Germany was restricting uranium slippers, read and agreed to sign the basing their conclusions on information supplies. He assumed that this indicated now well known letter to President from “highly reliable sources,” came to fission research and wanted to alert the Roosevelt. The letter, dated August 2, the paradoxical conclusions that Fermi, federal government. With the instincts 1939, began, “Some recent work by E. a refugee from fascism, was “undoubt- of a public relations expert, he turned to Fermi and L. Szilard....” It proceeded edly a Fascist” and that Szilard, in terror his mentor and friend Einstein, who to warn of German atomic weapons re- of the Nazis, was “very pro-German.” was living at a summer cottage on Long search and urged the U.S. to do its own. Perhaps Szilard’s cries that Germany Island, about 70 miles east of New York Szilard passed the letter to investment could win the war accounted for the lat- City. Szilard told the renowned physicist banker Alexander Sachs, who was a ter misinterpretation. (The report also

108 Scientific American November 2000 The Odd Couple and the Bomb Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. spelled Szilard’s name in two different uranium spheres embedded in graphite mi called the H-bomb “a weapon ways, both of which were wrong.) The blocks. On December 2, 1942, in a which in practical effect is almost one army decided of each man that “em- squash court under Stagg Field, the uni- of genocide.” ployment of this person on secret work versity’s football stadium, Fermi directed A joint patent for the Fermi-Szilard is not recommended,” despite the fact the experiment that initiated the world’s “neutronic reactor” was first published that the only secret work in question in first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear in 1955, a year after Fermi’s death. Szi- the U.S. at the time was taking place in chain reaction. After the historic experi- lard pursued molecular biology and nu- the minds of Fermi and Szilard. ment, Fermi and Szilard found Had the army been heeded, of themselves alone with their re- course, funds would have run out, and actor. They shook hands, Szi- all the embryonic federal atomic re- lard remembered, “and I said search by Fermi and Szilard would I thought this day would go have ceased. This mistake was averted down as a black day in the when the Federal Bureau of Investiga- history of mankind.” tion, under pressure from the White House, was ordered to “verify their loy- Later Conflicts and Harmony alty to the United States.” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent agents to interview ear the war’s end in Einstein (whose pacifist views would N1945, Fermi and Szilard later cause his own loyalty to be ques- differed once again. Szilard tioned). With Einstein’s good word, fed- had hastened the A-bomb’s eral money flowed in to Columbia in development as a weapon of November 1940, although suspicions of defense against Germany. Fermi and Szilard would abate only With Hitler’s defeat, Szilard years after they became U.S. citizens. argued that the bomb should Funding in place, Fermi’s team now not be used offensively against worked systematically to construct Japan but instead be demon- “piles” (Szilard’s lattice) of uranium and strated to encourage surren- graphite, to test for the ratio and geom- der. Fermi, as scientific adviser etry that would optimize a chain reac- to the administration’s high- tion. The day before the Japanese attack level committee on options for on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt bomb use, argued that a dem- approved an all-out federal commit- onstration would be impracti- ment to research the A-bomb. In the cal. The administration agreed, AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES spring of 1942 Fermi, Szilard and the with the subsequent August NOBEL LAUREATE FERMI was both a brilliant rest of the Columbia team moved to the devastation of the cities of Hi- theoretician and a gifted experimentalist. Few 20th- University of Chicago, where they es- roshima and Nagasaki. century physicists could make such a claim. tablished a top-secret “metallurgical After the war, Fermi fa- laboratory” for chain-reaction research. vored continuing army control of clear arms control until his death in The army’s Manhattan Project took atomic research, while Szilard success- 1964. Fermi summed up Szilard by call- over control of the effort in June. Ironi- fully lobbied Congress for a new, civil- ing him “extremely brilliant” but some- cally, at this same moment in history, ian Atomic Energy Commission. The one who “seems to enjoy startling peo- Germany scaled down its own A-bomb two men found common ground in op- ple.” Szilard reflected on Fermi by writ- work, convinced that the undertaking position to Szilard’s old friend Teller in ing, “I liked him best on the rare was impractical for the current war. 1950, when both objected to U.S. de- occasions when he got mad (except of In the fall, a pile was constructed, with velopment of the hydrogen bomb. Fer- course when he got mad at me).” SA

The Author Further Information

WILLIAM LANOUETTE received a doctorate in politics from the London Enrico Fermi: Collected Papers. Vols. 1 and 2. School of Economics in 1973. His thesis, comparing the use and abuse of sci- University of Chicago Press, 1962 and 1965. entific information by U.S. and U.K. legislators and government officials, pre- Collected Works of Leo Szilard. Vols. 1, 2 and 3. pared him well for his current work as an energy/science policy analyst at the MIT Press, 1972, 1978 and 1987. U.S. General Accounting Office. He has written about atomic energy and sci- Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szi- ence policy for more than 30 years, in such publications as the Atlantic lard, the Man behind the Bomb. William Lanouette Monthly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Economist. The author (with Bela Silard). University of Chicago Press, 1994. of a biography of Leo Szilard, Lanouette has lectured widely about the politics Enrico Fermi, Physicist. Reprint. Emilio Segrè. Uni- and personalities of the Manhattan Project. He is an avid oarsman, and his versity of Chicago Press, 1995. next book will be about the lucrative rise and scandalous end of professional An Enrico Fermi Web site can be found at www.time. rowing in 19th-century America. Lanouette thanks Nina Byers, professor of com/time/time100/scientist/profile/fermi.html physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and independent scholar A Leo Szilard Web site is at www.dannen.com/szilard. Gene Dannen for helpful additions to this article. html

t-home medical diagnosis dates back to the early 18th area verifies that the first antibody moved up the stick properly.) century and the invention of the enclosed thermome- The molecules of hCG and the antibodies are minute and col- ter. Sincethen, human ingenuity has devised ways to orless and so would naturally be hard to detect. But the first anti- detect an assortment of medical conditions. The mar- hCG antibodies also carry an enzyme that converts a colorless Aket for such devices has flourished since 1977, when the Food and substance plated onto the test and control regions into a colored Drug Administration approved the home pregnancy test. one. Depending on where the first antibody ends up, the person The pregnancy test checks a woman’s urine for human chori- conducting the test will see a colored line in just the control re- onic gonadotropin (hCG), a hormone produced by the placenta gion (meaning no pregnancy) or a colored line in both the con- after egg fertilization. Its concentration in the blood doubles trol and the test regions (pregnancy). —Rebecca Lipsitz, staff writer every two to three days, peaking around the eighth week of pregnancy. The technology for the test depends on antibodies— Y-shaped proteins that our immune system normally deploys against invading viruses, bacteria or anything else alien to the body. Every antibody binds tightly and with high specificity only to certain foreign molecules, or antigens, and this specificity is what guides the immune defenses. Pregnancy tests use a combination of three different hCG types of antibodies, two from mice and one from goats, the first two of which bind to hCG. A urine sample is BOUND ANTIBODY applied to the bottom of a test stick. The first antibodies flow up the stick as soon as they come in contact with the urine sample, attaching to any hCG that is present. The second antibodies are moored to the

Working Knowledge Working strip’s test area, and they immobilize the hCG IMMOBILIZED (along with the bound antibodies). Any of the ﬁrst ANTIBODY antibodies that lack hCG continue to move into the control region, where they are grabbed by the third type of antibody. (Binding in the control

COLORING ENZYME

URINE SAMPLE is applied to the bottom of the stick. Any hCG present binds to the ﬁrst anti-hCG antibody. Capillary action draws both bound and unbound antibodies up the stick. TEST REGION contains immobilized anti-hCG antibodies. They bind alternative sites on hCG, trapping the “sandwich” at the site. An enzyme attached to the ﬁrst antibody changes the color of a coating on the stick, evidence of a positive test.

DID YOU KNOW...

One of the characteristics that distinguishes ANTIBODY different pregnancy tests is how soon after ANTIGEN egg fertilization they can detect hCG. This depends directly on the minimum threshold levels of hCG needed for a positive test. Many manufacturers claim their tests can detect hCG at a concentration of 25 milli-international-units per milliliter, which appears approximately 10 days after egg fertilization. False negatives often result when hCG levels ANTIBODIES, protective proteins made by the immune are below the detection limits of the test. system, are similar in overall shape but contain slight False positives can sometimes occur for variations that enable them to recognize and bind to women who have received hCG as part of an different speciﬁc antigens (foreign substances). Anti- infertility treatment program. bodies from mice are used in pregnancy kits. Since 1977 the FDA has approved more than 100 different pregnancy tests. The conﬁden- tiality offered by these tests has made them the most popular of all types of home diagnosis kits.

Sales of pregnancy kits in 1999 were roughly $230 million, corresponding to approximately 19 million tests.

Although pregnancy tests dominate the home UNBOUND test market, many other over-the-counter kits ANTIBODY are available. These include monitors for glu- cose in diabetics (approved in 1980), ovula- tion (1984), cholesterol (1993) and illicit drugs (1998). Last year the FDA approved the ﬁrst home kit to test for hepatitis C, a disease IMMOBILIZED that may not reveal its symptoms until years ANTIBODY after infection.

UNBOUND ANTIBODIES progress up the stick into the control region, where they are bound by a third type of antibody. Again, the attached enzyme causes a color change, but that is proof only that the antibodies are behaving properly, not proof of pregnancy. ILLUSTRATIONS BYILLUSTRATIONS GEORGE RETSECK CHRISTIE AND BRYAN

Shawn Carlson explains how to simulate simple organisms on your computer

cientists sometimes struggle to un- tions, which can alter the fitness of the ar- space, it splits into two groups and re- derstand why certain animals act tificial animal. So by tracking many gener- assembles on the far side. as they do, especially social ani- ations of these byte-size beasties, you can Reynolds’s boids seem to support the mals. A school of fish or a flock of in several minutes watch their digital DNA fascinating theory of emergent behavior, Sbirds, for example, behaves in many ways evolve in ways that might take nature mil- which describes how complex social in- like a single creature. Yet exactly how the lions of years to accomplish with a real teractions can arise when individuals obey individuals organize themselves into a “su- genetic code. With much of this software a few rudimentary but very special rules. perorganism” is still very much a mystery. available online (consult the premier a-life Reynolds’s code contains no reference to But believe it or not, these days in- Web site, www.alife.org, or see www. flocking, much less any instructions for sights into such self-organizing commu- aridolan.com/ad/adb/adib.html for an in- how a flock should navigate obstacles. nities seem to come more often from dex of sites where you can download Java And whereas most programs can’t deal computer hackers than from field biolo- scripts), any interested amateur can now with situations that the programmer does gists. Many programmers are creating on plumb the depths of evolution, at least in not anticipate, in this simulation the their desktops virtual environments pop- these virtual worlds. boids execute a surprising array of sensi- ulated with simulated animals. The na- If you take up this challenge, you’ll be ble responses to unforeseen challenges. ture of these artificial life-forms (or “a- joining the ranks of people such as Craig Reynolds remains a leading pioneer on life,” for short) usually hinges on a spe- Reynolds, now with Sony Computer En- the virtual frontier: his applications of cial data string, which is analogous to the tertainment, who in 1986 developed an computer animation to motion pictures DNA blueprint of a living organism. This impressive model of flocking birds. Reyn- won him an Academy Award in 1998. digital code defines how an a-organism olds speculated that each bird in a flock Ariel Dolan, a computer programmer interacts with its cybersurroundings and acts on a simple set of directives. So he pro- in Ramat-Gan, Israel, has added a de- determines the likelihood that the simu- grammed his a-life creations, which he lightful twist to Reynolds’s creation by lated creature will reproduce. whimsically dubbed “boids,” to follow developing carnivorous boids, dubbed To mimic real DNA, the cybercode is just three rules. First, don’t get too close “floys” (pronounced “flow-eez”). Your The Amateur Scientist programmed to experience random muta- to anything, including other boids. Sec- gateway to Dolan’s a-life aviary is at www. ond, try to match your velocity to that of aridolan.com/eFloys.html, where you will the other boids around you. And third, find Java scripts that produce simulations always move toward the center of the that are truly a treat to watch. pack of nearby boids. Dolan’s floys follow just two rules: stick The results of his simulation are re- close to your fellows but not too close, markable. (Check out www.red3d.com/ and when you spot an intruder, move to- cwr/boids/ for an eye-popping animation.) ward it and attack. These instructions No matter how the boids are initially scat- also generate a flock. But the assembly tered, they quickly form a flock. When the benefits individuals in an unexpected group encounters an obstacle in cyber- way. Avoiding too much togetherness

CYBERBIRDS, dubbed “boids,” can be created on a computer (left) using software developed by Craig Reynolds. Although each virtual creature follows only a few simple rules, when a group of them encounters an obstacle (below left), the individuals split up (center) and later rejoin (right), mimicking a ﬂock of real birds. ALL BY ILLUSTRATIONS DANIELS & DANIELS

112 Scientific American November 2000 The Amateur Scientist Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. causes the floys to move in an ensemble that spreads out over a substantial region. They thus patrol airspace that extends far beyond the sensory range of any one floy. Whenever an outsider approaches, the nearest floy moves toward it. And because its compatriots are all programmed to remain together, the nearest neighbors follow along, as do their wing men, and so on. The result is quite striking. Challenged by an enemy, the entire flock turns quickly and pursues the intruder, including those floys that were initially too far away to sense the presence of the interloper. JAVA APPLET allows interested Web surf- The swarm soon engulfs the invader, ers to simulate carnivorous boids, called which ends up fighting for its a-life. This “floys” (above). A sequence of snapshots scene is not unlike what would happen to (top to bottom, right) shows what happens a hapless water buffalo that wandered when a band of floys (green) detects a lone into a lake infested with piranha. intruder (red ) and hunts it down as the be- Like feasting piranha, each floy is re- sieged interloper tries to flee. warded for every successful “bite” that it takes. In Dolan’s boid-eat-boid world, floys with three distinct levels of inborn each morsel delivers one unit of energy hostility. When a floy receives one cyber- from prey to predator. Fast floys have gene for aggression from each parent, it more opportunity to gorge, but they will be especially combative and will fight burn up energy rapidly while flying. Slow to the death with all foreigners. A floy floys use less energy, but they tend to that inherits only one gene for aggression reach intruders last, and so they collect will battle until its energy reserves get low less sustenance. and then retreat. And a floy with no vestigators have used computer simula- Dolan’s code generates mutations in genes for aggression will withdraw from tions of this kind to probe the mysteries of the instructions for speed and energy all fights. traffic flow (see, for instance, www.theo2. consumption and in other parameters as Here’s what I think might happen. physik.uni-stuttgart.de/treiber/Micro well, including how closely individuals When the population encounters an ene- Applet/). My good friend Greg Schmidt be- approach one another, how fast they ac- my group of overwhelming strength, lieves that Dolan’s floys may, in fact, need The Amateur Scientist celerate and even the probability that only some of the band will do battle, little modification to model the way peo- they will disobey the rules. Dolan’s pro- while the aggressionless individuals will ple drive on California highways. As with gram also ensures that the floys with the retreat. When energy reserves eventually my version, the actions of each floy most energy are the most likely to repro- run low, the modestly aggressive floys will could be determined in part by an aggres- duce and pass on their traits. So as the cy- join their nonaggressive comrades. But sion parameter, which would make some bergenerations pass, the population be- the highly aggressive floys will continue floys more likely to speed, swerve in front comes ever better adapted to live within to engage the enemy, thereby protecting of others or drive on the shoulder during its virtual realm. the retreating floys from attack. Although traffic snarls. Such a model, borrowed Armed with Dolan’s code and a little these steadfast warriors will ultimately be from a simulation of birds, could offer im- imagination, anyone with modest pro- destroyed, most of the original population portant insights into traffic management. gramming skills can perform all kinds of will survive—not bad, considering that a At the very least, it might one day explain original investigations. I am now trying uniformly aggressive population would be why drivers prone to rush-hour road rage to understand why high levels of aggres- killed off completely. And because more always seem as common as crows. SA sion survive in a population when this hyperaggressive individuals will appear in tendency so often seems self-destructive. the next generation when the surviving For more information about this and other My new version sets two bands of floys floys with single genes for aggression projects, direct your browser to the Web page against each other. A floy still loses energy mate, this strategy may be continued in- of the Society for Amateur Scientists, www. when it gets bitten by one from the ene- definitely. So some individuals in a war- sas.org, and click on the “Forum” button. my camp. But because warriors don’t gain ring population might always have de- You may write the society at its new address, strength when they strike a foe, successful structively aggressive tendencies—not for 5600 Post Rd. #114-341, East Greenwich, RI floy fighters in my simulation don’t gain their own protection but to ensure the 02818, or call toll-free: 877-527-0382. To energy when they bite an opponent. The survival of their pacifist brethren. Dolan’s purchase Scientific American’s new CD- result is a melee in which the winner is floys allow me to explore this notion. ROM containing all installments of this de- determined entirely by numbers, energy Artificial life-forms can also be used to partment published in the 20th century (more reserves and the rules of probability. examine problems that have nothing to than 800 articles), visit www.tinkersguild. I plan to modify the code to allow for do with biology. For example, some in- com or dial toll-free: 877-503-0148.

his past summer I attended a known as a slug (not to be confused with boldt University, Berlin, has discovered a conference in Portugal on the mollusk of the same name). simple system of mathematical equations the mathematics of pattern The slug is a colony of amoebas, but it that reproduces both the slime mold’s spi- formation, and one of the moves as if it were a single organism. Once rals and its streaming patterns. Cornelis J. lectures reminded me of my it finds a dry place, it attaches itself firmly Weijer of the University of Dundee has Tsecond favorite animal. My first favorite to the ground and puts up a long stalk. At shown that very similar equations can animal is the tiger, partly because I like its the top of the stalk is a round blob called model the movement of the slug. The dramatically striped fur. I like my second a fruiting body. The amoebas in the fruit- main factors that determine the patterns favorite because of its patterns, too, but ing body turn into spores and blow away are the density of the amoeba population, this creature isn’t as elegant as the tiger. It on the wind, thus continuing the cycle. the rate at which the amoebas produce a is the slime mold, or more specifically, a Thomas Höfer, a biophysicist at Hum- chemical known as cyclic AMP and the species of cellular slime mold known as Dictyostelium discoideum. Biologists find the slime mold fascinating because it lies on the borderline between single-celled protozoa and multi- cellular organisms. The slime mold also TIME illustrates a biological truth that the ex- plorers of the human genome should take to heart: it’s not just your genes that matter but what you do with them. De- spite its lowly position on the tree of life, Dictyostelium manages to create astonish- CONCENTRATION OF OF CONCENTRATION ingly beautiful spiral patterns [see illustra- MOLECULE ACTIVATOR tion on page 118]. To what extent are CELL POSITION these patterns encoded in the slime mold’s genes? Is there, in fact, a gene for spirals? To answer that question, we need to know how the slime mold makes its spi-

Mathematical Recreations rals. The pattern is actually the result of collective activity. The life cycle of Dic- tyostelium begins with a microscopic spore wafting along on the winds. If the spore happens to land on a nice, moist resting spot, it germinates into a single-celled amoeba and starts hunting for food (mostly bacteria). When the amoeba gets big enough, it reproduces by splitting in two. Pretty soon there are lots of amoebas. The artistry appears when the food runs low. The amoebas clump together, and as they make their way toward the center of the clump they sometimes form an elegant spiral. The crowd of amoebas gradually becomes more dense and the spiral more tightly wound. At some point it breaks up into “streaming patterns” that look like roots or branches extend- ing from the center. The streams thicken, and as more and more amoebas try to get CHANGEABLE ANGELFISH develops new patterns of stripes as it matures. In a computer simula- to the same place, they pile up in a heap tion of the process (upper right), the wave peaks correspond to stripes. ALL BY ILLUSTRATIONS CHRISTIE BRYAN

116 Scientific American November 2000 Mathematical Recreations Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. more than they do liquids. But by the time this distinction became clear, biologists had lost interest in the debate. Mathematicians, though, continued to ponder Turing’s ideas. Although his equations were far too simple to model real biological phenomena, they did produce the same kinds of patterns typically seen in animals. If pigments are deposited according to the peaks and troughs of parallel waves, you get stripes. More complex waves produce spots. The challenge for mathematicians was to flesh out Tur- ing’s scheme using theoretical models that more closely simulate the workings ARTFUL AMOEBAS in a slime mold colony form spirals, as shown in this artist’s rendering. of biology. In 1995 two Japanese scientists found sensitivity of individual amoebas to this acid—in a petri dish will produce con- the first convincing evidence of Turing chemical. Roughly speaking, each amoe- centric rings and spirals very similar to patterns in living things. Shigeru Kondo ba “shouts” its presence to its neighbors those made by the slime mold. Similar and Rihito Asai of Kyoto University ob- by sending out cyclic AMP. The amoebas reactions can produce stripes, spots, dap- served growing angelfish over several then head in the direction from which pling and many other patterns that are months and noticed a gradual rearrange- the shouts are loudest. The spiral pattern common in the animal kingdom. ment of their stripes. In mammals, the is a mathematical consequence of this Nevertheless, Turing’s ideas were reject- skin patterns simply enlarge as the crea- process. It forms when the amoebas at the ed by biologists. A major problem with his ture grows, but in maturing angelfish new center of the clump are rotating as they thesis was that the patterns that appear stripes are constantly forming as the older send out waves of cyclic AMP. spontaneously in the BZ reaction are not stripes split in two. What is more, the It therefore seems that most of the slime fixed—they move across the petri dish. changes can be predicted by mathemati- mold’s genes simply tell it how to be an The same is true for all the other Turing cal equations very similar to Turing’s. A amoeba. The genes tell the cells how to patterns observed by chemists. In con- computer simulation of molecular inter- send out chemical signals, how to sense trast, the patterns in most living creatures actions in a one-dimensional array of them and how to respond to them—but are fixed. We don’t see zebras with mov- cells yielded a wave pattern that closely the spiral patterns they produce are not ing stripes or leopards with moving spots. matched the rearrangement of angelfish specified in the genes. Instead the patterns Turing had shown theoretically that his stripes [see illustration on page 116]. emerge from the mathematical rules that equations can produce both stationary The movement of the stripes is rather the amoebas are obeying. Mathematics and moving patterns, but laboratory ex- slow, which is why we don’t generally may define the life cycle of the slime mold periments seemed to create only moving notice it. But, as Galileo said, “It moves as much as genetics does. ones. Later on, the chemists discovered all the same.” Mathematics changes the The equations that lead to this far- why: if you carry out the reactions in a gel appearance of the angelfish just as it in- reaching (and controversial) conclusion rather than a liquid, the patterns become fluences the life cycle of the slime mold—

Mathematical Recreations are modifications of equations devised stationary. Living organisms resemble gels and perhaps our own as well. nearly 50 years ago by English mathe- matician Alan Turing, who is best known as one of the founders of computer science. Turing was also interested in mor- READER_ FEEDBACK phogenesis—the formation and differen- tiation of biological tissues and organs. In n a recent column on tilings [“Rep-Tiling the Plane,” May], I said that no- 1952 he postulated that ordered patterns body has classified all possible rep-tiles (tiles that can be assembled to form in living creatures don’t need an ordered larger replicas of themselves). Aaron Meyerowitz of Florida Atlantic Uni- precursor. He argued that the patterns versity sent me an e-mail pointing out that this is almost certainly a hard could arise from chemical substances Iproblem in the sense of algorithmic complexity—that is, how long a computer called morphogens that react with one solution to the problem would run. another as they diffuse through tissue. Suppose we restrict our attention to polyominoes, which are polygons made When Turing first published his ideas, by joining squares edge to edge. It is known that the problem of determining they were purely theoretical, but a strik- whether a given set of polyominoes can tile a rectangle is intractable. Any algo- ing example of “Turing patterns” soon rithm used to solve the problem would take an absurd amount of time to yield an appeared: the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) answer. The same is also likely to be true for the problem of determining whether chemical reaction. Russian scientist B. P. a single polyomino can tile a rectangle. Furthermore, we know that any polyomi- Belousov and later his compatriot A. M. no that tiles a rectangle is a rep-tile: you can always fit the rectangles together to Zhabotinsky discovered that mixing just make a square and then fit copies of this square together to duplicate the shape of a few ordinary chemicals—including sodi- the original polyomino. So it seems intuitive that classifying the polyomino rep- um bromate, sulfuric acid and malonic tiles alone is an impossible task. —I.S.

118 Scientiﬁc American November 2000 Mathematical Recreations Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. REVIEWER_ CLAIRE PANOSIAN DUNAVAN Politics and Plagues Laurie Garrett sounds an alarm for the disastrous state of global public health Books

t the dawn of the twentieth cen- its cache of biologic specimens for out- “ tury the Western world fused side review. the ideas of civic duty and In contrast, global teamwork helped to public health. Conquering dis- rein in Zaire’s 1995 epidemic of Ebola easeA was viewed as a collective enterprise virus hemorrhagic fever. Once the world for the common good.... Where did we finally learned, that is, of desperate pa- go wrong?” asks Newsday’s medical writer tients, relatives and hospital workers per- and future-shock-meister Laurie Garrett in ishing from the blood-borne landa-landa the epilogue to her new book Betrayal of (evil spirit) in the benighted town of Kik- Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. wit. Garrett’s original Ebola coverage, Six years after her best-seller The Com- complete with sights, smells and an- ing Plague fueled nightmares of microbial guished cries in the night (“Afwaka! Some- Armageddon, the journalist-turned-proph- one has died! Someone has died! He was et is now on to politics and plagues. Her my husband! He was my husband!”), thesis? With globalization, no person or won her a Pulitzer Prize. Her recap in Be- corner of the planet is safe from antibiot- trayal of Trust is a cautionary tale of politi- ic-resistant superbugs, epidemics or bio- cal corruption, human misery and the war. Why then, Garrett asks, have recent sometimes hidden dangers of sick bays. investments in disease control declined, Ironically, with its utter lack of everyday while relative spending on curative medi- gear like sterile needles and latex gloves, cine—goods and services beyond the reach Kikwit’s own general hospital was the sin- of most global villagers—skyrocketed? And gle biggest boon to Ebola’s spread there. will this brazen self-interest by the world’s Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse But the former Soviet Union’s disas- wealthy someday rain doom on us all? of Global Public Health trous state of health and the post–cold Needless to say, for many disease sufferers by Laurie Garrett war defections (who knows where: Iraq? in Betrayal of Trust, it already has. Hyperion, New York, 2000 ($30) Libya? Sudan?) of key military biologists It’s hard to know what to credit—Gar- are the twin thunderbolts most likely to rett’s in-your-face storytelling, her ava- town of Surat. Headlining her chapter jolt Garrett’s readers from lingering com- lanche of historical and contemporary “Filth and Decay: Pneumonic plague hits placency. First she surveys the carnage of health data, or simple force of will—but India and the world ill responds,” Garrett an unraveled Soviet economy and med- her proposition is convincing. By the final rebukes the World Health Organization ical system: a twofold excess in death ver- pages of Betrayal of Trust, we also believe. and Indian health authorities for a palsied sus birth rates, rampant alcoholism and The road to faith, however, is long— response to the potential global wildfire. heroin addiction, scores of sickly and more than 700 pages of text and notes After all, just one spew of bacteria-laden abandoned children, widespread environ- from five years of stalking disease and bu- phlegm on an international flight could mental pollution, crackpot science (a still reaucratic decay in India, Africa, the for- have lit the blaze. (“Well, maybe,” a sea- pervasive legacy of Lysenko, the Stalinist mer Soviet Union and our own United soned plague pro—of whom there are era’s hero of anti-intellectualism), mis- States. Interspersed are epidemiologic sta- precious few these days—might reply. trust of vaccination, and decrepit hospi- tistics that sometimes raise more ques- Among killer respiratory pathogens, tal gulags where ordinary infected people tions than they answer. But, in the end, smallpox beats Yersinia pestis transmission go without treatment while, elsewhere, even these support the cause. The mere hands down any day.) power bosses hoard lifesaving drugs as fact that field data on, say, multidrug-re- In any case, while international airlines they once did caviar and cognac. sistant tuberculosis or HIV-tainted blood doused their planes with pesticide, Sudan Three hundred pages later, we join Gar- transfusions can be fragmented, anecdot- jailed all travelers from India for six days, rett on the first visit by any U.S. journalist al or downright flawed argues in itself for China barred Indians period, and WHO to VECTOR, the former U.S.S.R.’s once better epidemiologic intelligence and glob- waffled, how big—really—was the out- premier virus weapons lab outside Novosi- al monitoring. break of plague in Surat? Several thou- birsk, Siberia. In 1997 it is a ghostly com- In 1994 a flurry of plague on the west sand cases or fewer than a hundred? The plex with broken windows, surrounded by coast of India sounded an early warning. truth is, we’ll never know. India’s govern- Russian soldiers with threadbare uniforms Over a single week, the quasi-outbreak ment, no doubt embarrassed by its own and pathetic little ken of the lethal con- produced a panicked exodus of half a mil- crippled public health machinery and tents of Building Number 1—in Garrett’s lion people from the economic boom- mishandling of the crisis, never released own words: “row upon row of industrial

120 Scientific American November 2000 Books Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Books freezers [housing] Ebola, Lassa, smallpox, health for all, she argues, plays directly to quibble with her occasional factual er- monkeypox, tick-borne encephalitis, killer into pharmaceutical profit mongering ror or to bloodlessly intellectualize her influenza strains, Marburg, HIV, hepatitis and ignores historical fact. After all, case: yes, of course medicine needs public A, B, C, and E, Japanese encephalitis, and haven’t nutrition, housing, sewage and health, and vice versa, and so on. dozens of other human killer viruses. And water systems, epidemic control, immu- Don’t go there. there were dozens of different strains of Someday Garrett may be thankful for smallpox viruses—140 of them were natu- medicine’s imperfect craft. But right now ral, wild strains. Some were handcrafted Haven’t nutrition, she deserves thanks. While hardworking by the bioengineers of VECTOR, giving housing, sewage systems, and professionals in public health silently bat- them greater powers of infectivity, viru- immunization saved more lives tle on, she gives voice to their stifled moral lence, transmissibility.” outrage over lost lessons and opportuni- Some experts take issue with Garrett’s than any high-tech medical ties. At its core, Betrayal of Trust is a call for (and others’) Jeremiah-like vision of bio- intervention yet employed? international activism long overdue. May war. In fact, the debate is now routine fare its readers include policymakers, finance in major medical meetings. Nevertheless, ministers and global philanthropists. With after reading her eyewitness account and nization, education and literacy, and pre- Garrett’s glaring challenge before them, recalling recent history, it’s hard to deny natal, maternal and child health pro- they, too—like the frontline heroes she her claim that biologic weaponry vies to- grams—in short, public health—saved honors—hold the power to save lives. SA day with nuclear arms–making as the more lives than any high-tech medical world’s most potent intellectual property. intervention yet employed or imagined? CLAIRE PANOSIAN DUNAVAN is a med- As for American public health and This seeming antiscience stand—along ical journalist and professor of medicine, in- medical science, Garrett names heroes with Garrett’s impassioned, attention- fectious diseases and international health at and villains and openly states her mis- getting style—could raise the hackles of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her trust of the new frontier: molecular and many a dedicated doctor or research sci- articles and columns appear regularly in Dis- genomic medicine. Its illusory promise of entist. In response, how easy it would be cover and the Los Angeles Times.

THE EDITORS_ RECOMMEND

Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey H. Schwartz’s Extinct Martin Davis’s The Universal Computer: The Road from Humans, with principal photography by Jeffrey H. Schwartz. A Leibniz to Turing. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000 Peter N. Nevraumont Book, Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., ($26.95). 2000 ($50). “As computers have evolved from the room-filling behe- Tattersall (curator of anthropology at the American Museum moths that were the computers of the 1950s to the small pow- of Natural History) and Schwartz (professor of physical anthro- erful machines of today that perform a bewildering variety of pology at the University of Pittsburgh) have traveled around tasks, their underlying logic has remained the same,” Davis the globe to examine essentially every known hominid fossil. says. “These logical concepts have developed out of the work Their study of the anatomy has led them to the following con- of a number of gifted thinkers over a period of centuries. In this clusion. The pattern of evolution in our own species is no dif- book I tell the story of the lives of these people and explain ferent from that of the rest of the earth’s fauna: “repeated evo- some of their thought.” Davis, professor emeritus of mathe- lutionary experimentation, diversification and, ultimately, ex- matics at New York University, has devoted his career to “this tinction.” This reasoning may seem only commonsensical to relationship between the abstract logical concepts underlying those unfamiliar with the more usual picture that paleoanthro- modern computers and their physical realization.” pologists sketch of a rather linear development—“a single- His tale encompasses seven mathematicians who con- minded struggle,” as the au- tributed to that relationship: Gottfried Leibniz, George Boole, thors put it, “from bestial Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel and Alan benightedness to uplifted Turing. Leibniz, one reads, dreamed of “machines capable of enlightenment.” carrying out calculations.” Boole put forward an algebra of log- They develop their theme ic. And on to Turing, who envisioned a “universal machine” with great style (and great that could play games like chess, be induced to learn much as photographs) and conclude a child does and ultimately “could be made to exhibit behavior by suggesting what accounts one would be led to call intelligent.” Davis believes that the for H. sapiens’ being the story he tells “underscores the power of ideas and the futility lone hominid on the earth of predicting where they will lead.” today. We won’t spoil the fascinating read by divulging Howard C. Hughes’s Sensory Exotica: A World beyond what they (very convincing- Human Experience. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999 ($26.95). ly) propose. The book is an Can a dog sense in advance that its owner is about to have intellectual adventure that an epileptic seizure? A dog described in a recent news report would be well worth undertaking for this intriguing denoue- does that, evidently by detecting certain chemicals associated ment alone, but there are in addition a wealth of informative with the onset of a seizure. It is an example of a sensory capa- stops en route. bility beyond the human range. Many animals can sense things www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 121 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. that people are unaware of or sense weakly. Such animals are being conscious, is dependent on the emergence of semantic the subject of the story recounted by Hughes, who is a profes- capabilities and, ultimately, of language. Concomitant with sor of psychology at Dartmouth College. He describes sonar in these traits is the emergence of a true self, born of social inter- bats and dolphins, biological compasses (based on the sun or actions, along with concepts of the past and future.” stars or geomagnetism) in birds and insects, electricity sensing in fish, and pheromones (chemical signals) in insects and Peter Tyson’s The Eighth Continent: Life, Death, and Dis- apparently in people. And he takes pains to pin down the covery in the Lost World of Madagascar. William Morrow, Books mechanism of the sensory capability in each case. “We don’t New York, 2000 ($27.50). yet have all the answers,” he says, “but at least we are learn- Madagascar is the world’s fourth- ing how to ask the right questions.” largest island (after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo) and the largest S. S. Schweber’s In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppen- oceanic one. Isolated in the Indian Ocean, heimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. 250 miles off the coast of Africa, it is of singu- Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2000 ($24.95). lar interest because of the many animals and plants Many a scientist has to think today about what Schweber that are found only there. Science writer Tyson went calls “the danger of the knowledge of certain technologies.” It there four times between 1993 and 1997. On each trip is an issue that came into sharp focus with the development of he traveled about with a scientist—a herpetologist, a the atomic bomb. Schweber treats it by tracing the careers of paleoecologist, an archaeologist and a primatologist. physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, with em- His book describes the island largely through their phasis on their answers to the research. It is a technique that produces a sharp pic- question “What is the role of ture of an intriguing place. Tyson also presents a THE EIGHTH CONTINENT

the scientist in a democracy?” brief history of the island, beginning with the odd FROM In so doing he sets the stage fact that the first human inhabitants apparently ar- for an inquiry into other pro- rived no more than 2,000 years ago, and ponders found and troubling questions: what can be done about the ecological devasta- “What did it in fact mean for tion being wrought by the impoverished popula- scientists to address problems tion there today. affecting all of humankind? What moral and political re- Witold Rybczynski’s One Good Turn: A Natural History sponsibilities did it entail, par- of the Screwdriver and the Screw. Scribner, New York, 2000 ticularly during the beginning ($22). of the Cold War and in the Mc- Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at the University of Carthy era? And how did scien- Pennsylvania, has written best-selling books on such subjects tists respond to these de- as domestic comfort, building his own home and Frederick Law mands?” Schweber is a physi- Olmsted. He felt a bit let down when the Sunday magazine of cist and a historian of science, serving as professor of physics the New York Times asked him to write an article about “the and professor of the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He best tool” of the second millennium. But he is good with tools brings both talents compellingly to his discussion. and interested in them, and so he took on the assignment. Many tools, he soon found, predate the second millennium. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi’s A Uni- Consulting William Louis Goodman’s History of Woodworking verse of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Ba- Tools, published in 1964, he read somewhat disbelievingly that sic Books, New York, 2000 ($27.50). the screwdriver did not appear A woman senses that a room is light or dark and is aware until the 19th century. That set that she has done so. A photocell senses the same thing with- him off on a search for earlier ref- out awareness. The difference is consciousness—something erences to this “laughably simple everyone recognizes but no one can fully explain. Edelman (di- tool.” The result is this splendid rector of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego) and Tononi account of a number of tools, of (a senior fellow there) propose what they call the dynamic core the evolution of the screw and fi- hypothesis to explain the neural basis of conscious experi- nallyofhisdiscoverythatthe ence. “This hypothesis states that the activity of a group of “turnscrew” is indeed much old- neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience if it is er than Goodman thought. His part of a functional cluster, characterized by strong mutual in- search led him eventually to the teractions among a set of neuronal groups over a period of 15th-century Medieval House- hundreds of milliseconds.” They call such a cluster the dynam- ONE GOOD TURN book, wherehefoundadrawing ic core because of “its ever-changing composition yet ongoing FROM of a screw-turning lathe with a integration.” puzzling tool resembling a chisel In telling their tale, the authors describe brain structure and lying on a workbench. “One day, while I am puzzling over the function, review earlier efforts to explain consciousness and drawing again, I realize that the blunt end [of the tool] is exact- come to a discussion of higher-order consciousness—the kind ly the same size as the slot in the head of the cutter. Of course. that humans have. “Our position has been that higher-order It’s not a chisel, it’s used to adjust the cutter. It’s a screwdriver. consciousness, which includes the ability to be conscious of Eureka! I’ve found it. The first screwdriver.”

he magnetic compass sailed This “dip” of real compass needles toward dered succession of magnetized rocks on westward for centuries out of the downward direction, once mounted the ocean floors that record 100 and China, until even Atlantic to swing freely in the north-south plane, more full reversals of the present direc- mariners used it widely. In the had been first displayed at about the time tion of the magnetic poles during the Tround year of 1600, a prominent physi- of Gilbert’s earliest researches. past couple of 100 million years of cian of Elizabethan London, William If the body of the earth holds a huge seafloor spreading. The earth’s magnetic Gilbert, authored—in Latin—the first lodestone, its two magnetic poles lying a state fades sharply to zero at highly irreg- classic of that springtime century of sci- little displaced from the poles of earth ro- ular intervals on a million-year timescale. ence, under the grand title About Magnets tation, the magnetic technology that The deep electric currents switch off or and Magnetic Bodies, and that Great Mag- puzzled all before Gilbert can be rational- nearly off, to reappear generally aligned net, the earth,... & demonstrated by experi- ized. Worldwide observations of local mis- near the rotation axis, sometimes with ments. That English rendering is still in alignment between the magnetic and the reversed magnetic polarity, sometimes reprint (Dover paperback). No wonder celestial pointers fit this strangely simple peating the previous state. The core re- Galileo prized Gilbert’s amazing work, 10 picture quite well, and their dip angles, gion is a dynamo, where complex electric years earlier than Galileo’s own celebrat- too. Today a grade school science class can currents wind within a thick conducting ed Latin classic on the telescopic sky. have a small bar magnet and a hand-size fluid shell to generate the surface fields. Natural magnets, called lodestones, are split globe of the earth made of foam Theorists assure us that magnetic forces samples of magnetite, the complex black plastic. Push the magnet into the foam at between interacting currents can amplify oxide of iron, and were then chief donors about the right latitude, and many small an initial seed field, taking energy both of magnetization. Any piece of smelted bits of soft iron will align themselves iron could be magnetized by stroking it on the spherical surface just as Gil- with a good-size lodestone. (The old bert drew them. Staples are bits of word “lode” occurs still in the poet’s iron wire easily made by working word “lodestar” and carries the sense of your desktop stapler without any pa- leading one on.) Gilbert tells just how to pers to link. proceed even without a lodestone: ordinary iron metal, “if it be drawn out long” t the southernmost tip of Africa, and held in the north-south line, can Awell south of the Cape of Good magnetize compass needles quite well. Hope, Portuguese navigators noted A magnetic needle aligns itself very around 1500 that the magnetic nee- roughly north and south along the dle pointed closely in the same di- meridians wherever it is taken (no iron rection as the noon shadow of the ships then). No one knew how the nee- sundial gnomon (or of the main- dle attended to one suspiciously cosmic mast), the true north and south by direction everywhere it went, until sun and stars. They named that aus- Gilbert demonstrated the circumstances tere and windswept strand the Cape of that amazing power. Stars aside, this of the Needles, where magnetic nee- magnetism is terrestrial. dle and earth axis concurred. That Gilbert explains it through action. agreement no longer works there, for Make a “terrella” by rounding and pol- the great magnet of the earth drifts ishing a small piece of lodestone. Little irregularly up to 10 degrees a century. iron wire bits—“one barley-corn in Is the earth really a great lode- length”—will align nicely about it, their stone? Certainly not. Neither magnetite from the heat they tap and from the ki- stance depending on their location. nor iron metal remains strongly magnet- netic energy stored in the rotation of the Around the equator of the terrella they ic at the temperature of the earth’s earth. The seed might be the magnetized lie flat on the surface but turn to point to molten outer core. But long-term geo- plasma repeatedly expelled our way from the poles. At each magnetic pole they magnetic change provides strong and the active sun. During the past five years, stand upright, pointing into the ground. simple evidence for our present under- three-dimensional simulations of the real At a place like London they find the standing. Compass needles are not ruled fluid global dynamo have become impres- north-south plane and seek to point by any permanent magnet but by a great sive, capable of mapping plausibly tangled downward, but not vertically as at a pole. electromagnet, the earth. We find an or- Continued on page 127 DUSAN PETRICIC www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 125 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Survivals James Burke considers the primitive, the antiquarian, the mathe-

matical, the electrical—and draws some dramatic conclusions DAVE PAGE

accidentally spilled some salt at hoards of amassed bric-a-brac for the were edited and published in 1791 by dinner the other night and was benefit of the museum. One such was Charles de Coetlogon, Calvinist absentmindedly tossing a pinch the Fountaine family treasure, estab- preacher, whose pièces de résistance over my left shoulder when I re- lished 100-odd years earlier by Sir An- were his blurbs, that is, prefaces to Icalled that Victorian adventurer Ed- drew of that ilk, tutor to the English other people’s weighty tomes, the ward Burnett Tylor had first identified royal family, successor to Newton at 18th-century equivalent of “Read it! A that kind of thing: the now meaning- the Mint, pal of Gottfried Leibniz real page-turner!”

Connections less modern survivals of once mean- and antiquarian extraordinaire. In In the 1770s de Coetlogon was as- ingful ancient practices. Tylor (“father 1714 Sir A. spent a few years in Italy, sistant chaplain at Lock Hospital in of cultural anthropology”) was the buying up serious quantities of the London to the Rev. Martin Madan, guy who linked Little Red Riding past (coins, paintings, books and ce- reformed sinner. Back in 1748 Madan Hood to solar myths and kicked off ramics) and becoming bosom bud- had belonged to a drinking club for the argument (still raging) about dies with Cosimo III whether early technology diffused or de’ Medici, second-last Torricelli is less well known for was independently invented by differ- grand duke of Tuscany, ent cultures around the planet. while that place and his work in early gobbledygook. He began this work after visiting family were going to Havana in 1856, where he met Henry rapid wrack and ruin. I mean, as re- young tearaways, attended one of Christy, traveling son of a banker, cently as Cosimo’s dad, Ferdinand II, John Wesley’s sermons to get material loaded and ethnology-minded. The the resident in-house Medici intellec- for a satirical after-dinner routine, pair went on to Mexico, where Tylor tuals had been none other than was converted on the spot and took made notes for his first anthropologi- Galileo and his sidekick Evangelista holy orders. My guess is you know cal book, Anahuac, and Christy filled Torricelli, who only discovered the Madan only because he edited the his suitcase with all that parapherna- vacuum. present version of Wesley’s brother lia you bring back from holiday: Torricelli is less well known for his Charles’s “Hark! The Herald Angels masks, dolls, wicker baskets, and so work in early gobbledygook, a.k.a. Sing.” In 1780 Madan really blotted on. Christy did this magpie trick any- the geometry of indivisibles. If you his copybook with a carefully rea- where he went, including Perigord, read this column regularly, you’ll soned work on how polygamy was France, where he later bankrolled and know this is one of my many blind okay by the Bible and would solve accompanied Édouard Lartet (“father spots, so the best I can do is say that the problems of adultery, seduction of paleontology”) on explorations in Torricelli made discovering the vol- and prostitution. Lead balloon. Upper Paleolithic caves that revealed ume of barrels easier. I think. some of the first examples of cave art. Well, there was infinitely more to it eanwhile the umpteenth-up- A few of which Christy hacked off than that, as was evidenced when Mgrade edition of Wesley’s per- and took back to England to add to Torricelli’s notes on infinitesimals blew sonal health care handbook, Primitive his massive collection of prehistoric away one John Wallis, English math- Physic, was hitting the stores with an loot, which in 1865 he would leave ematician and no slouch. Knew Greek, extra chapter on the amazing curative to the British Museum, in the tender French and Latin by the age of 15, be- properties of the new electricity. Very hands of keeper of ethnography Au- came the government’s crack cryptol- much in fashion at the time, thanks to gustus Wollaston Franks. The collec- ogist, introduced the infinity symbol quack promoters like fave-rave “Dr.” tor’s collector. ∞, helped to found the Royal Society James Graham and his “London Tem- Apart from piling up stuff for him- with his pal Robert Boyle and took ple of Health and of Hymen,” where self (Italian majolica, Japanese and Torricelli’s work to the stage that it hypochondriacs waited in line to sit Chinese porcelain, Japanese sword was ready for Newton to turn it into on an “electrico-magnetic throne” guards, medieval brass-rubbings, vari- calculus. All that, as well as churning and receive shock treatment for every- ous ancient drinking vessels and fin- out the homilies and tracts required thing from acne to lack of issue. Once ger rings), Franks was a whiz at sepa- when you were also a working clergy- Graham shared the lecture stage with

rating the rich and aged from their man. Wallis’s puritanical sermons a large woman named Ann Siddons, WYNNE J. PATRICIA

Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Connections who had a squint, who later tried to poi- Wonders, continued from page 125 material attraction was already known to son herself very publicly in Westminster worldwide voyages of the modeled poles. Greek and Roman authors but never so Abbey and whose sister paid her an an- It is worth recalling the elaborate wire carefully examined. A spray of water will nuity to stay more than 150 miles away. coils with iron cores that compose the shield this needle from amber, but a coat The sister was Sarah Siddons, tragedy- power generators now turning to feed of olive oil will not. Gilbert lists many queen megastar of the 18th-century the- your reading lamp. That functionally substances that attract this needle, not ater, who would play every major female similar dynamos can grow of themselves only amber and jet, and scoffs at wilder Shakespearean role, give lessons in speech at cosmic scale is a wonder. The power claims, mainly magical or animate expla- to the royal princesses and spend over 50 demand of the global electromagnet is nations, as “disgracefully inaccurate.” years thesping to SRO crowds, many not of cosmic magnitude but on the His mechanics and his chemistry are among which were so impressed at her scale of the biggest power generators we still very much derived from Aristotle performances that they fainted. ourselves have built. The earth’s magnet- and the Greek elements and humors, so In her 1801 King John, the part of ism has been supplied over time by using his long, philosophical arguments do not teenage Prince Arthur was played by a 14- under a billionth of the earth’s stored en- seem conclusive to us. But he is a diag- year-old newcomer, Edmund Kean, who ergy of spin. nostician of talent, who tells us what he took elocution lessons from his ventrilo- The first experiment Gilbert describes has tested and compared during 18 years quist uncle and who stage-managed a ca- in De Magnete is surprisingly not about of work. His electrics are only a brief di- reer every bit as boffo as Siddons’s, mak- magnetism at all: “Make yourself a rotat- gression, but they point right at electric ing so much money that it was piled on ing needle, of any sort of metal,... pretty charge and its forces, now linked into his apartment floor. Kean believed his light, poised on a sharp point, after the electromagnetism. This early touch of own hype, became the melodrama villain manner of a magnetic pointer.” No mag- generality, a kind of unification based of all time, was elected an honorary netism, no north or south, this needle not on words alone but on shared action, Huron chief and died of alcoholic excess. signals not a magnetic attraction but an illuminates Gilbert’s work. Four centuries His son Charlie, trading on the family electrical one as it turns to follow the po- later his simple model still lies closer to name, was a moderately successful the- sition of a rubbed piece of golden amber. our developing science than to technical ater manager. In 1858 he hired an 11- Gilbert extends his fresh and skeptical innovation or to learned speculation year-old girl to play Prince Arthur. She thinking to fit the facts: a second distinct alone. SA went on to become Henry Irving’s leading lady and to gain worldwide fame as Ellen Terry, with more years on the Shake- spearean stage even than Siddons. In 1905, late in her career, Terry played the lead in Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, written for her by an up-and-coming playwright, J. M. Barrie, who had just produced what his friends told him would be a disaster that nobody would ever buy tickets for: a modest little play for children entitled Pe- ter Pan. Barrie authored a list of plays as long as your arm, most of them now for- gotten, including his only real flop: Jane Annie, written in collaboration with a guy who three years earlier had been a practicing doctor and one year later was to become a name in every household as the creator of the most famous detective of all time. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher- lock Holmes turned into such a cult that to this day thousands fetch up at his “home” (now a museum) on Baker Street, London, where he “lived” with his medical straight man, Dr. Watson. Later in life Doyle dreamed up another winner: Professor Challenger, explorer- anthropologist hero of The Lost World, who finds a mysterious, isolated plateau in the South American jungle that is in- habited by living prehistoric animals and Corbis half-ape, half-human “missing links.” Archaic survivals suggested by the work of anthropologist E. B. Tylor. Pass SA the salt, please. KAEHLER WOLFGANG www.sciam.com Scientific American November 2000 127 Copyright 2000 Scientific American, Inc. Smart Thinking

Readers of this magazine are obviously highly intelligent, but what other clues make us assume someone is brainy, wonders Steve Mirsky DAN WAGNER DAN

ere’s how you know peo- out that such perceptions and concep- polling—do well in the voting. And who- ple think you’re smart: tions “inﬂuence attitudes and behaviour ever is the president of the U.S. does even they call you “Einstein.” in everyday social interactions, voting better. This prejudice has led to oddball Here’s how you know preferences ... and can affect personnel assessments of brainpower in which Ron- people think you’re really decisions.” Ask any kid whose teachers ald Reagan beat Leonardo da Vinci (last Hsmart: you’re the guy whose name, Ein- already taught that kid’s older sibling. superpower over Last Supper), George Bush stein, is what smart people get called. The study examined the responses of topped Stephen Hawking (read my lips The really smart guy’s name may also be hundreds of sophomores and juniors over try to read my books) and Bill Clin-

Anti Gravity used sarcastically—ya follow me, Ein- over a two-decade stretch, with data ton outpolled Isaac Newton (castigation stein? (Quick digression: Was this habit gathered in 1982, 1984, 1989, 1993 and over gravitation). popular throughout history? Centuries 1997. Even though each student could The results reveal the importance of ago did anyone ever say, “You forgot to name only one person, Einstein always three factors in assumptions about intel- muck the stalls again, Newton.” Or, topped the list and never had less than a ligence: familiarity, likability and power. “Hey, Pythagoras, your sandal’s untied 16 percentage point lead over his closest Who could be more familiar than the about halfway up your calf.”) rival—with the exception of 1982, when prime minister or the president, both of Finally, here’s how you know people he edged Pierre Trudeau by a single whom probably appear on Canadian tel- think you’re really, really smart: in a point. (For you younger readers, Trudeau evision on an almost nightly basis? And study designed to examine perceptions was the dashing, erudite Canadian prime if those people didn’t have a talent for of intelligence, undergraduates consis- minister who presided over Canada’s fi- being liked, chances are they wouldn’t be tently and often by a wide margin picked nal, full independence from Great Britain. in office in the first place. Albert Einstein in response to the instruc- His wife Margaret, apparently much more Both familiarity and likability probably tion, “Think of an ideal example of an of an Anglophile than Pierre, eventually take a back seat to power, however, which intelligent person.” The research, per- left him and wound up dating half the explains why the Canadian P.M.’s usually formed at the University of British Co- Rolling Stones.) finished behind the U.S. presidents. lumbia and recently published in the The Trudeau votes are part of a fascinat- “Why aren’t Canadians biased toward Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, was ing trend. Both the Canadian and British their own leaders?” the authors ask. “The designed to get a better grasp on judg- prime ministers—whoever they hap- paradox, we suspect, is based on the fact ments of intelligence. The authors point pened to be at the time of a particular that Presidents . . . are viewed as more powerful than our Prime Ministers—even with respect to Canadian affairs. Indeed, there is previous evidence that leader power supersedes leader likability in determining attributions of intelligence.” So caveat emptor, Cicero. Next time you’re under the impression that some- body is smart, make sure it’s not just charm or nuclear stockpiles that has you making that assumption. For example, other frequent high finishers include Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Madonna. Now, these people are no doubt no dopes. But the fact that they appear in the top 15 in multiple years, whereas John Bardeen is nowhere to be found, is a strong indicator that in con- ceptions of intelligence, fame and power trump (oh yeah, the Donald made the lists, too) two quiet Nobel Prizes in Physics. That’s right, Bardeen won two Nobels, which is one more than Einstein got. And probably at least one more than

SA SIDNEY HARRIS

End Point you’ve got, Einstein.