No one alive can recall the wrenching transformations of the Industrial Revolution. But nearly everyone on earth has witnessed the dawn of the Internet age, its modern-day equivalent. The globe-shrinking, empowering series of innovations that has transformed lives throughout the world and continues to shape communications, entertainment, leisure time and the workplace first took hold in the 1980’s.
There was no Wright Brothers moment. The Internet advanced stealthily, the province of academic researchers and specialists at vast government-funded computer projects like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States and the European Center for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN, in Switzerland.
Technicians inspect a new military remote-controlled plane at the Edwards Air Force Base, California, in 1981.
The world little noted but has long remembered, for example, the moment in 1980 when Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor with CERN, wrote the hypertext software code he named Enquire. It corralled the disparate provinces of the documentation systems then in existence and united them in a single entity he called the World Wide Web.
British physicist-turned-programmer Tim Berners-Lee.
The personal computer advanced by leaps and bounds. The do-it-yourself kits of the 1970’s evolved into preassembled computers with processing power that expanded exponentially. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple developed new programs and hardware that made the personal computer as familiar as a television set by the end of the decade.
Users learned to operate a funny little gadget called a mouse, mastered the art of sending electronic mail—or e-mail, for short—and took part in chat lines in the cyberspace gathering places known as virtual communities. They learned to fear a mysterious enemy called a virus. They looked forward to the day, apparently not far off, when everyone could work at home and telecommute.
The launch of space shuttle Columbia in 1981.
The space program still sent astronauts aloft, but the focus shifted to the orbital craft known as space shuttles, like the Columbia, the Discovery and the Challenger, to transport satellites and spare parts for space stations.
The shuttles ascended to an altitude between 200 and 400 miles, a short hike compared with the moon missions of yesteryear but with dangers just as threatening. Less than two minutes after take-off on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven crew members.
The unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft reached the far ends of the solar system, sending back stunning photographs of the moons and rings of Saturn before traveling onward to Uranus and reaching Neptune by the end of the decade.
Dione, one of the moons of Saturn, photographed by Voyager 1, 1980.
Medical research advanced on several fronts, most notably in cancer research, but the frantic search for a cause and a cure for AIDS dominated the headlines. The disease, first noted in the early 1980’s, remained a mystery until Robert Gallo in the United States and Luc Montagnier in France simultaneously identified the retrovirus, HIV, that causes the deadly immune deficiency. By the end of the decade, AZT, the first drug to treat the disease, had been developed and approved for adult use by the FDA.
Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Chermann and Françoise Barre-Sinoussi, the three Franch scientists who helped to discover the causes of AIDS, in 1984.
It was a decade of startling breakthroughs and exciting new research projects. Surgeons began opening up clogged arteries with a minimally invasive procedure called a balloon angioplasty. In Salt Lake City, Dr. Robert K. Jarvik successfully implanted an artificial heart of his own design in the chest of a retired dentist named Barney Clark.
The artificial heart in 1981.
In 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated, pronouncing the final word on a disease that had afflicted mankind for more than 10,000 years. It was an unforgettable moment that lit a spark of hope. If smallpox could be vanquished, surely AIDS could not be far behind.
DECEMBER 22, 1980
The E.P.A. Gets Tough on Waste
Chemical industry executives were calling 1980 “the year of Hazardous waste” even before President Carter signed legislation this month that will create a $1.6 billion “superfund” to clean up dangerous toxic waste dumps and chemical spills.
The reason is that the Environmental Protection Agency last month imposed long-delayed regulations governing the handling of hazardous wastes from the moment of their creation to their final disposal. While the “superfund” is aimed at cleaning up such hazardous waste disasters as Love Canal, the agency regulations have the broader goal of preventing them.
“This is the most comprehensive set of environmental regulations ever developed,” declared Ben Woodhouse, manager of regulatory affairs for the United States marketing division of the Dow Chemical Company.
The scope of the regulations is indicated by the 13 pages the E.P.A. needed in the Federal Register simply to outline the criteria for determining whether a waste is hazardous. The regulations extend beyond toxic wastes to include substances that are considered dangerous because they are corrosive, easily ignitable or highly reactive.
The clean-up bill requires industry to pay excise taxes on basic chemicals and crude oil that will raise $1.38 billion of the total over five years. The new regulations, which became effective Nov. 19, will probably cost as least that much annually, according to the agency’s analysis. In combination with existing air and water pollution control laws, they are intended to close the circle on industrial pollution problems that have caused increasing public concern in the last decade. 
NOVEMBER 10, 1980
MORE COLORFUL VIEW OF SATURN EMERGING
Pasadena, Calif., Nov 9–Voyager 1, now 2.5 million miles from Saturn speed, has returned new photographs showing contrasting bands of pale yellow, golden brown and reddish brown running parallel to the planet’s equator, as well as high-speed jet streams coursing through the hydrogen-helium atmosphere.
Image of Saturn taken by Voyager 2 spacecraft.
The multi-hued world of Saturn emerging in the Voyager photography is in striking contrast to its pale yellow image seen in the best Earth-based telescopes.
Saturn’s rings continued to surprise and puzzle scientists as new Voyager photographs, processed to show how the right particles reflect ultraviolet light, highlighted what appeared to be some fundamental difference between the innermost ring and the other two major rings. In ultraviolet light, the inner or C ring has a bluish tint, as against the whiter A and B rings.
The 10,000-mile wide C ring is the least visible from Earth of the three major rings. Between the C ring and the cloud tops of Saturn, a distance of about 8,000 miles, lies a region apparently free of orbiting debris.
SHUTTLE ROCKETS INTO ORBIT ON FIRST FLIGHT
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., April 12–The space shuttle Columbia, its rockets spewing orange fire and a long trail of white vapor, blasted its way into earth orbit today, carrying two American astronauts on a daring journey to test the world’s first re-usable spaceship.
Soon after they settled into orbit, John W. Young, a civilian, and Capt. Robert L. Crippen of the Navy focused a television camera on the Columbia’s tail section and discovered that more than a dozen heat-shielding tiles had ripped off, possibly because of the stresses of launching.
Project officials said that the tile loss should not shorten the flight or endanger the lives of the astronauts when the Columbia plunges back into the atmosphere, glowing red-hot from frictional heat, to attempt a runway landing Tuesday. The projected 36-orbit, 54 1/2-hour flight is scheduled to end at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
“I’m just not concerned about it,” Neil B. Hutchinson, a flight director at Mission Control in Houston, said in discussing the tile problem at a news conference this afternoon. “We’ve got a super vehicle up there.”
The mission is the first of four planned orbital tests of the space shuttle, a revolutionary complex of machinery designed to take off like a rocket, cruise in orbit like a spacecraft and return to earth like a giant glider. No other space vehicle has been reflown.
If the shuttle lives up to expectations, the Columbia and three sister ships now under construction should each be capable of making as many as 100 round trips into space, deploying and servicing satellites and also carrying scientific laboratories and planetary probes.
It was the first launching of American astronauts in nearly six years, and officials at the Kennedy Space Center were elated and visibly relieved. Controllers in the firing room waved small American flags as soon as they received assurances that Mr. Young and Captain Crippen were safely in orbit.
The age of the Space Shuttle begins with the launch of Columbia on the STS-1 mission. Commander John Young and Pilot Robert Crippen were at the controls.
George F. Page, the director of shuttle operations, arrived at a post-liftoff news conference, smiling and waving his flag. “I’ve been on a lot of first launches,” he said. “I’ve been in the business 20 years, and I never felt anything like today.” Neither did Captain Crippen, the 43-year-old astronaut who made his first trip into space after waiting 15 years. His heart rate jumped to 130 beats a minute, from a normal 60, in the 12-minute ascent. The increased heart rate was not unusual for astronauts in a critical phase of a mission.
“That was one fantastic ride!” he exclaimed. “I highly recommend it.” Though busy checking out the shuttle systems, Captain Crippen stole a few glances out the cockpit window at the earth and the airless space all around, remarking: “Oh, man, that is so pretty!”
Starting as a 4.5-million-pound, 184-foot-high complex of machinery, consisting of the orbiter Columbia attached to a huge external fuel tank and two solid-fuel rockets, the space shuttle struggled upward to achieve orbit.
COOL, VERSATILE ASTRONAUT: SALLY KRISTEN RIDE
The celebration over sending the first American woman into orbit has tended to overshadow the fact that Dr. Sally K. Ride is to be the first person to perform one of the most significant tasks of the space age. Reaching into the void with a 50-foot robotic arm, she plans to capture a satellite as it hurtles about the earth and, using mechanical might conferred by gears and motors, bring it safely to rest in the cargo bay of the space shuttle.
Astronaut Sally Kristen Ride inspects the array of tools at her disposal during her earth orbit in the Challenger shuttle STS-7.
Her aerial exercise points to the not-so-distant future when it could be routine to grasp satellites, mine asteroids, build space stations—in short, to clutch and shape instead of just to pass through space as an awestruck visitor. It marks a new stage in the taming of the high frontier.
Even before liftoff, Dr. Ride had achieved world renown as the woman designated to break the all-male barrier in the American space program. There are now seven women in the astronaut corps.
Dr. Ride will also play an important role in preparation for future missions. She will act as a liaison agent between the Government and private companies when clients from aerospace and military industries contract for space aboard the shuttle.
On the second shuttle flight Dr. Ride had the highly visible job of capsule communicator, the person on the ground who relays messages to the astronauts. Soon after that she was named mission specialist for the seventh flight of the shuttle.
In her pioneering role, Dr. Ride has been subjected to a host of personal questions, such as whether she would wear a brassiere in orbit and whether she feared the flight would adversely affect her reproductive organs. Through it all she has remained unrattled, direct and concise.
“It’s too bad this is such a big deal,” she remarked at a NASA news conference. “It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”
AUGUST 31, 1983
First U.S. Black in Space
The first black American to soar into space, Lieut. Col. Guion S. Bluford Jr., has in his career followed a trajectory as sure and graceful as that of the Challenger. Fascinated as a child with things that fly, he pursued his interest to the point of taking a doctorate in aerospace engineering. A reluctant hero on the issue of racial barriers, the 40-year-old Air Force officer acknowledged his pioneering role at a recent news conference, but he stressed that he was more excited about being able to fly on the Challenger.
He has nonetheless gone out of his way to share with black students his devotion to the art of aerospace engineering.
This year he visited a predominantly black high school in Camden, N.J., which built an experiment to be carried aboard the Challenger. “The students went wild when Colonel Bluford came,” said one teen-ager who worked on the experiment. “He said: ‘I’m an engineer, and I’m black and I’m lonely out there.’ ”
With almost no hope of success, Colonel Bluford in 1978 applied to the astronaut program, along with 8,078 others. He said he was puzzled when an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration called to chat about the Texas sunshine, until he was asked if he would like to be an astronaut.
The next year he became eligible for a mission. “It really proved to be better than I expected,” he said after entering the program. “It gives me a chance to use all my skills and do something that is pretty exciting. The job is so fantastic, you don’t need a hobby. The hobby is going to work.”
Colonel Bluford, who prefers to be called Guy, is a mission specialist, one of the new breed of scientific pioneers who are taking an increasing share of the limelight from the pilot astronauts.
Aboard the Challenger, he will perform experiments with electrophoresis, a way to separate biological materials according to their surface electrical charge by passing them through an electric field. The technique may yield new drugs. He will also help launch a communications and weather satellite for India and put the shuttle’s mechanical arm through tests with an 8,000-pound weight
Though he is the first American black in space, he is not the first black; the Soviet Union placed Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, who is Cuban, into orbit in 1980 aboard Soyuz 38. Waiting to follow Colonel Bluford into space are three other black American astronauts.
The comedian Bill Cosby said the historic flight was a breakthrough for the Federal Government. “This is someone who had earned the mission,” he said. “Our race is one which has been quite qualified for a long time. The people who have allowed him to make this mission are the ones that have passed the test.”
Colonel Bluford lives in Houston with his wife, an accountant with an oil concern. Both his sons are science students in college. “I try to keep them from feeling pressured that they have to accomplish more than I have,” he said. “I want them to be happy. That’s what is most important.”
NEWEST SHUTTLE FIRED INTO ORBIT AFTER 3 DELAYS
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug. 30–After three postponements over two months, the space shuttle Discovery rocketed into orbit today on its maiden flight and successfully deployed the first of three communication satellites in its cargo.
The launching, which came just seconds before 8:42 A.M., was delayed almost seven minutes by the intrusion of a small private aircraft in the restricted airspace surrounding the Kennedy Space Center. The countdown was halted while an Air Force plane intercepted the intruder that was holding up the $1.2-billion spaceship and escorted it out of harm’s way.
On the ground the reaction to the successful launching was more exuberant. The nation’s 12th shuttle mission, and the Discovery’s first, was postponed twice in June, once because of a computer malfunction and then because a fuel valve failed to open in the final seconds before liftoff. One of the engines that had already ignited had to shut down.
Then, with these problems behind them, launching crews uncovered a potential problem in transmitting critical ascent commands through the spaceship’s master events controller. This forced a one-day postponement in the launching, which had been scheduled for Wednesday.
At a post-launching news conference, Robert B. Sieck, the launching director, said: “We’re happy the orbiter and its crew finally left town. The launch team is ecstatic. The only way to get over an abort and two postponements is to have a successful launch.”
Astronaut Dale Gardner approaches the Westar 6 satellite, using the Manned Manoeuvring Unit (MMU), prior to capturing it and bringing it back to Discovery’s cargo bay.
MARCH 5, 1985
E.P.A. ORDERS 90 PERCENT CUT IN LEAD CONTENT OF GASOLINE BY 1986
WASHINGTON, March 4–The Environmental Protection Agency said today that it was considering a total ban on leaded gasoline by 1988. It issued final rules for removing 90 percent of the lead currently in automobile fuel by the end of this year.
The agency said last year that it was contemplating a flat prohibition on lead in gasoline by 1992.
Lee M. Thomas, Administrator of the environmental agency, said that an accelerated schedule for barring all lead in gasoline was being considered in large part because of new information about the adverse effects on human health of lead in the air. In particular, he noted that new studies suggest that lead from gasoline is a significant cause of high blood pressure among adults.
“There is no doubt in my mind that lead in the environment is still a national health problem and that gasoline is a major contributor to lead exposure,” Mr. Thomas said at a news conference at his headquarters this morning. “These standards,” he said, “will significantly reduce the adverse health effects that result from using lead in gasoline and will reduce the misuse of leaded gasoline in vehicles designed for unleaded fuel.”
Agency data show that the use of leaded gas is 67 percent higher than was forecast in 1982 when the current standard of 1.1 grams per gallon was adopted. Much of that increase, according to the agency, is because some motorists are using the cheaper leaded gasoline in vehicles with engines designed to use only lead-free gasoline.
Mr. Thomas said that it was estimated the new rules put in place today would add about 2 cents a gallon to the cost of producing gasoline. He said he did not know how that increase would translate at the pump.
This Journey Comes Once in 76.3 Years
Travelers dream of spectacular destinations throughout the world, but the next major trek for as many as 10,000 North American adventurers may be to gaze at something entirely beyond this world—the return of Halley’s comet next April.
The best seats on the planet will be in the Southern Hemisphere. But no one will be forced to travel below the Equator for a good show, according to the astronomer Stephen J. Edberg, coordinator for amateur observations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and unofficial high lama for every amateur Halley hunter on the continent.
“For those willing to make some effort,” he says, “there’ll be a very satisfactory view in the Northern Hemisphere.” The effort will require an exodus from urban areas to the nearest desert or clear rural or wilderness skies, but once there, Halley’s comet, nucleus and tail, should be visible to the naked eye and clear and detailed through ordinary binoculars.
But stay-at-home or globetrotter, you might as well kiss the comet goodbye if you don’t catch it in 1986; it returns to this neighborhood roughly once each 76.3 years. If a 10-year-old child is old enough to understand what he or she is viewing and remember it, that child will be 86 years old when the next opportunity knocks, around 2062. (It could be worse. The Great Comet of 1864 won’t be back for about 3 million years.) The British Astronomer Royal, Edmund Halley, calculated his comet’s average period, or circuit time around the sun, during its 1682 visit, but this period can be as short as 74 or as long as 79 years.
Halley’s Comet in 1986.
As soon as California’s Mount Palomar telescope confirmed, in October 1982, that Halley’s comet was back in the neighborhood, knowledgeable comet watchers were able to calculate its closest approach to earth and make their reservations accordingly. The full moon interferes with good viewing, so its dark phases will leave a best-observation window from April 4 or 5 through April 20. (The comet will be visible to a greater or lesser extent from January through April. March and April will be the best months. February will be the poorest because the comet will be too close to the sun.)
Before Dr. Halley, comets appeared without warning or prediction, and the most common explanation was that they were omens of nasty historic events on the horizon.
SEPTEMBER 3, 1985
WRECKAGE OF TITANIC REPORTED DISCOVERED 12,000 FEET DOWN
A team of American and French researchers was reported yesterday to have found the hulk of the luxury liner Titanic south of Newfoundland.
Mother ship Atlantis II of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution returning home after expedition to site of wreckage of luxury liner Titanic.
After combing the site with new undersea robots, the team was able to verify the ship’s identity with cameras and sonar early Sunday morning, according to American and French officials. A French announcement said the wreck was found at a depth of more than 12,000 feet.
The discovery came more than 73 years after the luxury liner, said to be unsinkable, struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage and went down, resulting in the loss of more than 1,500 lives. The ship was the biggest and most luxurious liner of her day.
Dr. Robert D. Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the leader of the joint expedition, said in a ship-to-shore interview that pieces of the ship were found early Sunday.
She took more than 1,500 to their death
The Titanic’s wreckage had eluded at least three teams who set out to find it. Researchers have come back with only dim, tantalizing hints.
The Titanic sank on her way from Southampton, England, to New York after striking an iceberg April 14, 1912. She took more than 1,500 of her approximately 2,200 passengers and crew to their death.
The Titanic was carrying some of the richest of the world’s rich, including John Jacob Astor and his wife, who bore his child after Astor went down with the ship. They were aboard in a suite that cost $4,000 for the one-way voyage.
Isidor Straus of Macy’s was lost, as was Mrs. Straus, who refused to leave her husband of many years to enter a lifeboat.
The researchers worked at finding the wreck with advanced robots that use remote-controlled television, photography and sonar-mapping systems that can survive crushing pressure and pierce the darkness miles under the ocean surface.
FEBRUARY 4, 1986
NEW DNA TEST OFFERS BIOLOGICAL ‘FINGERPRINTS’ FOR CRIME FIGHT
A new biological test promises to change radically the way criminologists track down murderers, rapists and muggers.
An autoradiograph of the first genetic fingerprint.
Virtually foolproof identification of any person is now believed possible through the powerful new laboratory test that detects genetic “fingerprints” in tiny samples of blood, semen and hair roots.
The test can help solve mix-ups of newborn babies in hospitals, aid in identifying lost people, help determine parentage and alter immigration procedures. The test may also provide scientists with new methods to detect hereditary disorders and to determine the functions of large portions of the genetic material DNA in the body.
The test is called DNA fingerprinting. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is contained in every cell and is different in each person.
The British scientists who developed it calculate that the chances of two people having the same test results are measured in the billions. The only known exceptions are identical twins. Experts say that DNA fingerprinting might someday have greater application than conventional fingerprints and be done routinely at birth.
DNA fingerprints for blood and sperm appear to be the same. Because there are severe limitations on identifying the origin of sperm through existing techniques and because spermatozoa are largely composed of DNA, criminology experts said they suspect that the main use of the new test will be in rape cases. According to the developers of the test, it should be possible to match a DNA fingerprint of sperm from a victim or clothing with that of blood or sperm from a suspected rapist.
The test was developed at the University of Leicester by Dr. Alec J. Jeffreys and reported in a recent issue of the British journal Nature. It was adapted for criminology use by Dr. Peter Gill and Dr. Werrett of the British Home Office’s Forensic Science Service in Aldermaston, working in collaboration with Dr. Jeffreys.
Other forensic scientists, such as Dr. Gilbert E. Corrigan of the Veterans Administration Hospital in St. Louis, called the test “phenomenal.”
So far the test is apparently being done only in England. Some experts said they believed a few laboratories in the United States would begin experimenting with it in about a year.
James Kearney, a forensic science specialist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, said his agency was taking the development seriously, had assigned a researcher to study its potential and has been collaborating with scientists at the National Institutes of Health to develop a similar test.
Mr. Kearney said it would take “from two to five years” to overcome the hurdles and to adapt the test for routine testing, according to estimates made by F.B.I. specialists.
2 SOVIET ASTRONAUTS LOFTED TOWARD NEW SPACE STATION
MOSCOW, March 13–The Soviet Union launched two astronauts today toward a rendezvous with the new space station Mir, and in a rare move the takeoff was shown live on national television.
At exactly 3:33 P.M. (7:33 A.M., New York time), flames belched from the huge boosters and the rocket lifted smoothly over the snow-dappled Central Asian steppes at the Baikonur launching site.
Fifty seconds later, as the voice of the controller reported that “the flight is normal,” the television shifted to cameras inside the Soyuz T-15 craft and showed Col. Leonid D. Kizim, the commander, and Vladimir Solovyov, the flight engineer, cradled in their space suits and apparently at ease.
At 120 seconds, as the controller announced the separation of the first stage, the astronauts were visibly jolted. The transmission continued until the 270th second, when the crew was reported safely in orbit.
The launching was only the fourth that the Russians have shown live on television. The three previous televised shots involved foreigners, directly or indirectly: the Soyuz crew that linked up with an American Apollo spacecraft in 1975, and Soviet-French and Soviet-Indian crews in 1982 and 1984.
Some Western diplomats surmised that the launching was broadcast to demonstrate the reliability of Soviet equipment after the catastrophic explosion of the American space shuttle Challenger Jan. 28, with the loss of seven lives. The Soviet press has commented at length on the Challenger disaster and the subsequent investigation, sometimes arguing that it demonstrates the dangers of President Reagan’s proposed reliance on a space-based defense against nuclear missiles.
Russian Mir Space Station.
The publicized launching of the two astronauts followed hard on the successful rendezvous of two unmanned Soviet space probes, Vega 1 and 2, with Halley’s comet. First Vega 1 on Thursday, then Vega 2 on Sunday flew by the comet to record and measure its nucleus and its coma of dust.
The Vega missions involved participation by experts from a dozen countries and were given extensive publicity in an apparent effort to demonstrate Soviet dedication to peaceful and cooperative exploration of outer space.
MARCH 25, 1986
GLOBAL EFFORT URGED FOR OZONE
MEDFORD, Mass., March 24–International laws banning the use of products containing chlorofluorocarbons has been urged at a conference on the global environment.
Senator John H. Chafee, a Rhode Island Republican who was one of 10 speakers at the New England Environmental Conference at Tufts University, said the laws were needed to protect the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere.
Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) false color image showing ozone depletion over Antarctic taken from NASA’s NIMBUS-7 SATELLITE in 1986.
Chlorofluorocarbons are believed to damage the ozone layer’s shielding effect, allowing the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays to penetrate the atmosphere Mr. Chafee told the 1,200 participants at the conference, which was sponsored by more than 180 organizations, that without international laws preventing the use of products containing these chemicals, there could be increased incidences of skin cancer and other diseases along with the extinction of certain plants and animals.
“Many people assume that we solved the problem when in 1978 the United States prohibited the use of CFC’s in spray cans,” Mr. Chafee said Sunday. “Unfortunately, many nations in the world have not enacted such prohibitions.”
He also warned of “extraordinary changes in climate” from the “greenhouse effect,” the warming of the planet caused by burning fuels and dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.
“Shifts in rainfall, growing season and temperature in our Midwest could dramatically alter our ability to continue as a world leader in food production,” he said, adding that the melting of the polar ice cap would raise the sea level to dangerous heights. “Coastal New England would be particularly hard hit,” he said.
Mr. Chafee drew mixed reaction from the audience when he suggested that “the need to find nonfossil fuels may even make us swallow hard and move toward nuclear energy.”
THE GENOME PROJECT
It would be the biggest, costliest, most provocative biomedical research project in history, and the United States must embark on it immediately. That was how Walter Gilbert, Nobel Prize-winning biology professor at Harvard University, heard the genome project described at scientific meetings all through 1985 and 1986. The undertaking—which would reveal the precise biochemical makeup of the entire genetic material, or genome, of a human being—would, he heard, revolutionize medicine. It would answer the Japanese challenge in biotechnology. It would grant insight into human biology previously held only by God.
At meetings in California and New Mexico, in New York and Washington, Gilbert watched the billion-dollar national project seize the imagination of scientists—yet threaten to stall over the form it should take and the speed at which it should proceed. So one day, as he sat through yet another meeting, it struck him that since the genome project had to be done, and it was going to be years, if ever, before the Government marshaled the resources and the will to undertake it, he, Walter Gilbert, would have to do it.
Early this year, Gilbert announced he would launch a new biotech venture, the Genome Corporation, whose sole purpose would be to “read” the human genome and sell the information that is deciphered. Gilbert’s plans stirred immediate controversy. How, it was asked, could someone “own” the human genome? By what moral yardstick could it be exploited for private gain?
A robustly built, 55-year-old man with a gap-toothed Cheshire cat grin, Gilbert brims over with the intellectual mischievousness that has always steered him toward the hottest game in town. In the 1960’s, he gave up a promising career in physics and charged into the emerging field of molecular biology. Later, without a lick of business experience, he helped start one of the first big biotech companies, Biogen, and made millions for himself and others—before being unceremoniously dismissed.
Is he now, as some suspect, trying to recreate in the Genome Corporation the heady excitement of the early Biogen days and to overturn his reputation as a brilliant scientist but failed businessman?
Gilbert has yet to line up financial backing and many are skeptical about his plans. But whether or not his company becomes a reality, most observers agree that the genome project, in one form or another, will happen anyway—and that when it does, it will change the face of biomedicine. It will set off, predicts Jack B. McConnell, director of advanced technology at Johnson & Johnson, a “third revolution in biotechnology.” The first, McConnell says, brought vaccines, antibiotics, new drugs; the second, artificial hips, pacemakers and other such devices; the third could help speed the development of new treatments or possible cures for Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis and the host of other genetic diseases (about 4,000), and could spark high-tech spinoffs on a scale not seen since the moon program.
A cancer researchers uses ultraviolet light to study DNA in 1987.
In the new understanding it promises to give humans about themselves, the genome project also raises philosophical questions going back to Eden and the Tree of Knowledge: Can we know too much? For it would place in human hands the actual blue-prints—in unremitting, look-it-up-in-the-dictionary detail—for how human beings are made, how they grow, how they differ among themselves and from other animals.
The elephants, polar bears and other animals chiseled into the brick walls surrounding the large central court of Harvard’s Biological Laboratories once gave fair notice of the building’s function. But in this building, where Walter Gilbert has made most of his discoveries and where his lab remains, researchers today explore not just living animals but the molecules that give them life. Foremost among them is the molecule that makes elephants elephants and humans human—the master molecule, DNA.
In the mid-1970’s, Walter Gilbert developed with Allan Maxam (then a lab technician) a technique that, by chemically cutting DNA into segments of varying lengths, vastly simplified the reading of DNA messages. This rapid-sequencing method, together with a similar one developed by the British scientist Frederick Sanger, increased by a thousandfold the rate at which DNA information could be read, accelerating the pace of genetics research—and also earning both Gilbert and Sanger the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980.
Yet today, only about 500 human genes (less than 1 percent of the total) have been decoded. Scientists are slogging through the human genome like a third-grader reading Kierkegaard. Even a steady rise in the rate of sequencing would leave the job unfinished until the 22nd century. The genome project would transform the whole scale of that effort. Making use of new sequencing machines and relying on large computers to store and manipulate the information, it would complete all three billion DNA bases by the year 2000 or soon after.
Harvard Gets Mouse Patent, a World First
Calling it a “singularly historic event,” the United States today issued to Harvard University the world’s first patent for a higher form of life, a mouse specially developed by researchers at the Harvard Medical School through techniques of genetic manipulation.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued patent No. 4,736,866 for “transgenic nonhuman mammals” developed by Dr. Philip Leder, a 53-year-old geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Timothy A. Stewart, 35, a former Harvard researcher who is a senior scientist at Genentech Inc., a leading biotechnology company in South San Francisco.
The two scientists isolated a gene that causes cancer in many mammals, including humans, injected it into fertilized mouse eggs and developed a new breed of genetically altered mice.
Because half the females develop cancer, the altered breed serves as a more effective model for studying how genes contribute to cancer, particularly breast cancer, Dr. Leder said.
A transgenic mouse, who has had alien genes introduced into its DNA for research purposes, on palm of Dr. Philip Leder, a Harvard Medical School Molecular geneticist.
Other experts said the invention presented scientists with a more efficient biological system for testing new drugs and therapies to treat cancer, and for determining whether chemicals and other toxic substances found in food or the environment are harmful.
The announcement elated researchers and biotechnology industry executives who said it would attract more investments for research and lead to safer and more effective biological inventions in medicine, agriculture, forestry and other industries.
But critics, including several powerful members of Congress, protested the decision, arguing that a handful of officials appointed by the Reagan Administration had in a single act determined a new and important public policy without a public debate and in defiance of a request from Congress to delay the action.
The Patent Office decision recognizes the quickening pace of developments in biotechnology, particularly in creating and duplicating new forms of animals. Along with genetically engineered pigs, cattle and sheep that have been produced in laboratories across the country, scientists are also beginning to transform aquatic species.
JANUARY 3, 1989
Scientists Link ‘88 Drought to Natural Cycle in Tropical Pacific
Last year’s killing drought in the United States was caused by massive, naturally occurring climatic forces in the tropical Pacific Ocean and had little to do with global warming caused by the greenhouse effect, according to new evidence.
The same complex forces, involving large-scale shifts in ocean temperatures and winds in the equatorial Pacific, affected not only North America. They also made themselves felt on the other side of the world, scientists say, causing the unusually heavy monsoon rains that in 1988 brought record floods, death and misery to Bangladesh.
These broad, intricately interconnected relationships between the ocean and the atmosphere have been only dimly understood in the past. But now climatologists are making major strides in understanding the ways in which such relationships in one part of the world drastically affect weather conditions, lives and fortunes in another.
While most climate experts believe that the greenhouse effect, a global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, will have a major impact in the decades ahead, even those who argue most strongly for that point of view agree that last year’s drought was overwhelmingly a product of natural forces. Even if a warming trend is already under way, as some experts believe, on a year-to-year basis events such as last year’s changes in the Pacific exert a far stronger influence on the weather, scientists say.
The tropical Pacific is emerging in some scientists’ minds as perhaps the planet’s most important source of short-term climatic changes.
This is the territory of El Nino, the massive strip of abnormally warm water that from time to time stretches westward along the Equator from South America and that sometimes plays havoc with the weather in various parts of the world. But El Nino is only part of the story.
Climatologists now recognize that it is not just a random phenomenon
Climatologists now recognize that it is not just a random phenomenon. It appears periodically, alternating with what has only recently been identified as its opposite twin: an abnormally cold stretch of equatorial water.
Scientists disagree on what to call the cold cycle. It was first dubbed La Nina, Spanish for “the girl,” to distinguish it from El Nino, which means “the boy,” or Christ Child, so named because the warm cycle appears near Christmas. Some scientists objected to La Nina as sexist, however, and substituted El Viejo, “the old man,” as in Old Man Winter. Still others prefer to avoid all this by simply calling the cycles warm events and cold events.
It was this cold cycle in the eastern Pacific, some scientists now say, that played a major role in creating the great North American drought of 1988 and the devastating floods that inundated Bangladesh.
Precisely what triggers a warm or cold phase is not yet perfectly understood, but scientists believe they know much about the general processes at work. A cold phase, such as now exists, develops when strong trade winds, blowing from the east, drive warm surface water to the western Pacific. At the same time, there is an increased upwelling of cold water from the ocean depths off South America.
MARCH 25, 1989
LARGEST U.S. TANKER SPILL SPEWS 270,000 BARRELS OF OIL OFF ALASKA
Tugboats tow the oil tanker Exxon Valdez off Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound.
A tanker filled to capacity with crude oil ran aground and ruptured yesterday 25 miles from the southern end of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, spewing her cargo into water rich in marine life.
By evening the ship, the Exxon Valdez, had sent more than 270,000 barrels, or about 38,500 tons, of oil into Prince William Sound, making this the largest tanker spill in United States history.
Opponents of further development of Arctic oilfields quickly seized on the spill as evidence of what they perceive as the environmental risks involved.
By early evening the spill was about 5 miles long and 500 feet wide, said Petty Officer John Gonzales, a spokesman for the Coast Guard station at the port of Valdez, from which the Exxon Valdez departed late Thursday, bound for Long Beach, Calif., with her load of 1,260,000 barrels.
Petty Officer Gonzales said no one had died or been injured in the accident. He said the Exxon Valdez had been maneuvering around icebergs when she ran aground on Bligh Reef, 25 miles south of the port, about 10:30 A.M. yesterday, Eastern standard time. Whether the maneuvering was the cause of the accident is under investigation, he said.
David Parish, a spokesman for Exxon, said the company did not expect major environmental damage as a result of the spill.
But environmentalists and marine biologists expressed fear that the spill would cause drastic damage to the abundant marine life in Prince William Sound, including otters, whales, porpoises, sea birds and fish. They said the spill could mean severe losses to Alaska’s fishermen, because in this season pink salmon are migrating from the coast to the ocean and herring are moving in toward the shore.
Several environmentalists said the spill raised anew questions about the wisdom of continuing to develop oil on Alaska’s North Slope, sending it south across the state through the pipeline and loading it onto tankers. They insisted that this kind of accident provided another argument against the Government’s plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the North Slope to oil development.
The spokesman said bird experts from the Fish and Wildlife Service had been sent to Alaska to try to save an undetermined number of sea birds already fouled by the oil.
The oil industry has contended that its safety and environmental record in Alaska is excellent and that the fears of opponents of North Slope oil development have failed to materialize in the 12 years since the Trans Alaska Pipeline was opened.
VOYAGER CAMERAS DISCOVER A TURBULENT BLUE NEPTUNE
As Voyager 2 closes in for the first fly-by of Neptune on Thursday night, its cameras are already giving scientists a clear view of the planet, a beautiful blue orb in dark space, and discovering it to be a surprisingly dynamic world of thick gases roiled by 400-mile-an-hour winds and a storm system the size of Mars.
The spacecraft has also just detected intense natural radio emissions from Neptune, indicating that it has a magnetic field generated by fluid motions in a planet’s core. The emissions are produced around planets by high-velocity charged particles as they spiral along magnetic field lines into the planet’s atmosphere.
Photographs transmitted by Voyager in the last few days have especially surprised and confounded scientists. Because heat drives planetary weather, the scientists found it astonishing that a planet out where the sunlight is dim could muster the energy to generate such violent winds and storms.
“It’s just amazing,” said Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, a planetary meteorologist at the California Institute of Technology. “The energy for winds is weaker at Neptune than at Jupiter, and yet the turbulent atmosphere there is similar to Jupiter’s.”
The scientists have no theories yet on why the atmosphere is so turbulent. The most recent pictures, made public today, showed in the greatest detail yet the huge storm system, known as the Great Dark Spot, in Neptune’s southern hemisphere. Discovered in early pictures three months ago, the storm can now be tracked in time-lapse sequences as it pulsates and twists with cyclonic force.
A view of Neptune taken from Voyager 2 spacecraft.
At Neptune, its last planetary target, Voyager will be almost 2.8 billion miles from Earth, a distance so great that it takes 4 hours and 6 minutes for the radio signals bearing its pictures and data to arrive at tracking stations. Neptune is currently the farthest planet from the Sun. Pluto, with its elongated orbit, moved closer to the Sun than Neptune in 1979 and will again move farther away in 1999.
Rival Scientists Decide Universe Is Composed of 3 Types of Matter
Using two giant particle accelerators, one in Europe and the other in California, rival teams of scientists have established beyond reasonable doubt that the universe contains no more than three fundamental types of matter.
The discovery, reported yesterday by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, is a scientific landmark with far-reaching implications for physics, astronomy and cosmology.
Settling the question of how many types of matter the universe might embody has long been a major quest of physicists. But the equipment needed to perform the necessary experiments was beyond the reach of technology until recently. The completion of new, powerful particle accelerators finally achieved the goal.
There had been evidence over the last few months that the number of types of matter was three, but with yesterday’s announcement this assumption became a virtual certainty.
The nearly simultaneous disclosures by the two laboratories reflect the intensity of the competition between them, in which Nobel prizes and other rewards might be at stake. Scientists at Stanford held a news conference yesterday to report their achievement, and scientists in Europe promptly accused the Stanford group of trying to upstage their own results, which were scheduled to be made public today.
The new accelerator results strongly reinforce theories about how the universe developed after its violent birth.
It has long been known that matter consists of more than 100 different kinds of particles, but in the last two decades, physicists realized that this bewildering array is made up of combinations of a handful of “fundamental” particles. Physicists have been able to group these particles in three distinct “families.”
The first family, from which all familiar matter is made, consists of “up” and “down” quarks, the constituents of the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei; the electron, and a particle called the electron neutrino. Neutrinos have no electric charge and no measured mass as yet, and as such are very difficult to study. They nevertheless play crucial roles in the structure of matter and the entire universe.
Two other families of fundamental particles have been discovered in special kinds of matter, those created by high-energy particle accelerators or carried by cosmic rays. The second family includes “charmed” and “strange” quarks, the muon, and the muon neutrino. The third family consists of “top” and “bottom” quarks, the first of which has yet to be detected; the tau particle, and the tau neutrino.
Shuttle Launched After Delay and Galileo Is Sent to Jupiter
The space shuttle Atlantis rocketed into orbit today to send the Galileo spacecraft on its planned six-year, 2.5-billion-mile journey to Jupiter.
On the fifth orbit, the crew of Atlantis released the 2.5-ton Galileo from the cargo bay at 7:15 P.M. The astronauts maneuvered the shuttle out of the way, and an hour later, the rocket attached to Galileo fired to boost the spacecraft out of Earth orbit.
Minutes later, the second stage of the solid-fuel rocket was fired, sending the spacecraft on its interplanetary trajectory.
NASA’s Galileo probe passing over one of Jupiter’s 16 moons.
Operations of the Galileo rocket were controlled by an Air Force center in Sunnyvale, Calif., 37 miles south of San Francisco. The center suffered some minor damage in the earthquake but was restored to normal service early today.
Jubilant scientists hailed the launching of the long-delayed Galileo mission to orbit Jupiter, the largest planet. During the mission, an instrumented probe will be fired into the Jovian atmosphere.
Lennard A. Fisk, the space agency’s associate administrator for science, called this the beginning of “the second golden age in the exploration of the solar system.”
Scientists believe that Galileo’s 745-pound probe, which is to penetrate deep into the dense hydrogen atmosphere, could give them important clues about primordial conditions in the solar system and perhaps insights into the validity of the “big bang” theories of the creation of the universe.
DECEMBER 12, 1989
South Pole Emerging as Center of Astronomy
Fighting chronic fatigue caused by thin air and deadly cold, scientists here are assembling a new type of telescope that may reveal the mysterious origin of cosmic rays.
The new instrument is the first large telescope ever brought to the South Pole. It is part of a concerted campaign begun recently to exploit Antarctica’s unique physical qualities for astronomical research.
Among the other new Antarctic projects expected to shed light on cosmic rays will be the launching from Ross Island later this month of a gigantic balloon.
The balloon, flown by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will carry four astronomical experiments, including two cosmic-ray analyzers built at the University of California at Berkeley. Scientists expect the winds at altitudes more than 100,000 feet to carry the balloon westward along the 78th parallel completely around the world in about 15 days, perhaps returning to within a few hundred miles of its launching site.
The South Pole is now basking in 24-hour-a-day summer sun at the relatively mild temperature of about minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit, and many scientists shed their red National Science Foundation parkas while working outdoors. But the touch of an unprotected fingertip to cold metal can produce pain and frostbite.
Another problem is the altitude. The South Pole is 9,300 feet high, and because the air is very cold, it is as thin as the air on top of an 11,000-foot-high elevation in a temperate zone. People living at the Pole grow accustomed to having a difficult time sleeping, tiring quickly and becoming absent-minded. A lack of oxygen makes a few of them sick.
But despite the discomforts and the monotonous view of the featureless polar plateau, astronomers are delighted with the scientific advantages of the site.
“The time has finally come when Antarctica is coming into its own as a major center for important astronomical research,” said Dr. Robert M. Morse of the University of Wisconsin.
FEBRUARY 28, 1980
Small Computer Software Gains
There is something new and novel in publishing these days, and the name is computer software. Although in its infancy, this is a business, according to some observers, that in time could produce the next Doubleday or Harper & Row. But these are not conventional publishing houses like a Doubleday. Rather, they are small independent companies whose sole or main business is the production of computer software for those smallest of data procession machines—the “personal” computer.
The companies, there are only a handful of them, produce five-inch record-like computer disks, known as “floppies” containing the software instructions that govern the operations of these machines. They are sold at retail, typically in a computer store.
Despite early and overly optimistic notices, the market for these computers has not exploded. Rather, these machines have remained pretty much the province of the hobbyist or technically inclined layman whose primary motivation in owning a computer is to learn about data processing. And to hear some in the industry tell it, the market is near saturation point. The problem is that even people who perceive the need for a small computer don’t want to learn the programming.
“There is no such thing as a real personal computer yet,” said Daniel H. Fylstra, a founder and president of Personal Software, based in Sunnydale, Calif. “We won’t see the emergence of a mass market until there are computer programs that are easy to use and intuitive from a user’s point of view.”
SEPTEMBER 23, 1980
CHESS COMPUTERS MOVE TOWARD MASTERY OVER HUMANS
Down a bishop and two pawns, peering at the board from behind a pair of spectacles, the chess player had a carefully hidden plan. Patiently, he waited for the computer to act. Then, when he was handed a printout of the computer’s next move, his face crinkled with a smirk of delight. Quickly he took the rook pawn with his queen, checkmating his mechanical opponent. Man had won. Computer had lost. Again.
The lesson was an old one: Chess mastery does not come easily, even for computers. Man—at least, the most skilled of his kind—is still better than the very best computer. But the world computer chess championships starting Thursday in Linz, Austria, will provide a significant indication of how far computers have come and how intense the race is to improve their playing ability.
The four-day tournament will put forward an international field of 16 computer programs. Some programs will be run on portable computers at the tournament site; others will be at fixed locations in their home countries, with moves transmitted by telephone.
On another front, programmers are undoubtedly working more intensely these days because of a recently announced $100,000 prize for the first computer program to beat humans in the traditional world championship. That prize will be provided by the Fredkin Foundation of Cambridge Mass., and administered by Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., has opted for this intense searching technique, and he has achieved notable success in a program named Belle. The program will compete in the Linz tournament.
The heart of the Belle program is its hardware. Mr. Thompson has 10 hard-wired modules connected to his computer which he said enables the computer to analyze “about 100,000 positions per second” to a depth of seven or eight piles, or about 18 million positions in three minutes.
Experts are optimistic about the future of chess-playing computers. Many of the portable microcomputer chess games available in stores can beat the average player, but tackling grandmasters will be more difficult.
Hans Berliner (right front) with his Hitech computer and Robert Hyatt (left front) with Cray XMP 48 computer using his “Blitz” program during a computer chess tournament in which Hitech won in 1986.
Manufacturers Using Robots
At most of the nation’s plants that turn out planes, tractors, trucks, machine tools or motors in quantities that do not lend themselves to large assembly-line production, the methods of manufacturing have changed little since World War II.
Most of the great variety of parts needed for such products are cast, machined and assembled by hand in batches, usually about 10 batches a day of about 20 parts per batch. It is this type of manufacturing that has been difficult and expensive to automate and thus has remained largely in the hands of blue-collar workers whose productivity has shown little grown. But, increasingly, companies have been turning to the use of automated robots to perform such tasks.
Dennis E. Wisnosky, manager of the Manufacturing Organization and Automation Technology Center at the International Harvester Corporation, told a symposium on Industrial Automation and Robotics last week that his company was planning to spend about $2 billion in the next five years in an attempt to bring major improvements in many of its plants.
Mr. Wisnosky said that American manufacturers had little choice but to update the manufacturing process, since Japan, its major competitor, was already ahead of the rest of the world in applying robots. In terms of the number of advanced robots already on the plant floor, Japan has about 7,500, the United States 5,000 and Western Europe 4,000.
Sparks flying as robots weld raw metal car frames on an assembly line at a Honda plant in the early 1980s.
Up to now, most of the industrial robots put into use have been what Phillippe Villers, president of Automatix Inc., called “dumb” robots—those that can do a series of programmed tasks but cannot adapt to changes in their environment. But the greatest growth in robot manufacturing, he said, will come in robots that are “smart.” Such robots could have some ability of sight or touch, such as being able to pick the right parts off a conveyor belt and put them into a computer-controlled machine tool.
Texas Instruments Inc., he noted, has already set up a system of robots to test small calculators. A nimble robot picks up the calculators from test machines while another presses keys in a predetermined way. A third robot “reads” to see if the calculator has come up with the right answers.
DISCLOSURE ON RADAR-EVADING PLANE ASSAILED AT HOUSE PANEL’S HEARING
Washington, Aug. 27–Members of a House subcommittee charged today that secret information on an experimental aircraft able to evade Soviet radar detection was leaked to a journalist so that the Defense Department could justify announcing the existence of the plane.
The charge was made after the journalist, Benjamin F. Schemmer, told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on research and development that senior Pentagon aide disclosed details of the Air Force’s “stealth” aircraft program and encouraged him to write an article about it last week. Mr. Schemmer, editor of the Armed Forces Journal, said he was given details about the aircraft four days before Secretary of Defense Harold R. Brown held a news conference on the subject.
Mr. Schemmer said in sworn testimony that in a Pentagon briefing he was told that Mr. Brown would not announce the project until his article appeared. The disclosure that Mr. Schemmer apparently received an officially sanctioned leak is almost certain to fuel the growing debate over whether the Carter Administration is misusing sensitive national security information for political purposes.
In today’s hearing, several members of Congress made similar charges, suggesting that Mr. Schemmer had been given information on the “stealth” program so that the Pentagon would have some justification for announcing that it was working on a new generation of aircraft. The chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Samuel S. Stratton, Democrat of New York, said that “it is clear from information that has been given us that the Department of Defense is more interested in convincing the public that it is doing a great job than in keeping our secrets from the Soviet Union.”
AUGUST 23, 1981
NEXT, A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK
IBM PC Model 5150 with printer, 1981
It used to be that a little money and a little inventiveness would go a long way in the personal computer business. Apple Computer, it is now legend, was started by two college dropouts working in a garage. The Tandy Corporation, now one of the industry’s leaders, invested just $150,000 to develop its first computer.
Now the ante is rising dramatically. The race is intensifying, and the personal computer industry is seeing an influx of participants. In June, the Xerox Corporation became the first major office equipment company to enter the market. Then, 11 days ago, the biggest of them all, the International Business Machines Corporation, jumped in. Other large computer and office equipment companies will likely enter the fray, and many Japanese companies are waiting in the wings.
In particular, I.B.M.’s entry erased any lingering doubts that personal computers are serious business and no place for the puny or the mere tinkerer, except around the edges of the market.
Worldwide, some 500,000 computers costing less than $5,000 were sold last year at a total value of $730 million, according to Dataquest Inc., a Cupertino, Calif., market research firm. That total will grow at least 40 percent annually, to 3.7 million units, valued at $3.9 billion, in 1985, the firm estimates.
And with computer power becoming available to the masses, entire new businesses are opening up around it. Such services as electronic information retrieval and the writing of programs, or software, allow businessmen, engineers, schoolchildren and housewives to make greater use of the machines.
The entry of many big companies like I.B.M. will change the market, but it also reflects changes already occurring. The industry is moving to a second generation of machines, which will use microprocessors capable of handling 16 “bits,” or units of information, at the same time, twice the processing power of existing 8-bit machines.
I.B.M.’s machine was one of the first by a major manufacturer to use the 16-bit microprocessor, but most others in the industry are expected to match that eventually. The new generation will thus be faster and capable of handling more complex tasks and larger memories. Alternatively—and much more important, according to some experts—the new generation of machines could be used to perform the same tasks computers now do but be much easier to use. In effect, the machine would do more of the work and the user less. Instead of having to type detailed instructions on a keyboard, using a special language, in a few years users will be able to communicate with computers more like they do with fellow human beings. Computers might develop the ability to understand the particular nuances and style of their owners.
“They will have as much stored knowledge of what you know, what you’ve said, what you’ve done than any friend would have the patience to learn,” predicts William H. Gates, president of Microsoft, a Bellevue, Wash., company that has designed software for many personal computer manufacturers, including I.B.M.
The market for personal computers is also changing and is segmenting. While personal computers are often thought of as home computers, the industry definition is of any machine inexpensive enough for one person to own and use, whether at home or at work. And while the personal computer started as a device for the computer hobbyist, its major market by far has turned out to be the small business user and professionals, such as doctors, writers and farmers who use the computer for their accounting, inventory, mailing lists and word processing, either at home or in the office. According to Future Computing, a Dallas consulting firm, small business use accounts for nearly half the sales of under-$10,000 units.
Personal computers are also finding a place in large corporations. A large company might give all its analysts or engineers personal computers to replace or supplement a larger computer they all had to share. Computers can be linked together in networks so that workers can send memos to one another electronically.
A separate market seems to be emerging, directed at the home market. Whereas computers used for business sell for at least $2,000 and have one or more disk storage devices to hold programs and files, the computers aimed at the home market are clustered at $300 to $600. Such machines, offered now by Tandy, Commodore, Atari and Texas Instruments, are merely electronic keyboards that attach to one’s television set and emphasize games and education.
Experts generally do not expect the home market really to start growing until 1985 because there is not much that can be done with them yet.
The presence of hundreds of programs and numerous peripherals for the Apple, as well as the fact that Apple is carried by 1,000 of the 1,500 computer retail stores, give Apple great momentum.
Apple, however, has recently run into several problems as a result of its rapid growth. The Apple III, which was designed to be a larger version of the Apple II, was introduced in May 1980, but ran into manufacturing problems and was plagued by technical flaws. Apple finally got the product to market last March but there is still not much software available. The system is selling at a rate of 1,000 a month, compared to more than 15,000 a month for the Apple II. Because it is not firmly established, and because of its higher price, the Apple III is considered much more vulnerable to attack by I.B.M. than the Apple II. If Apple introduces a 16-bit machine within a year, it will further undermine its sales of the Apple III.
OCTOBER 11, 1981
Word Processors Spell Out a New Role for Clerical Staff
The growing business reliance on word processors, those small computers with typewriter-like keyboards designed to complete routine reports and other rote clerical chores, has barely begun, but it already is having a profound effect on the office of the present as well as the future.
Where there was one word processor for every 10 clerical workers last year, by mid-decade the figure will be one for every three.
Experts predict a radical restructuring of work, including a devaluation of current work skills and the creation of new ones.
“The emphasis on typing speed also will decline because these machines make it possible for secretaries to handle more work in less time,” said John J. Connell, executive director of the Office Technology Research Group, a Pasadena, Calif., organization of managers from 44 foreign and domestic companies concerned with managing change in the office. “Instead of spending 20 percent of her day typing, the typical secretary will spend only 10 percent in the years ahead. Secretaries will have more time to devote to intellectual tasks that are now done by their bosses and other managers.”
One of the biggest problems to be overcome is worker resistance. “The use of word processors has meant a slight improvement in the working lives of some clerical workers because it has removed the drudgery of repetitive typing,” said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working Women, a group representing female office workers. “But for millions of others, it has meant that they are assigned to centers where they do nothing but baby-sit machines for eight hours.”
VIDEO GAMES:
A GLUTTON FOR GLOBS…AND QUARTERS
There are no fire buttons, warp buttons or hyperspace buttons. Bombers, fighter planes, mutants, asteroids and space invaders are nowhere to be seen.
For a year now, the best seller in the $5-billion-a-year videogame market has been Pac-man, a hide-and-seek game that has to do with eating fruit, gobbling energy dots, and eluding amorphous monster globs. It is made by the Midway division of the Bally Corporation.
“At first blush, Pac-man seems like a kid’s game, but anyone can be entranced by it,” says Ray E. Tilley, managing editor of Playmeter, a trade magazine that reports on coin-operated amusements.
Since Pac-man was introduced in October 1980, the video game playing public has been entranced in excess of $1 billion, according to industry analysts. That adds up to more than four billion quarters consumed by Pac-man alone. The price of a Pac-man ranges from $2,500 to $3,000, depending on the model.
“Pac-man is the most popular video game ever,” says Harold Vogel, games analyst at Merrill Lynch. “It’s had an unusual life span already. With 100,000 units out there, that’s an all-time record.”
On some college campuses and at resorts, games like Pac-man can earn up to $500 a week. For that reason, pinball and video-game arcades usually have five or six or more Pac-mans, and video games can now be found at suburban family entertainment centers, in college dormitories, in movie theater lobbies, at supermarkets and airports—even at a taco stand on 72nd Street on the West Side of Manhattan.
Wherever a Pac-man game appears, it is often a standout not only because it makes money but because, unlike most successful video games, it has nothing to do with war, space or shooting. According to a Paine Webber report entitled “Video Games: A New Growth Industry,” these are three activities that appeal especially to men. The report points out that the Pac-man game appeals to nearly as many women as men and thus has a broader player base.
The game itself is difficult to describe. As one player, a snack bar manager who averages seven to eight hours of video game play a week, explains it, “It is so simple, but it has no relation to reality. It’s different from space games, tank games and war games. The motivation is eating. This creature moves and eats dots.”
Pac Man video game screen.
Big Plans for Little Computer
HAYWARD, Calif.– In an industry in which egos frequently are as large as the products are small, Adam Osborne may take the prize for each.
Mr. Osborne is the founder and president of the Osborne Computer Corporation, which makes a portable, mass-marketed personal computer that is quickly gaining popularity.
Mr. Osborne, at 42 years of age one of the “old-timers” in the personal computer industry, obviously perceives a hole in the market. He founded the privately held company with $250,000 of his own money in 1980 and rapidly produced a microcomputer that folds up to the size of a suitcase, fits under an airplane seat and weighs just 24 pounds.
Shipments began last summer, and between June and November, Osborne recorded $1 million in sales and quickly became profitable. With a 25-month backlog of orders, Mr. Osborne is boldly predicting now that he will sell $200 million worth of computers by the end of 1982, a total that would be more than half the revenues posted by Apple Computer Inc. in 1981, its fifth year.
Mr. Osborne said he was currently shipping more than 120 machines a day, but expected to be at a 1,000-a-day rate by the end of the year. That would put his company at the same shipping rate as the industry’s largest manufacturers.
Osborne, which employs 150 persons, “may have the steepest sales slope of any company,” said Ben Rosen, a New York electronics industry analyst whose venture capital fund has invested a small amount of money in Osborne Computer.
The Osborne 1 sells for $1,795. Packaged all in one case, the microcomputer, built around an eight-bit microprocessor, includes a five-inch display screen and two floppy-disk drives for storing data. By comparison, most other computers with similar equipment, but perhaps with potential for more data storage, sell for about $2,500.
Osborne 01 microcomputer system, 1982.
Besides portability and low price, Mr. Osborne brought a third new feature to the personal computer marketplace: Included in the price are two applications software packages, one for word processing and one for financial analysis.
Mr. Osborne said his next step would be to introduce more computer products at the low end of the price range. He would not give details of his plans, but said he would drop “a cherry bomb” when competition moved into his territory.
NOVEMBER 2, 1983
THE DEBUT OF I.B.M.’S JUNIOR
The International Business Machines Corporation yesterday introduced its first computer designed specifically for use in the home, but said the $700 machine would not be available for the upcoming holiday buying season.
Consumers will not be able to buy the long anticipated computer, called the PCjr (pronounced PC Junior), until early next year and it will be in limited supply even then, the company said.
The home computer industry has been characterized by severe price cutting, which helped lead to last week’s announcement by the Texas Instruments Corporation that it was quitting the business. There is also a growing disenchantment among consumers who are finding that the machines, many of which carry base prices of $200 and less, can do little more than play games.
The PCjr, long known in the industry as the “Peanut,” will come in two versions. The basic machine will have 64K bytes, or 64,000 characters, of internal memory and will sell for $700. It will have two slots for cartridges, similar to video game cartridges, that contain programs for the computer. A television or a special video monitor, not included in the price, could be used as a screen.
The enhanced version, which will sell for $1,300, will have 128K bytes, or 128,000 characters, of memory and a disk drive capable of storing an additional 360,000 characters. It will also include the cartridge slots.
The basic Apple IIe, with 64,000 characters of memory, has a list price of $1,400, without the disk drive needed to run programs. That compares with the basic $700 PCjr. Apple, which has already lost market share to the I.B.M. PC in the office market, is expected to have to cut the price of the IIe to remain competitive in the home and education market.
‘WINDOWS’ AND ‘GATEWAYS’ LOOM IN NEAR FUTURE
The Computer Dealers Exposition, or Comdex, was held in Las Vegas this year.
Comdex, if not guaranteed to provide ultimate answers, at least lays out all the potential new candidates in one huge exhibition, flowing out of the Las Vegas Convention Center and onto the floors and ballrooms of nearby hotels.
Gateways were to this year’s show what mice were to last year’s. Then everyone was unofficially demonstrating his own version of the mouse, the cigarette-pack-sized pointer that, attached by its tail of cable to the computer, allows the cursor on the screen to be moved without using the keyboard.
Me-too competition was keenly evident in the software world of windows. “Windows” is the current (or soon to be so) buzzword in user-friendliness. They allow your personal computer to become the ultimate messy desk, at least metaphorically. You can pile all the paperwork in your drawers, files and shoeboxes into layers and layers of electronic papers on your screen.
For you to get at this material, the display is split into numerous smaller screens, or windows, each providing a glimpse of enough to let you determine more or less what’s hidden and whether you want to deal with it at the moment.
Windows will be available sometime in 1984. At the moment three major software houses—Visicorp, Microsoft and Quarterdeck—are attempting to convince buyers that their particular windows, once they manage to get them open, are the only ones through which to view the world.
My own feeling is that windows are as likely to lead some computer owners to defenestration as to success in dealing with data. Still, windows may find a niche in business computing. Technology always seems to find a place for itself somewhere—well, perhaps not always.
JANUARY 16, 1984
APPLE EXPANDS PRODUCT LINE
The Apple III computer.
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 15–One year ago Apple Computer Inc. hoped to dazzle the computer world with a revolutionary new machine called Lisa that was said to be the key to the company’s future. But Lisa turned out to be a poor seller, and Apple’s earnings and its leadership in the personal computer market crumpled under an attack from the International Business Machines Corporation.
Now Apple is preparing to try again with another new machine called Macintosh, which will be introduced at the company’s annual meeting on Jan. 24. The stakes for Apple are even higher now, especially if it wants to remain a force in the computer business. It is Apple’s third and probably last chance to reduce its dependence on its Apple II line, which is nearly seven years old.
Macintosh, which is expected to sell for $2,500, is only part of Apple’s strategy. The company is also announcing newer, faster versions of its Lisa with an entry price as low as $3,500. And later in the year the company is expected to announce two new versions of its Apple IIe and to push that product more strongly into the home market.
Apple had a number of setbacks in 1983 after several years of breakneck growth. I.B.M., which entered the personal computer business in 1981, quickly surged to the lead in terms of revenues and significance. Apple actually sold more computers than I.B.M. did last year—but at a lower price as I.B.M. forced Apple out of the profitable office market and into the home and educational markets. Apple had no mainstream office computer with which to respond, since its Apple III had never caught on, and the Lisa, priced initially at $10,000, was too expensive.
Meanwhile, Apple’s earnings plunged. The company earned only $5.1 million in the quarter ended last Sept. 30. That was 73 percent below the level of a year earlier. John Sculley, Apple’s president and chief executive officer, who was hired from Pepsico Inc. last spring, has said low earnings would continue for two more quarters.
Apple declines to comment on forthcoming announcements, but industry sources indicate that the basic Macintosh will sell for $2,500. It will include 128,000 characters of memory, a high-resolution black-and-white nine-inch screen and one disk drive storing about 400,000 characters of information. The disks will be 3 1/2 inches in diameter, compared with the traditional 5 1/4 inches.
The development of Macintosh was headed by Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chairman. Macintosh will use the same technology as Lisa. Thus users will be able to accomplish various tasks by pointing to symbols on the screen with a palm-sized device called a “mouse.”
However, Macintosh’s relatively small memory is expected to limit its capacity, especially compared with Lisa, to simultaneously display different programs in different “windows” on the screen and to move information from one program to another. Such transfer between programs is useful, for instance, if someone wants to take budget projections calculated with a program called a spreadsheet and insert them into a letter being written using a word-processing program.
Sources say the computer at first will come with two programs: MacWrite, a word-processing program, and MacPaint, which allows users to draw images on the screen by moving the mouse. A dot matrix printer capable of printing the images drawn on the screen as well as text will be included for an extra $500 in the introductory offer.
Macintosh is expected to weigh slightly less than 20 pounds and to come with an optional cloth carrying case.
ELECTRONIC OFFICE CONJURING WONDERS, LONELINESS AND TEDIUM
Rebecca Alford arrives each weekday at 7 A.M. for her job processing health claims at a life insurance company in Syracuse. For the next nine hours, except for breaks and lunch, her day is dominated by a computer.
Mrs. Alford says her job at the Equitable Life Assurance Company is monotonous and is paced by strict output standards, and that workers are intensely scrutinized by superiors. “If you stop working, they ask you what you are stopping for,” she says. “Pinning you to a computer, I don’t like that at all.”
She works at a video display terminal alongside some 55 workers in the department, processing 70 claims a day. She gets a 15-minute break in the morning and a hour off for lunch.
Mrs. Alford, who is 30 years old, earns $217 to $400 a week, depending on production. She says the pay standards, a form of piece work, are so complicated that workers do not know how much they will earn each week.
Her work environment is a manifestation of the electronic office, in which many tasks are performed with the help of computers and other new technologies.
As typewriters and other office equipment are replaced by video display terminals all over the country, clerical workers and, to an increasing extent, professional and management workers are feeling the effects. Many, like Mrs. Alford, find the work monotonous and boring. But many others are pleased and say the new technologies make the work less time-consuming by removing tedious tasks of the past.
The technologies, which many experts say constitute one of the more important developments in the workplace in the 1980’s, are bringing fundamental changes in the way office work is organized and performed in general business offices, insurance companies, brokerage houses, banks and the like.
In recent years, the number of electronic work stations in use has risen markedly, and it is expected to increase substantially, authorities say. Today some 12.7 million video display terminals, personal computers, word processors and the like are in use in the United States, with the number expected to rise to 41 million by 1987, according to International Data Corporation, a market research company in Framingham, Mass.
The computerization, some experts say, means a continuing decline in what has been called the social office. Doris McLaughlin, a technology specialist at the University of Michigan, says the technologies “are making work a lot more lonely.”
“It’s tedious, it’s boring,” Gladys Hunter, 45 years old, says of her clerical job at a Cleveland bank. “Some girls are bringing in radios, with headphones, to get them through the night,” she says.
“We’re not talking about eliminating the human factor,” says Randy J. Goldfield, a computer consultant with Omni Group. “All we can do is have the machines do the grunt work a lot faster. We’re talking about removing a lot of the low-level work from the desks of secretaries and even professionals and having it automated, and presumably providing a bonus factor of available time in which people can be more creative and productive.”
Five office workers at Harvard University said they enjoyed a number of aspects of the new technologies. “It’s a joy not to have to retype,” said Christina Knapp, a Harvard secretary.
Anne Miller, a worker at the Widener Library, said the machines offered explosive gains in the collection of information and making information available to scholars and the general public.
Barbara Lewis, a secretary at Harvard, said, “I feel I’m doing six days’ work in five.”
The women contended that many university workers feared job loss because of the technologies.
Miss Knapp said, “If you’re not quick, you’re shunted to other work.” She says the issue is participation. “We would welcome the technologies if we felt we could feel some control over what happens to us,” she said.
APPLE PLANS PORTABLE COMPUTER
In two weeks Apple Computer Inc. plans to introduce a briefcase-size, battery-operated version of its popular Apple IIe that analysts say could pose a significant challenge to the International Business Machine Corporation’s PCjr home computer.
Apple Macintosh portable computer, 1989.
The new Apple IIc, the company’s first portable computer, will be shown to the public on April 24 in San Francisco. Its introduction, at a base price of $1,295, marks the second major product announcement by Apple in three months aimed directly at I.B.M.’s growing share of the personal computer market; the Macintosh, Apple’s powerful and so far highly successful entry against the I.B.M. Personal Computer, was brought out in late January.
Apple officials decline to discuss the new IIc publicly, but they have already allowed some industry analysts brief glimpses of the machine. By all accounts, it weighs about 7 1/2 pounds, excluding a 5-pound battery pack, and includes 128,000 characters of internal memory. It also feature a full-sized keyboard, and an optional “mouse,” a handheld pointer device similar to the one used on Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh machines to control the movement of a cursor on the computer’s screen.
The computer also comes with a single floppy disk drive, for permanent data storage, tucked into the side of the machine. A $300 printer, capable of reproducing seven colors, is also expected.
MAY 31, 1987
KEEP THE PICTURE, BUT TOSS THE CAMERA
“In the past the camera was one of our most important icons, as significant as the picture itself. Now it’s convenience and the picture that counts.”
The words are those of Ray Brown, professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University. But they could just as easily have come from executives at the Eastman Kodak Company and Fuji Photo Film U.S.A. Both companies are touting disposable cameras that do the picture-taking job effectively, if not artistically.
Kodak’s Fling and Fuji’s Quick Snap are clearly aimed at the same buyers. Each weighs just a few ounces, comes with a fixed focus, a miniature lens and view-finder, and a manual advance system. Both are constructed of plastic, are intended for use outdoors, and are to be discarded when the roll of film is taken out to be developed.
Fuji U.S.A. already has experience with throwaway cameras. Last year its parent company, the Fuji Photo Film Company, Tokyo, introduced the throwaway camera in Japan and sold 1.5 million cameras in six months.
Neither Fuji nor Kodak is pushing disposables as an alternative to expensive cameras. “The value is there for an enjoyable picture but certainly not a professional frame,” said Jack Powers, general manager of Kodak’s consumer products division.
Similarly, Paul Hudak, director of marketing for Fuji Photo Film, U.S.A., said disposables were “aimed at people who might otherwise miss out on a photographic opportunity because they were reluctant to bring their camera’s along.”
He added that amateur photographers already snap about four billion outdoor photographs a year. He estimated that by 1990 disposable cameras will raise that figure by 15 percent.
But much will depend on many stores carry disposable camera. “If they’re selling the convenience of a disposable product, then the challenge is to have broad distribution,” said Richard Winger, manager of The Boston Consulting Group.
NEXT OFFICE REVOLUTION: ‘VOICE MAIL’
At many companies, the interoffice memo has learned to talk. A new generation of telephone answering machines is replacing the memo and the message slip, uprooting office folkways in the process.
These computer-based systems, dubbed “voice mail,” can answer a company’s phones, route callers, and dispense information. They allow senders to shower the same oral messages on dozens or even hundreds of recipients at once, to be heard at their convenience.
Some people find such systems impersonal, intimidating, even infuriating. Callers can find themselves bounced from one recorded response to another, unable to break through to a human being, a situation that has been dubbed “voice mail jail.” Even regular users can become befuddled. One man in Los Angeles pressed the wrong buttons on his phone and transmitted a private love message to his entire department.
Others find the systems intriguing, invaluable, even indispensable. They eliminate the frustrations of busy signals and “telephone tag”—a situation in which callers keep missing each other. “It’s the most important technology since photocopying,” said Gus Bender, a telecommunications specialist at the Travelers Companies, the Hartford insurance concern, where 10,000 employees use voice mail.
Almost everyone seems to agree that they are becoming inescapable. Even the Vatican is installing one, to allow callers to hear messages from the Pope.
The result is that, far more than with mere answering machines, people no longer have to talk to each other directly to communicate by phone. Indeed, voice mail users now talk about two kinds of telephone communications -voice mail, which is communicating by message, and “real-time” communications, once known as conversation, in which both parties are on the line at the same time.
“I may talk to a salesman for as long as a week only through the message box,” said Bill Caparelli, vice president of sales and marketing at VLSI.
Voice mail supporters say it offers great savings in costs and time. Secretaries and receptionists can be eliminated or diverted to other tasks, and the phones are always answered. “We have entire departments without secretaries,” said Paula Jones, a spokeswoman for VLSI. Telephone tag and ubiquitous message slips can be reduced. People can retrieve and send messages 24 hours a day from any place, a great help for people who must communicate across time zones.
Voice mail systems are specialized computers that convert speech into digital bits. The digital speech can be stored on magnetic disks, copied and manipulated just like other computer data.
As answering machines, they are more versatile than tape recorders. They can take a message even when the phone is in use. Moreover, a person hearing a message from another voice mail user can immediately dictate a reply into the phone, which will automatically send it to the caller’s phone mailbox.
Messages can also be transferred from one person to another, or circulated like in-house memos, with each listener appending oral comments.
Perhaps the feature that is most obvious to outsiders, however, is the “automated attendant,” in which the computer answers the phone and routes the call to a particular individual or to pre-recorded information. Voice mail systems are now used to dispense information ranging from airline flight schedules to the menu at Harvard dining halls to 976 services like dial-a-porn (“Press 1 for hot raw ecstasy,” etc.). At the Republican National Convention this week, a voice mail system dispensed convention news and local traffic and weather reports.
Voice mail systems have been in use since 1980, but met with a mixed reception. Some early users abandoned their systems out of frustration or because they offended customers. But the systems have become popular more recently as prices have dropped and the technology has improved.
Prices for voice mail systems range from $3,000 to $500,000, depending on capacity, or about $50 to $200 per phone mailbox. Some companies sell circuit boards for $300 that turn personal computers into voice mail systems.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1980
TAMPON BRAND TIED TO SHOCK SYNDROME
Use of the Rely brand tampons may increase the risk of a serious, sometimes fatal disorder in women called toxic shock syndrome, the Government’s Center for Disease Control in Atlanta said today.
The center said a review of women who contracted the disorder last July and August found that about 70 percent of them used Rely tampons. The study also affirmed earlier findings that indicated a link between toxic shock syndrome and the use of tampons generally.
Toxic shock syndrome is a recently recognized illness that occurs primarily in women under 30, particularly during or just after their menstrual periods. The illness is characterized by sudden onset of high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, a rapid drop in blood pressure, sometimes leading to shock, and a sunburnlike rash followed by peeling skin, especially on fingers and toes.
The risk of contracting the disorder, apparently an infection from the bacteria known as staphylococcus aureus, is low, however. Only about three out of 100,000 women of menstruating age are affected annually. Since last January, the Center for Disease Control has received reports of 299 cases, 285 of them in women. Ninety-five percent of the cases in women occurred during their menstrual cycle. Since 1975, 25 deaths, all women, have been attributed to toxic shock syndrome.
Last June, the Center for Disease Control reported that use of tampons seemed to be a contributing factor to the disorder. The new center study, however, indicated that the syndrome was associated with Rely tampons more frequently than with other brands.
Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Edward H. Kass holding a beaker with Tampon fibers which he believes causes Toxic Shock Syndrome.
JULY 3, 1981
RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS
Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.
The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.
The sudden appearance of the cancer, called Kaposi’s Sarcoma, has prompted a medical investigation that experts say could have as much scientific as public health importance because of what it may teach about determining the causes of more common types of cancer.
Doctors have been taught in the past that the cancer usually appeared first in spots on the legs and that the disease took a slow course of up to 10 years. But these recent cases have shown that it appears in one or more violet-colored spots anywhere on the body. The spots generally do not itch or cause other symptoms, often can be mistaken for bruises, sometimes appear as lumps and can turn brown after a period of time.
Doctors investigating the outbreak believe that many cases have gone undetected because of the rarity of the condition and the difficulty even dermatologists may have in diagnosing it.
Dr. Alvin E. Friedman-Kien of New York University Medical Center, said he had tested nine of the victims and found severe defects in their immunological systems. The patients had serious malfunctions of two types of cells called T and B cell lymphocytes, which have important roles in fighting infections and cancer.
A BALLOON DEVICE AVERTS SURGERY FOR CORONARY DISORDERS
To spare many patients painful and costly surgery, doctors are turning to a technique that involves inflating a balloon in arteries clogged by fatty deposits from arteriosclerosis.
The balloon, inflated after being introduced into the damaged area of a blood vessel, compresses obstructions and allows more oxygen-rich blood to flow to an organ. In some instances, the technique is relieving cramps and saving legs by removing obstructions to the blood supply to the lower limbs. In others, it relieves the obstructions that produce the chest discomfort called angina and might also lead to heart attacks.
Heart specialist Dr. Andreas Gruntzig holding a balloon catheter.
In addition, this method (known technically as percutaneous transluminal angioplasty) is treating, and even curing, some cases of a type of high blood pressure that results from blockage of an artery feeding the kidneys. Although such blockages cause only a small percentage of all cases of high blood pressure, the therapy can be dramatically successful, freeing the patient entirely from drug therapy.
Until four years ago, radiologists who were experienced in using angioplasty for several ailments were unable to flatten obstructions in the coronary arteries, which are the ones that nourish the heart. Heart attacks can result when coronary arteries are blocked by fatty substances.
Now this technique, in addition to all its other applications, is becoming more commonly used to compress obstructions in coronary arteries. Although coronary angioplasty generally is still considered experimental, it is becoming a standard practice at a few hospitals.
Three doctors who have compressed obstructions in the coronary arteries of more than 1,100 patients have the longest experience with the technique. They are Dr. Andreas Gruntzig, who devised the technique at the University of Zurich and now works at Emory University in Atlanta; Dr. Simon H. Stertzer at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York; and Dr. Richard K. Myler at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco.
Angioplasty removes the blockage caused by atherosclerotic plaques, or the accumulation of fatty substances on the inside wall of an artery.
In about four of five patients, the balloon technique removes the obstruction and immediately relieves the symptoms. And about 84 percent of such patients will maintain their success after three years, according to data collected in a registry at the National Institutes of Health and reported at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas two weeks ago.
DECEMBER 2, 1982
Artificial Heart Implant Is Begun in Salt Lake
SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 1–A retired Seattle dentist suffering from inoperable heart disease underwent surgery late tonight for what was to be the first transplant of a permanent artificial heart.
Barney Clark, 61 years old, had been scheduled to receive the fistsized polyurethane device Thursday morning at the Utah Medical Center, but his rapidly deteriorating condition led doctors to begin an emergency operation at 10:30 P.M. The operation by a team of University of Utah doctors was expected to last three to four hours.
Dr. Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the artificial heart.
Dr. Clark suffered from cardiomyopathy, a degenerate disease of the heart muscle. He was among 10 prospective recipients of the revolutionary device, called the Jarvik-7, for Dr. Robert Jarvik of the university’s Artificial Organs Division, who developed the device.
Because Dr. Clark’s condition satisfied the rule established by the University of Utah and the Federal Food and Drug Administration, he was selected as the first recipient of a permanent artificial heart.
Hundreds of animals have survived for up to nine months with the Jarvik-7 heart, but Dr. Clark is the first human recipient. The surgical team was headed by Dr. William C. DeVries, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Utah Medical Center, who is the only surgeon authorized by the Government to implant the Jarvik-7 heart. Recipients of the heart, which is driven by an external air compressor, will have to spend the rest of their lives tethered to the compressor by two six-foot hoses, doctors say.
In recent months, while he was in better health, Dr. Clark visited the medical center to observe parts of artificial hearts in place in calves and sheep. He returned here Monday, in serious condition, and immediately signed a letter of authorization for doctors to implant the device. He signed a second authorization a day later.
Since Tuesday, Dr. Clark’s heart rate has deteriorated and the decision to proceed with the operation at an earlier time was made by Dr. DeVries and other attending physicians at about 8 o’clock this evening.
“His attitude prior to surgery was marvelous,” said Dr. Chase N. Peterson, the vice president for health sciences at the University of Utah. “He turned to his wife, Unaloy, and said, ‘I’m a little nervous’.”
FEBRUARY 6, 1983
AIDS: A NEW DISEASE’S DEADLY ODYSSEY
Cards representing AIDS victims held aloft during interdenominational service in Central Park last night in 1983.
Medical detectives are calling it the century’s most virulent epidemic. It is as relentless as leukemia, as contagious as hepatitis, and its cause has eluded researchers for more than two years. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was first seen in homosexual men—particularly those who were promiscuous—but it has now struck so many different groups that its course cannot be predicted.
And despite a massive nationwide microbe hunt involving hundreds of investigators and millions of dollars, scientists simply cannot catch up with it. “We’re always a few steps behind,” says Dr. William W. Darrow, a research sociologist with the Centers for Disease Control (C.D.C.) in Atlanta, “and that makes us very, very concerned. The disease could be anywhere now.”
While AIDS has continued to rage in big-city homosexual communities with terrifying and deadly results, it has also struck Haitian men and women, intravenous-drug users, female partners of drug users, and infants and children. AIDS has become the second leading cause of death—after uncontrollable bleeding—in hemophiliacs, and, most recently, a number of surgical patients who have received blood transfusions have contracted AIDS, raising fears among some observers about the nation’s blood supply.
The mysterious AIDS organism is generally thought to be a virus or other infectious agent (as opposed to a bacterium) and to be spread in bodily secretions, especially blood and semen. It is responsible for the near-total collapse of the body’s immune system, leaving the victim prey to cancers and opportunistic infections that the body is unable to defend against. And, while some of the diseases associated with AIDS can be successfully treated, the underlying immune problem is, apparently, irreversible. The AIDS patient may survive his first bizarre infection, or his second, but he remains vulnerable to successive infections, one of which is likely to kill him.
AIDS is deadly. According to the C.D.C.’s figures for late January, it has struck 958 individuals since it was first seen in 1979, and it has killed 365, a mortality rate of 38 percent; of the cases reported before June 1981, 75 percent are dead. Although these earlier cases probably received less experienced treatment than AIDS patients get today, some fear that the five-year death rate will be higher than 65 percent. Smallpox, by comparison, killed 25 percent of its victims.
In the fall of 1981, the C.D.C. studied the sexual habits of 50 homosexual victims of AIDS. The investigators did not ask for the names of their partners.
Epidemiologists developed many theories about why homosexual men were at risk for these rare infections and cancers. Sexually active homosexuals are prone to a host of diseases: syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes, hepatitis, amebiasis (one of the most common diseases in what doctors call the “gay bowel syndrome”) and infections caused by fungi and protozoa usually seen only in the tropics.
As the syndrome spread to other groups, however, early theories that attempted to explain the outbreak among homosexuals were discarded. Within months, intravenous-drug users—both men and women—who were not homosexuals were showing the same signs of immune suppression and developing the same unusual opportunistic infections. Then came Haitians, in both the United States and Haiti, who said they were neither homosexuals nor drug users but who developed what appeared to be an identical syndrome of acquired immune deficiency.
In the spring of 1982, the C.D.C. received its first reports of AIDS in hemophiliacs. Some of these patients were probably exposed to the AIDS agent in a blood-clotting medication called factor VIII concentrate that is made from the blood of thousands of donors. Anywhere from 2,500 to 22,000 blood donors are used to make just one lot of this widely used product; one lot treats about 100 patients. To date, the C.D.C. has received a total of eight confirmed reports of hemophiliacs with AIDS, six of whom have died. All used factor VIII concentrate rather than an older, less convenient blood product called cryoprecipitate, which is made from the blood of a handful of donors. In view of the AIDS threat, some hemophilia experts are urging a return to cryoprecipitate, especially in mild or newly diagnosed cases.
In the summer of 1982, the C.D.C. received reports of three patients who contracted AIDS after receiving blood transfusions. Two of those patients were adults from the Northeast and the third was an infant in San Francisco who needed a transfusion to correct an Rhfactor incompatibility. Four more cases of possible transmission of AIDS through blood transfusions are now being investigated.
By mid-January, the C.D.C. had received five reports of AIDS that had spread to female sexual partners of drug abusers. In four of those cases, the male partners had not even been sick. Thus, AIDS qualified as a sexually transmitted disease among heterosexuals. It also began to be clear that individuals could be identified who might be carriers of the AIDS agent, able to infect other people without themselves developing symptoms.
Dr. James Oleske, a pediatric immunologist and associate professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, has treated eight young patients since 1979, four of whom have died. He believes the disease is passed on either in the womb or through normal contact between mother and child after birth. “It’s a tragedy,” he says of the cases he has seen. “The only thing to be said for it is that eventually AIDS will help us understand more about the immune system.” Homosexual men still represent 75 percent of the disease’s victims, and the specter of AIDS haunts every member of the homosexual community, especially in the cities where it is most prevalent (they are, in descending order, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia).
“You don’t know what it’s like to be gay and living in New York,” says Larry Kramer, 47, a novelist and screen writer and the cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an educational and fund-raising group for AIDS victims. “It’s like being in wartime. We don’t know when the bomb is going to fall. I’ve had 18 friends die in the last year and a half from AIDS,” Mr. Kramer says. “Another 12 are now seriously ill, and six of them are in the hospital. Doctors and psychiatrists are pleading with the community to learn a new way of socializing. They’re begging us, in the name of all who died, to learn how to date.”
And, in fact, behavioral changes are currently the only prudent advice physicians can offer. Some doctors hesitate to urge celibacy or monogamy on patients for whom casual sex is a way of life, but most seem to think the evidence is compelling enough to advocate just that. “I strongly recommend that my patients be very circumspect and cautious in their future sexual contacts,” says Dr. Dan William, a Manhattan internist who treats primarily homosexual men. In his practice of some 2,000 patients, he has seen 24 cases of AIDS.
“I tell my patients what the epidemiologists know—which isn’t much,” says Dr. William. “We are more or less convinced that we are dealing with a sexually transmissible agent. Large numbers of contacts—or a small number of indiscriminate contacts—increase the probability of exposure. In addition, a patient’s susceptibility to any infectious disease is much greater.” Dr. William counsels monogamy, and, he adds, “It’s important for a patient to emphasize to his sex contact that he must not bring any new diseases home with him.”
The incubation period for AIDS is thought to be at least six to eight months and could be as long as two years. This means that people who have already been infected might not know it until sometime between mid-1983 and the end of 1984. By then, each carrier might have unknowingly infected hundreds more individuals—through sexual contact, through blood donations, or through some yet un-imagined route.
“Most epidemics behave better than this,” says the C.D.C.’s Dr. Curran. “Like detective stories, they come eventually to a merciful end—even if they remain unsolved.” But with acquired immune deficiency, more than two years after the first case was reported, there is still no end in sight.
AIDS NOW SEEN AS A WORLDWIDE HEALTH PROBLEM
Geneva acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has become a worldwide problem with cases now being reported in 33 countries and all inhabited continents.
Of particular concern is a spurt in cases diagnosed in Europe, where the number has doubled in the last year, as it did soon after the disease became known in the United States in 1981.
And there are indications that in Africa the disease may be striking heterosexual men and women in equal numbers, unlike the situation in the industrialized countries, where AIDS predominantly strikes homosexual men and intravenous drug users. The disease is occurring in several countries in central and western Africa to a much greater extent than was previously recognized.
Although AIDS has been diagnosed worldwide, the reports have been somewhat spotty, according to Dr. Walter Dowdle of the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, who was chairman of an international gathering of scientists here last weekend, the first meeting to discuss the global impact of AIDS.
Dr. Dowdle emphasized that the new findings that emerged from that meeting should not be greeted with undue alarm. “AIDS is not a mysterious disease that is going to sweep the whole world,” he said. “It is increasing, but not at a rate alarming for the general public.”
The 38 scientists who met at the World Health Organization’s headquarters represented all the specialties involved in AIDS research.
The 15 European countries reporting to the World Health Organization now account for about 10 percent of all AIDS cases. Of the 267 AIDS cases that have been reported in Europe, 164—or about 60 percent—were diagnosed from January to October of this year.
Preliminary results of a new study in central Africa have led some AIDS experts to suspect that the disease may generally be transmitted heterosexually in some of the less developed areas of the world. The study also suggests, however, that this may be because of inadequately sterilized needles and syringes used in everyday medical practice.
In some countries, only a few AIDS cases have been diagnosed. Australia has reported four cases and Japan, the only Asian country to report the disease, two.
Despite the small number of cases reported in some countries, many participants said they suspected the true incidence of AIDS was more widespread than believed. They said the incidence of AIDS might be many times greater than the official worldwide total of about 3,000 cases.
The 2,753 AIDS cases reported from the United States make it the country with by far the largest reported incidence of the disease. However, recent health statistics from New York have hinted that the so-called “doubling phenomenon,” in which the number of new cases doubles about every six months, may be easing off. “What this means, we’re really not sure,” Dr. Dowdle said. “But we certainly hope it means something.”
Meanwhile, however, the doubling phenomenon has appeared in Canada as well as Europe.
Of the 50 AIDS cases reported so far in Canada, 15 were reported in 1982, 15 in the first six months of 1983 and 20 from July to October, Dr. Alastair J. Clayton, an official of the Laboratory for Disease Control in Ottawa, said.
The doubling phenomenon is evident from the European statistics in which the number of diagnosed cases rose from 2 in 1979 to 10 in 1980, 17 in 1981, 67 in 1982 and 164 so far this year.
One bright note in an otherwise bleak situation was a report about hepatitis B, a health problem that threatens many of the same people who are at high risk of contracting AIDS.
Researchers reported that, despite earlier fears, there was no evidence that AIDS or any other infection could be spread by hepatitis B vaccine. Those fears had arisen because the licensed hepatitis B vaccine is derived from the blood of chronic hepatitis B carriers, many of whom are homosexual men.
Nevertheless, the potential spread of AIDS through other blood products, as well as whole-blood transfusions, still concerns many doctors.
APRIL 22, 1984
FEDERAL OFFICIAL SAYS HE BELIEVES CAUSE OF AIDS HAS BEEN FOUND
Luc Montagnier, Jean-Claude Chermann and Françoise Barre-Sinoussi, the three Franch scientists who helped to discover the causes of AIDS in Pasteur Institute of Paris.
ATLANTA, April 21–Dr. James O. Mason, head of the Federal Centers for Disease Control, said today that he believed a virus discovered in France was the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
The French virus is called LAV, for lymphadenopathy-associated virus. It is a member of the retrovirus family, which over the past year has been the leading candidate as the cause of AIDS.
“We cannot know for sure now that the LAV virus is the agent that causes AIDS, but the pattern it follows in the human body makes us believe it is,” Dr. Mason said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 4,087 cases were reported in the United States as of Monday, and 1,758 patients have died.
Dr. Mason predicted that in time the new findings would lead to development of a diagnostic test for AIDS as well as a test to help in prevention. For one thing, he said a test might be developed to screen out AIDS-contaminated blood before it was transfused to patients.
One reason for believing that the virus is the cause of AIDS, Dr. Mason said, is that tests first done in France have shown that the LAV attacks the same white blood cells, called OKT4, or helper T-cells, that are destroyed by the disease.
ON TRAIL OF CANCER: DISCOVERIES REACH A CRESCENDO
Scientists who study biology at its most basic level are in the midst of a crescendo of new discoveries that seem to be unraveling of the mystery of the cancer process.
In the last few months, they have added to the list of known human cancer genes, identified new significance in the breakage and rearrangement of chromosomes, begun to see the function of cancer genes’ counterparts in the normal body, and identified a two-stage sequence in which two cancer genes of different classes act in step to produce a malignancy.
So fast and furious is the pace of discovery that some experts say informally that more has probably been learned in the past few years than in the previous quarter century.
“With the new molecular tools, so many things are just coming together,” said Dr. George F, Vande Woude of the National Cancer Institute, one of the experts in the field.
Most of this increasing wealth of knowledge has to do with the genes, the basic hereditary messages carried in the form of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in all living cells, and with the chromosomes, the tiny threadlike structures that carry those genes somewhat like beads on a string.
Some of the newest and most provocative findings link certain genes, called oncogenes, or cancer genes, with changes in chromosomes in a fashion that suggests plausible hypotheses to link the changes to the beginnings of cancer.
In recent months scientists have also, for the first time, linked a cancer gene to a known product in the body, a growth factor that helps the body make platelets, blood substances that are called into action to heal wounds. The apparent link between such a growth factor and the normal counterpart of an oncogene seems significant to many research workers because cancer has long been defined as a state in which cell growth often accelerates wildly having somehow lost its normal controls.
JUNE 1, 1984
Hepatitis Vaccine Produced by Gene-Splicing
The first experimental vaccine for humans produced through gene-splicing methods has given healthy adults immunity to hepatitis B virus, a major cause of liver disease throughout the world, scientists reported yesterday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The importance of such a vaccine, made artificially in the laboratory, is that it could be produced in virtually limitless quantity, probably at relatively low cost, and would be free from the risk of contamination by substances from human blood.
Furthermore the promise shown by the experimental vaccine against hepatitis B virus also suggests that other vaccines against important human diseases may be made by gene-splicing technology in the future.
Scientist Michael Houghton wearing latex gloves holding up a series of vials in a laboratory where he performs hepatitis non-A, non-B test procedures involving isolation and cloning of proteins.
The need for such a vaccine is great. Today there are estimated to be more than 200 million cases of liver disease worldwide that are caused by the virus. At least that many people are carriers of the virus and are capable of passing it on to others.
In regions of Asia and Africa where hepatitis B virus is most common as a cause of liver infection, liver cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among males. Experts believe infection with the virus is a factor in the cause of most of those cancers.
DECEMBER 12, 1984
MOVEMENT SEEKS TO ADVANCE RIGHTS OF DYING
Every day several sacks of mail arrive at the front door of a small rented house in suburban Los Angeles and in two crowded offices on West 57th Street in Manhattan. From the quarters of these three little-known organizations a continent apart comes much of the current impetus for a better-known movement advocating the “right to die.”
A good deal of attention has been captured by those who call themselves the “right to life” movement: activists who seek to protect the unborn by opposing abortion. But at the other end of life, where machines and drugs can prolong life often beyond the will of patients to live it, hundreds of thousands of people are organizing to secure the rights of patients who want “death with dignity.”
On the surface, there is little controversy over granting dignity to a dying person. Without issuing broad policy statements, medical groups generally agree that in some terminal cases, technology merely prolongs the dying process, and such groups leave individual decisions to the physicians involved. The painful and increasingly complex conflicts come when the desire for a natural death by an individual or his family clashes with a whole host of legal, moral and ethical concerns of hospitals afraid of lawsuits, of doctors who control life-support machines and regard a patient’s death as a professional failure and of emotional relatives under stress.
There are also some who fear that making it easy for patients or relatives to have life-sustaining machinery turned off could lead to abuses under the name of euthanasia, or mercy killing.
Although their precise goals and strategies differ, the Society for the Right to Die and other such groups are striving, with some apparent success, to change the way American society looks at death. In their view, death is no longer a simple inevitability. With machines that can pump and clean blood, fill and empty lungs with air and restart hearts, man can often control the time of death, although not always the quality of prolonged life.
For a hopelessly ill person to choose a natural death instead of lingering on a machine, the groups maintain, is as much a moral and legal right as the right, long established in law, to consent to initial medical treatment.
The three large organizations working to design and rewrite state laws, to alter public perceptions and to assist individuals and families in the emotional and legal confrontations that frequently erupt are the Society for the Right to Die, Concern for Dying and the Hemlock Society.
The Hemlock Society appears to be the most radical group. Its 10,000 members believe that individuals who want to commit suicide, which the society calls “self-deliverance,” ought to be able to receive active assistance as well as to have medical treatment stopped on demand.
Both Concern for Dying and the Society for the Right to Die shun advocating active euthanasia and instead emphasize education of doctors, legislators, patients and their families to the rights of patients.
“The patient’s wishes should be paramount,” said Alice Mehling, executive director of the Society for the Right to Die.
JULY 22, 1985
IMPACT OF AIDS: PATTERNS OF HOMOSEXUAL LIFE CHANGING
Four years since the public first became aware of AIDS, the lethal viral disease has brought profound changes to the lives of homosexual men in New York.
It has had a pervasive effect on homosexual life styles, relationships, sexual patterns and self-images. Many believe the changes to be permanent, and some feel that the disease has led to a redefinition of contemporary homosexual life.
Successive stages of panic and apathy about AIDS have seized homosexuals since 1981. The years have taken their toll. “I think the gay community is still reeling from the devastation of this disease,” said Dr. Stuart E. Nichols Jr., a psychiatrist at Beth Israel Medical Center who has treated and studied AIDS patients since 1981. “It’s a personal disease for any gay man, and the ability to deny is not there anymore for the majority of gays.”
For many, it has entailed the emotional cost of repeatedly coming to terms with death at an early age. “A man I know said to me today, ‘I know 150 people who’ve died of AIDS’—150 people!” said Larry Kramer, author of “The Normal Heart,” an Off Broadway play about AIDS.
Larry Kramer at the Village Voice AIDS conference on June 6, 1987 in New York City.
Currently AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is the leading cause of death among men aged 25 to 44 in New York City, supplanting the usual causes in this age group such as suicide, accident and homicide. According to the City Health Department, 3,926 cases of AIDS have been reported in the city, 59 percent of them among homosexual or bisexual men; most of the rest come from a variety of risk groups, including intravenous drug users and the sex partners or children of those who have AIDS. Since 1978, 2,033 of the AIDS victims in the city have died—52 percent of the reported cases.
Many of those interviewed agreed that AIDS has led to change in several areas, including modifications in sexual activity, a trend toward long-term relationships and a realignment in relation to the nonhomosexual part of the community. However, such changes have been complex, said Dr. Emery S. Hetrick, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. He is a member of the State Task Force on Gay and Lesbian Issues appointed by Governor Cuomo.
It is hard to generalize about “extremely diverse” people, he said, noting that the impact of AIDS is only one aspect of life among homosexuals of different ages, social class and ethnicity.
“Many people have limited having sex to one’s life partner, or are practicing ‘safe sex,’ ” said Dr. Hetrick. He was referring to techniques such as limiting the number of sexual partners; using prophylactics and avoiding exchanges of body fluids that have been linked with transmission of the virus that is believed to cause AIDS; getting regular physicians’ checkups, and avoiding drugs that suppress the body’s immune system or reduce inhibitions about high-risk sexual behavior.
Dr. Hetrick emphasized, though, that sexual patterns were varied before the advent of AIDS. “A number of men were extremely sexually promiscuous, and a proportion engaged in acts that could be dangerous,” he said. “But a sizable number had been in stable relationships, and were not at risk at all. Some others were in primarily stable relationships, with perhaps an occasional trip to the baths.”
All those interviewed said that the widely reported panic that crested in 1983 has abated, and that it is no longer common for nonhomosexuals to express fear that hairdressers or waiters will give them AIDS.
Opinions differ about the lessons that can be drawn from the response to AIDS and about whether the struggle has transcended traditional divisions among homosexuals. “It’s a big dark cloud, but there’s a real silver lining to it,” said Judge Failla. “The community has matured and taken responsibility for itself.”
But Mr. Kramer, a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said, “AIDS hasn’t coalesced the gay community one single bit—anyone who claims that is deaf, dumb and blind.”
He added: “The gay community is totally and utterly unorganized. We have no political power in this society, and no lobbying power in Washington. That’s obvious from the response to this horrible disease.”
Mr. Dunne said he found Mr. Kramer’s play “profoundly moving” but it made him “profoundly angry.”
“He says there are no heroes,” Mr. Dunne said. “But I see them and work with them all the time—the physicians and nurses and volunteers bearing terrible burdens, and the people who are dying from AIDS and have been so heroic in the way they struggle with it.”
MARCH 11, 1986
FETAL TESTS CAN NOW FIND MANY MORE GENETIC FLAWS
The couple already had two children afflicted with the grim reality of cystic fibrosis. They could not face having another. The disease causes digestive problems, breathing problems, lung infections, with an almost continual threat of death from early childhood onward. The woman ended her next pregnancy by abortion.
But now she is pregnant again and plans to have this baby. Genetic testing that has become available only within the last several months has given her solid assurance that the child will be free of the disease.
This is the human side of a revolution in diagnosis of genetic diseases that is unfolding today because of scientists’ growing ability to find and interpret the messages of the human genes. Today such diagnoses are becoming available for an ever increasing roster of disorders caused by a fault in one or another single gene among the 50,000 to 100,000 that humans possess. Individually, most of these diseases are quite rare, although cystic fibrosis afflicts an estimated 30,000 Americans and Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy appears about once in every 5,000 males born alive.
Prenatal detection of the classic form of hemophilia has become possible within the last year, as has been the case with cystilemma fibrosis. What one expert called “reasonably good” detection of muscular dystrophy has been possible since last fall. Phenylketonuria, an important cause of mental retardation usually known as PKU, has been detectable in the fetus for about two years; the blood diseases sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, also known as Cooley’s anemia, have been detectable longer.
Earlier methods have allowed detection of at least 50 other genetic diseases, including Down’s syndrome and Tay-Sachs disease. But the new DNA studies are safer for the fetus than some of the earlier techniques and have added important diseases never before detectable in the womb.
With the new predictive abilities come some sobering ethical and social problems of which specialists are very much aware. Only a handful of laboratories today are capable of doing the new tests, and they are expensive, yet many thousands of people might benefit. Furthermore, the ever-increasing ability to detect genetic disease early in fetal life is likely to sharpen the debate over abortion and generally exacerbate the dilemma of parents and doctors when diseases that used to be unforeseeable “acts of God” can now be predicted in advance.
AUGUST 9, 1986
U.S. FILES FIRST AIDS DISCRIMINATION CHARGE
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8–The Federal Government has for the first time accused an employer of illegally discriminating against a person with AIDS, Federal officials said today.
The charge was made by the Department of Health and Human Services, which said that a North Carolina hospital had violated a man’s civil rights by dismissing him from his job as a registered nurse and then refusing to consider him for any other job.
The Government said the Charlotte Memorial Hospital and Medical Center had violated the law “by discriminatorily denying the complainant individualized consideration for possible re-employment.”
The Government’s action is significant because it sets a precedent demonstrating that people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome may be able to protect their rights despite a restrictive interpretation of the relevant law by the Justice Department. In addition, lawyers said, the ruling underscores the need for employers to be cautious in taking action against workers with AIDS.
The law in question, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, prohibits discrimination on the basis of handicap in any program or activity that receives Federal financial assistance.
Charlotte Memorial Hospital, a 777-bed nonprofit facility, receives Federal funds through Medicare and Medicaid, the programs for the elderly and poor.
NOVEMBER 3, 1987
Last Samples of Smallpox Pose a Quandary
Ten years after smallpox ceased to exist as a human disease, virus experts and public health officials are in a strange and unprecedented quandary: what to do with the last surviving smallpox viruses.
These viruses, the most fearsome endangered species on earth, exist today in only two places, high security laboratories in Moscow and at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Now, on the 10th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the experts are questioning whether or not those last stocks of variola virus—the cause of smallpox—should finally be destroyed.
“No scientist is working with viable variola virus or is likely to be allowed to do so,” said Dr. Keith Dumbell, of University of Cape Town, in South Africa, writing in The Lancet, a medical journal. “To the best of our knowledge,” he added, “destruction of all remaining laboratory stocks of variola virus would set the final seal on the attempt to rid the world of this infectious scourge.”
But some specialists have argued that the virus should not be erased altogether from the world, partly because unforeseen research uses might arise in the future and partly simply because once it was destroyed, it could never be raised from extinction. Philosophically, the deliberate extinction of a species would be an unprecedented step.
But this is a species that, over thousands of years, has killed many millions of people and has spread panic and destruction in its wake, often killing one in five of those infected in any outbreak and disfiguring many of the survivors.
Now the only surviving representatives of the virus are stored in little vials kept in freezer lockers at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, waiting only for some hypothetical future use.
The last naturally transmitted case of smallpox occurred in Merka, Somalia, in late October 1977. It is from this case that the 10-year anniversary is dated. The next year, two cases occurred in England because the virus accidentally escaped from a research laboratory. There have been many rumors but no actual cases of smallpox anywhere since then.
Dr. Dumbell questioned his fellow virologists throughout the world about the desirability of destroying the virus. Of the 61 scientists in 22 countries who responded, only five thought the virus stocks should be preserved indefinitely.
Those five offered two fundamental reasons: first, that the virus could be kept in storage with minimal risk and that this should be continued to preserve specimens of the species; and second, that the preservation of openly retained stocks was preferable to destroying them and leaving the possibility that some country was keeping secret stocks for possible use in biological warfare.
Such rumors of clandestine virus supplies are fueled by the fact that some countries, notably the United States and the Soviet Union, continue to vaccinate military personnel even though there is no present risk of the disease smallpox anywhere.
Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who was head of the World Health Organization’s global smallpox eradication program from 1966 until its successful conclusion, said yesterday he could see both sides of the quandary. He does not consider the safety of maintaining stocks a major issue.
“As a scientist I would say let’s keep it,” he said, “but looking at the reality of concerns, I think we would be politically well advised to destroy it.”
MARCH 21, 1987
U.S. APPROVES DRUG TO PROLONG LIVES OF AIDS PATIENTS
3’-azido-3’-deoxythymidine (AZT), the drug used to treat HIV.
The first drug proved to prolong the lives of AIDS patients was given Federal approval today. Both Government and drug company officials emphasized, however, that the drug was not a cure for the fatal disorder of the immune system, which has struck 33,000 Americans.
The drug is azidothymidine, or AZT, an antiviral drug made by the Burroughs Wellcome Company under the brand name Retrovir. Its approval, which means it can be prescribed by doctors, had been expected since January, when the company made its presentation before the Food and Drug Administration.
Even before today’s approval, the drug had been made available to more than 5,000 patients in clinical tests and in a special program to many of the most severely ill patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Because of concern over the drug’s potentially severe side effects and limitations in supply, Burroughs Wellcome said it would limit distribution in the coming months to selected categories of patients. These will include, in addition to thousands of AIDS patients who have suffered a particular form of pneumonia, many thousands more with a severe form of AIDS-related complex, or ARC, a subgroup whose white blood cells have been severely depleted.
The drug works by inhibiting the ability of the AIDS virus to duplicate inside body cells. It apparently is not completely successful at this, however, because for unknown reasons, the condition of some patients on the drug continues to deteriorate. The drug does not rid the body of the virus.
Physicians and AIDS patients said they were pleased by today’s announcement but concerned by the high price of the drug, estimated at $8,000 to $10,000 a year for a patient. They say this will force many people to exhaust their savings and go on the welfare rolls, relying on programs such as Medicaid to pay for the drug.
The Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a voluntary organization in New York that assists AIDS victims, said it was pleased by the licensing of AZT but concerned about the price.
“This licensing represents another step forward in the research on AIDS,” the group said. “We are, however, outraged at the extreme high cost of the drug and the fact that a person with AIDS may be forced to spend down all their assets in order to afford this excellent drug.”
Archie Harrison, a New York AIDS patient who has been taking AZT for 17 weeks, said that he felt the drug had helped him, and that he personally had not suffered the bad side effects some patients had. But he, too, expressed concern about the cost.
“I think it’s outrageous, in a life-threatening situation,” said Mr. Harrison, a 32-year-old man who was diagnosed with AIDS in February 1986. He noted that many patients on AZT were living on fixed incomes, such as Social Security disability, and would be unable to pay for AZT by themselves.
The New York State Department of Health said the drug would be covered under Medicaid, which pays for the health care of poor people. As with other drugs, the program will pay pharmacists the wholesale cost plus a nominal dispensing fee.
The state’s view is that “if the treatment is effective then it should be available to all residents of the state,” said Frances Tarleton, a spokeswoman for the department.
Medicaid is a joint Federal-state program administered by the states. Each state will decide its policy on payment for AZT.
JULY 28, 1987
Fatigue ‘Virus’ Has Experts More Baffled and Skeptical than Ever
Medical experts are struggling, with only limited success, to understand a mysterious illness that leaves its victims exhausted for months or years at a time.
The ailment, known as chronic Epstein-Barr virus infection, chronic mononucleosis or chronic fatigue syndrome, has stirred rising concern in public and medical circles over the last two years.
The illness has already caused one highly publicized but sharply disputed “epidemic” at a resort community at Lake Tahoe, Nev., from 1984 to 1986. It may have caused an outbreak of 100 cases in the small Nevada town of Yerington from late 1985 to early 1986, according to Dr. Anthony L. Komaroff, director of general medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“Whatever it is, it seems to be growing in frequency,” said Dr. Komaroff, whose group has studied more than 500 patients suffering from the syndrome. “Literally every time I say to a friend that I’m studying this illness, and then describe it, they say ‘Oh, my God. My niece has it, or my next-door neighbor, or my boss.’ ”
Although the syndrome has apparently never been fatal, it can unquestionably be devastating to many of those affected. Virtually all suffer persistent fatigue, in some cases so overwhelming that it curtails work, restricts social life or even becomes totally disabling. Most victims also experience low-grade fever, muscle pains, depression, headaches, recurrent sore throats, swollen lymph glands and allergies. And many victims are unable to think clearly or to concentrate. Some have likened their condition to feeling like a Raggedy Ann doll with the stuffing knocked out or to an endless bout of flu with the added mental confusion of Alzheimer’s disease.
Some experts suspect that “chronic Epstein-Barr virus syndrome” has become the latest fad diagnosis, replacing iron-poor blood, low blood sugar and thyroid problems as a catch-all explanation for symptoms that cannot otherwise be explained.
“I don’t think it’s clear that there’s an epidemic of this,” said Dr. George Miller, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases, epidemiology and molecular biochemistry at the Yale University medical school. “I would say there might be an epidemic of diagnosis.”
Dr. Gary Holmes, an epidemiologist at the Federal Centers for Disease Control who studied the Lake Tahoe outbreak, said, “A lot more is being made of this by the lay press than it probably deserves,” adding, “The problem is that almost every person in the United States has symptoms that are compatible with symptoms of the syndrome.”
The ailment strikes women twice as often as men, for reasons that are not understood. It also disproportionately afflicts nurses, doctors and other health personnel. The most visible victims are often professionals in fast-paced jobs, leading quipsters to dub it “the Yuppie plague” or “Yuppie flu.”
Drug Combination Gains Support as Alternative to Surgical Abortion
Drugs that induce miscarriages may eventually replace traditional surgical abortions in the first three months of pregnancy, according to a World Health Organization official. In particular, a panel that recently evaluated international drug tests determined that a specific two-drug combination was safe and effective when used early in pregnancy.
The combination included a relatively new compound, called RU 486, that induces abortions and has been tested in Europe as a “morning after” pill. The other drug, prostaglandin, is older and already on the market.
The combination is about 95 percent effective in causing abortions in the first three months of pregnancy, according to the panel, which was convened by the W.H.O. and which will be publish its report in two months.
The drug combination is “a major advance,” said Dr. Irving Spitz, director of clinical research at the Population Council in New York City. The drugs “certainly will have a very major impact, absolutely,” he added.
At the same time, Dr. Spitz and others noted that drug companies might not choose to market the drugs in this country out of fear of opposition from those who object to abortions.
Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu holds RU-486 pills he developed.
A woman is given an RU 486 pill and two days later gets an injection of prostaglandin or a prostaglandin suppository. The woman then has a miscarriage; her uterus contracts and expels the fetus. The experience is like a heavy menstrual period, often accompanied by some cramps.
The drugs produce “very, very minimal side effects,” Dr. Barzelatto said. “There is not an significant increase in nausea over the amount pregnant women feel anyway, the women don’t have diarrhea, and the abdominal pain is not severe.”
Dr. Spitz said Ru 486 induces abortions in 80 to 85 percent of women who take it in the first six weeks of pregnancy, but its effectiveness falls substantially after that. By the 9 or 10th week of pregnancy, “only one-third respond,” Dr. Spitz said.
FEBRUARY 22, 1988
BOYCOTT THREAT BLOCKING SALE OF ABORTION-INDUCING DRUG
While a new abortion-inducing drug is expected to be sold in France, China, England and other countries, opponents of abortion are blocking sale of the drug in this country.
The fate of the drug, RU 486, which has a potential for other medical conditions, mostly affecting women, is focusing new attention on the influence of the anti-abortion movement on medical decisions.
National Right to Life and other groups opposed to abortion have served notice to drug companies that if any company sold an abortion-inducing drug the millions of Americans who oppose abortion will boycott all the company’s products. This happened to the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo, Mich., when it tried to develop abortion-inducing drugs several years ago.
Supporters and opponents of the drug RU 486 demonstrate outside the French Embassy.
Pharmaceutical companies say they have no plans to seek the Food and Drug Administration approval that is necessary to sell abortion-inducing drugs in the United States. They say publicly that they are not cowed by the anti-abortion movement and that they had other reasons for not selling such drugs. Privately, however, drug makers speak differently.
“The reasons are obvious,” said one company executive who asked not to be named. He said his company feared that if it sold such a drug, it would suffer greatly from a boycott by the millions of members of National Right to Life and by “all the physicians, pharmacists and lay people who don’t believe in abortions.”
The power of anti-abortion groups “is very upsetting,” said Dr. Irving Spitz, director of clinical research at the Population Council in New York City. Dr. Daniel Mishell, professor and chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, said he thought it was “medically wrong” that RU 486 would not be available to women in this country.
Dr. Mishell said abortions would be safer with RU 486. Surgical abortions, performed by suction and by dilation and curettage, carry risks of blood loss, perforation of the uterus, complications from anesthesia and perforation of the bowel or other organs. Although these things rarely occur, they would be avoided altogether in a drug-induced abortion.
RU 486 causes abortions by blocking progesterone, a hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. By itself, the drug induces abortions in 80 to 85 percent of women who take it very early in pregnancy, within the first six weeks after their last menstrual period. But its effectiveness then starts to drop sharply so that by nine weeks after a woman’s last period, there is only one chance in three that abortion will occur.
Researchers in Europe and China foIn 1985, Upjohn stopped all research on drugs to induce abortions or prevent pregnancy, after two years of a boycott of all Upjohn products by National Right to Life. An Upjohn spokesman said the company decided to stop its fertility research program because of “the adverse regulatory climate in the United States” and because of the “litigious climate” here.
Dr. C. Wayne Bardin, who is vice president and director of biomedical research at the Population Council, and others also say the boycott was a principal reason that Upjohn stopped its fertility program.
Dr. Hodgen is concerned that the abortion issue will preclude marketing RU 486, even for the uses that have nothing to do with stopping or preventing pregnancy. “Groups that oppose abortions will oppose the marketing of this drug, even if the drug cured the common cold,” he said. “Let’s be real about that.”
Dr. Hodgen added that the emergence of RU 486 poses a new issue for American society. If a drug can provide so many benefits, should it be kept off the market because it also can induce abortions? “We have to weigh risks and benefits of a social nature,” he said.
FEBRUARY 28, 1988
THE HIGH COST OF THINNESS
Suctioning fat from the thighs, rump, knees and face may seem an extreme way to pursue good looks. But the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery announced recently that this technique, called liposuction, is “safe and effective.”
Liposuction has become the most common form of cosmetic surgery done in the United States: more common than face lifts, nose jobs, skin buffs, wrinkle fills or eyebag removals. In 1986 alone, nearly 100,000 liposuctions were performed, most of them on people who weren’t, in any medical sense of the word, obese. They were people who generally run none of the ordinary health risks of being fat, such as high blood pressure, heart disease or diabetes. Their only problem was that, in their opinions, they were not slim enough.
So here we have a potentially deadly, expensive antifat operation that is, according to advocates like Dr. Robert Bernard of the New York Regional Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, “very definitely not for the overweight.” Here is an operation that works best on the people who need it least (the more fat removed, the higher the risk); that, among other things, can lead to disability from fat clots, blood clots or severe depletion of bodily fluids; that doesn’t always even improve the patient’s looks.
Yet this is the operation that has become the most popular cosmetic surgery of our time, because so many people seem to want an easy way to look thinner. But beyond the cute names and euphemisms, which make the procedure sound as simple as vacuuming a closet, is the truth about liposuction. It is major surgery. The patient faces a one- to two-hour operation, most often under general anesthesia and most often requiring an overnight hospital stay, followed by six weeks or more of limited activity—including wearing a tight girdle so the skin won’t sag later. Pain, numbness, bruising, discoloration, depigmentation and other transient complications can linger for as long as six months.
As for the severest risk, death, it is true that 11 deaths is a low mortality rate, on the order of .01 percent. (Eleven is the number of deaths brought to the attention of the surgery society’s ad hoc committee on new procedures; the actual total may be higher.) But low mortality rate or not, 11 deaths is 11 deaths too many. Should anyone die in the name of vanity? These 11 patients—not to mention the thousands incapacitated or inconvenienced—were healthy when they went in for their operations.
“These are usually young people,” says Dr. Kenneth Christman, an Ohio plastic surgeon whose first—and last—liposuction resulted in his patient’s death. “The patients getting liposuction are 20, 30, 40 years old; these are people who have no business dying.”
Gene Studies Emerging as Key Engine of Science
The science of genetics is fast becoming what geneticists always knew it was: the central and most provocative science of life.
How far and fast the field has come was abundantly apparent at a recent major international meeting in Toronto. Many, perhaps most, of the scientific reports given there would have been incomprehensible to geneticists as recently as a decade ago. Some would have been derided as fantasy.
But today the revolution of modern genetics that began 35 years ago when the structure of the genetic material DNA was discovered has entered a new time of acceleration.
“Genetics is a great engine driving the advancement of knowledge in a whole host of fields in biology,” said Dr. Philip Leder of Harvard Medical School, a major figure in modern research on gene functions.
In an interview last week he cited many such fields in human genetics alone. He noted that there has been improved diagnosis of a wide range of diseases and treatment of some; better understanding of the biology of the brain and central nervous system, and discovery and production on a large scale of many rare human substances that are coming into use to treat a wide range of ills, including such major killers as cancer and heart disease.
DNA molecular model kit from 1986.
At the Toronto meeting, the 16th International Congress of Genetics, one of the most heavily attended scientific workshops was on transgenic mice—animals with foreign genes, sometimes human, sometimes of other species, that were transplanted into them as embryos. The animals are proving valuable to science in many ways; for example, they provide fresh understanding of how genes called oncogenes contribute to the cancer process.
The first human oncogene was isolated and reproduced in the laboratory in 1982 and the first success in transplanting genes into embryos of mammals occurred two years earlier. Not many years before that first successful transplantation, eminent scientists had scorned the idea that it might be achieved before the 21st century.
The numbers are evidence of how vigorous and expanding the science of genetics has become, Dr. Haynes said. “Today genes can be identified, weighed, measured, counted, manipulated, replicated and mutated in test tubes, and shuttled from cell to cell, even across species barriers,” Dr. Haynes said in his opening address.
The processes of splicing, analyzing and rebuilding genes are today so routine and so largely automated that a major topic of the Toronto meeting was how to carry out a huge project to translate the chemical messages of all the three billion subunits of the human DNA. That project is controversial today, but not because anyone doubts that it can be done.
Some geneticists believe the project would become an immense source of valuable new insights to be mined for decades by scientists exploring the biology of human health and disease. Others believe there are better ways of using their efforts to push back the frontiers of knowledge.
Both camps are convinced that their branch of science is only just beginning to exert its full potential impact for the better understanding of life and for improving the human condition.
OCTOBER 17, 1989
CRITICS CHALLENGE RELIANCE ON DRUGS IN PSYCHIATRY
The United States Food and Drug Association approved the prescription anti-depressant medication Prozac in 1987.
The movement among psychiatrists to rely more and more on using drugs to treat mental disorders is coming under strong attack. Critics contend that scientific studies evaluating the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs have been systematically biased, exaggerating the medications’ potency.
The drugs under challenge include many of the main medicines used to treat anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Critics say close scrutiny of the scientific literature suggests that many studies of such medications are flawed and that their results should be regarded with skepticism. Further, they say, the scientific debates and professional doubts on the question have been isolated in the professional community, and patients have been left in the dark.
The challenge is disputed by advocates of biological psychiatry, who see mental disorders as diseases of the brain that can best be treated with medication rather than psychotherapy. They say the critiques make too much out of minor technical matters and ignore an overwhelming body of data supporting the effectiveness of medication.
The debate is, in part, another skirmish in the battle for patients between psychiatrists, who can prescribe medications, and psychologists, clinical social workers and other psychotherapists, who cannot.
In the last decade or so, many psychiatrists have shifted toward more treatment by drugs. But a spate of new studies raise questions about that trend. The most recent, published in the October issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, showed that 45 severely depressed patients who received cognitive-behavioral therapy in addition to drug treatment fared better a year later than those who received drugs alone.
“The answer to all psychiatric problems does not lie in drugs; the magnitude of their effect is far less than the public has been led to believe,” said Roger P. Greenberg, a psychologist in the department of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Center in Syracuse. “We’re not arguing that medications do nothing; there’s a place for drugs for some people, but they are overrated and overprescribed. In comparisons of psychotherapy and drugs, by and large drugs do not appear to be the superior treatment.”
While some psychiatrists worry that a public debate over the efficacy of psychiatric drugs may lead some patients to stop taking drugs they need, others see the debate as useful.
“There are some abuses of drugs, just as there are some careless charges,” said E. Fuller Torry, a psychiatrist in Washington. “But it’s a healthy dialogue that needs to go on. You shouldn’t leave all the decisions to the psychiatrists.”
NOVEMBER 28, 1989
SURGEONS COMPLETE HISTORIC TRANSPLANT
CHICAGO, Nov. 27–The nation’s first liver transplant using a living donor had an unexpected complication today as surgeons removing one-third of the donor’s liver accidentally nicked her spleen, making it necessary for them to remove it.
Nevertheless, surgeons said tonight that the complicated procedure was generally going well. After seven tense hours of surgery, they had removed the donated tissue from Teresa A. Smith, 29 years old, of Shertz, Tex., and had begun transplanting it into her 21-month-old daughter, Alyssa.
As it began to appear that the operation would be a success, the atmosphere noticeably lightened. In contrast to the first part of the procedure, carried out virtually in silence in the blue-tiled operating room as rock music played.
“This is really the fun part,” said Dr. Christopher E. Broelsch, the leader of the surgical team at the University of Chicago Medical Center, as he prepared to implant the donated liver.
The operation was completed at 8:30 P.M., more than 12 hours after it began. “It went extremely well,” Dr. Broelsch said. “I am quite excited about it.”
Although four similar transplant operations involving live donors have been performed in other countries, until now, all liver transplants in this country have involved livers from cadavers.
Liver transplant surgeons elsewhere in the country said that they were eager to try living donor transplants themselves but that they wanted to see how the procedure fared at Chicago. In such cases, surgeons prefer that the donor be a close relative so there will be less of a chance that the recipient’s body will reject the new organ.
Dr. Broelsch said that he would know within 24 to 48 hours after the completion of the transplant whether the liver was functioning normally. He said he would know within one week whether there would be a severe rejection of the new organ by Alyssa’s body.
But he added: “This liver is going to function right away. I can tell.”
