greg goebel / public domain
* VECTORS is an original newsletter of fact and commentary on aerospace, technology, science, and historical topics.
* The energy crunch that arrived with surprising speed after the turn of the century has led to a worldwide interest in biofuels -- ethanol made from corn or sugar cane; biodiesel made from rapeseed, palm oil, or even coconut oil. Biofuels promise, at least in principle, not only freedom from uncertain oil supplies in unstable countries, but also an exit from rising carbon dioxide emissions -- biofuels take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so there's no net release of carbon dioxide when the biofuels are burned.
However, current biofuel technology has a number of drawbacks. Corn-based ethanol is regarded as the worst case, with some estimates showing that it requires more energy to produce than it provides -- in itself it doesn't produce net carbon emissions, but the process is reliant on technology that does. The "negative estimates" are generally regarded as exaggerations, but even more mainstream estimates show it only provides about 50% more energy than required to make it. Furthermore, there's no way that corn-based ethanol could provide more than a tenth of US fuel needs even if all US corn production were converted to ethanol -- and the increasing use of corn for ethanol is driving up US food prices. With inefficiencies in production and demand on the corn crop, corn-based ethanol isn't any particular bargain at the pump compared to gasoline.
Other feedstocks, particularly sugar cane, are more efficient, at least in the sense of providing a much higher ratio of energy out to energy in. However, sugar cane's still a crop plant, requiring good farmland and care to grow and competing against food production. Wouldn't it be nice, so the thinking goes, to be able to use as feedstocks plant material that can't be used as food, such as cornstalks, straw, prairie grasses, lawn clippings, and fast-growing trees?
A joint paper produced by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Agriculture (DA) in 2005 suggested that the USA could obtain 227 billion liters a year, 30% of the nation's vehicular fuel needs, from 1.3 billion tonnes of waste biomass, without major impact on food or timber production. In addition, a paper published by University of California at Berkeley researchers in 2006 suggested that while use of corn-based ethanol only cuts net greenhouse-gas emissions by 18%, cellulosic ethanol could cut emissions by up to 88%.
The obstacle is that such "cellulosic" materials are hard to convert into ethanol. It can be done, but with current technology it's much more expensive to produce "cellulosic ethanol" than corn-based ethanol. However, that unfortunate situation is now changing: billions of dollars of investment capital are flowing into biofuels in general, and in early 2007 the DOE awarded $385 million USD in contracts for the construction of six cellulosic-ethanol pilot plants that will produce almost 500 million liters of ethanol a year. That's only a few percent of US corn-based ethanol production, but backers of cellulosic ethanol believe the technology has finally reached the ignition point and is poised to take off.
* Production of cellulosic ethanol presents a formidable challenge. It's very easy to produce ethanol from cane sugars, and not particularly difficult to produce it from cornstarch -- though the starch has to be first broken down into simple sugars by an enzyme called "amylose", which is why sugar cane is a more efficient feedstock than corn. Once the raw sugars are available in solution, they can be fermented by yeasts to create ethanol, which is then distilled out of the solution.
Cellulosic materials are a much harder nut to crack. They consist of three main components:
To turn cellulosic materials such as leaves, stalks, grasses, and trees, the plant fibers made up of cellulose and hemicellulose first have to be broken down into simple sugars. The lignin is simply a nuisance and has to be disposed of in some way. Breaking down the plant material is the first technical obstacle, but it's not the only one. Although cellulose breaks down into six-carbon sugars like glucose ready for fermentation into ethanol, hemicellulose breaks down into five-carbon sugars like xylose -- and there are no microorganisms that occur in nature that can metabolize five-carbon xylose into ethanol. There are some microorganisms that can metabolize xylose and similar sugars, but they don't produce ethanol as an end product.
The first steps toward production of cellulosic ethanol actually focused on fermenting xylose and other five-carbon sugars. In 1985, a team led by microbiologist Lonnie Ingram of the University of Florida at Gainesville genetically modified the human colon bacterium, Escherichia coli, to metabolize a wider range of sugars into ethanol. The modified bacterium proved able to convert a sum of 90% to 95% of the sugars in biomass to ethanol. The problem was that it could tolerate no more than 4% ethanol in the final fermenting solution; since distillation of ethanol from solution is energy-intensive, it pays to have the highest concentration of ethanol possible. Ingram and his colleagues have since boosted the tolerance of the bacterium to 6.4% ethanol, and have licensed their technology to businesses working on cellulosic-ethanol production.
It's not the only game in town. In 1995, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, just outside Denver, genetically modified a bacterium named Zymomonas mobilis to ferment xylose and other five-carbon sugars, along with the six-carbon sugars the bacterium ferments naturally. This work was later passed on to researchers at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, with the latest Zymomonas strain capable of tolerating 10% ethanol. It is also now going into commercial service.
Work has been done to genetically modify yeasts, the standard microorganism for fermentation of traditional feedstocks, to handle five-carbon sugars. In 1993, a team of researchers at Purdue University in Indiana led by microbiologist Nancy Ho produced a modified yeast that could handle xylose, and have since honed the modified yeast to handle a wider range of five-carbon sugars, as well as increase its productivity.
* All this is encouraging, but more needs to be done. Yeast can process a batch of glucose to ethanol in a few hours, but the modified microorganisms can take a day or two to do the job, reducing production throughput. The modified microorganisms are also not very robust. Not only do they have problems dealing with even moderate concentrations of ethanol in solution, they also are jammed up by other by-products of the biomass fermentation problem. Improvements are needed.
Work is also being done on the first step in the cellulosic ethanol production process: breaking down the biomass for fermentation. The traditional approach is to break up the biomass with dilute acids and steam, then treat the resulting soup with cellulase and hemicellulase enzymes. This approach has limitations, mostly due to its use of acids:
A team lead by Bruce Dale, a chemical engineer at Michigan State University (MSU), has come up with an alternate scheme that uses ammonia and other basic substances in a low-temperature process that effectively breaks down leaves, grasses, and straws. The ammonia can be recovered and reused, and the process produced fewer enzyme inhibitors. The only problem is that it doesn't work so well with lignin-rich woody feedstocks such as trees, and so work continues on refining the process.
* There's also work on genetically modifying plants to be better fuel feedstocks. In 1999, a team under Vincent Chang, a biochemist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh announced the development of a modified poplar with 50% less lignin than a natural poplar. The work was originally intended to come up with a better feedstock for paper processing, but it's also relevant to use of poplars as a feedstock for ethanol production. The NCSU has not been able to improve on the 50% reduction, however, and has more recently been working on modifications of tree cellulose fibers to reduce their crystallinity and make them more vulnerable to cellulase enzymes -- reducing the need for enzymes. Researchers have also been tinkering with other feedstocks, such as switchgrass, to improve yield and reduce lignin content.
* Right now, producing a gallon of cellulosic ethanol costs as much as $4 USD, almost four times as much as the cost of corn-based ethanol. Industry officials believe that once the first pilot plants come on line in 2009, that cost will have dropped to $2 USD a gallon, and forsee steady progress towards "break-even".
Backers of cellulosic ethanol production are perfectly aware of the limitations of corn-based ethanol, but appreciate the way it's paved the way. It has created an infrastructure for the production, distribution, and sale of ethanol that cellulosic ethanol is leveraging off of to get started. In a few decades, corn-based ethanol may be a thing of the past, but if so it will have served an honorable role in establishing the biofuel economy.
* The impact of nonvolatile "flash" memory technology could have hardly been predicted. Today flash memory is used in digital music players, digital cameras, and cellphones, with hundreds of megabytes of capacity available at commodity prices. The global market in 2006 was $19 billion USD.
The basic concept was developed by two Bell Laboratories researchers, Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng came up with a variation on the classic field-effect transistor (FET). A normal FET has three connections: a "source", "drain", and "gate". The gate is effectively a plate whose voltage can be controlled to turn current between source and drain on and off. In effect, the FET is an electronically controlled switch.
The two researchers came up with an idea to add a second "floating" gate underneath the regular "control" gate. Activation of the control gate would cause the floating gate to acquire or lose a charge. Once the floating gate was configured in this fashion, it would stay switched on or off indefinitely. In other words, the device was "nonvolatile" -- it didn't lose its memory the instant the power was turned off. Dr. Sze's boss asked him: "Simon, tell me, what use can you think of for this device?" He later admitted: "I couldn't think of anything." It took a lot of power to charge or discharge the floating gate and so the memory was power-hungry. It was also slow, expensive, had limited lifetime, and seemed like a marginal technology at best at the time.
Then, in 1980, a Toshiba researcher named Fujio Masuoka came up with a modified scheme in which entire blocks of a floating-gate memory were erased at one time. The result was cheaper and less power-hungry. His bosses weren't impressed either, but he saw potential in his "flash" memories, seeing they could occupy a niche between normal fast, cheap, volatile computer RAM memory and hard disks. It was a perceptive insight, and Dr. Masuoka was eventually able to sell Toshiba management on the idea.
By 1986, Toshiba was producing flash memories in pilot quantities, and two years later Intel of the US bought a license to produce flash as well. In 1987, Dr. Masuoka rethought the architecture of his original "NOR" flash to come up with a cheaper, denser "NAND" flash architecture. The flash revolution had begun. Since that time, other improvements have been added -- for example "multilevel" flash memories, in which each memory cell doesn't just have an ON or OFF state -- it also has a "1/3 ON" and "2/3 ON" state, allowing twice the bit capacity with the same number of cells on a chip. Another innovation has been to stack flash ROM chips on top of each other.
* Flash memories have been getting more powerful every year, with gigabyte flash modules now available. As Dr. Matsuoka perceived, flash memories have their particular niche: they can't compete in price per bit with disk drives, and they have neither the speed nor the lifetime to compete with RAM -- a flash memory will wear out after about a million accesses, which would kill it off almost immediately if it were used for RAM.
However, there's a certain minimal cost for building a hard disk drive, and flash memories can operate on far lower power than a hard disk drive. A million accesses is not much of a problem with a digital camera, since memory accesses only take place when a picture is taken or accessed, not all the time as with RAM. As a replacement for a floppy disk, worn on a pendant, flash memory is almost ideal.
There's a continuously moving border between the utility of hard disks and flash memory. The new XO "$100 PC" will have a flash drive, not a hard disk, to keep down costs -- but the problem is that operating systems and application software keep getting more and more storage-hungry.
Flash memory still has technological room for growth and hard disk drives are not likely to crowd it to extinction any time soon. New technologies for solid-state memories, such as "magnetic RAM" and "ferroelectric RAM (FRAM)" may replace the current flash technology in a decade or two, but they will merely move into the profitable niche already carved out by flash memory.
* THE AXIS INVESTIGATES THE BOMB: Anyone worried about the possibility that the Nazis might get the atomic bomb first had obvious reasons for concern in late 1940. The fall of Norway had put the world's only heavy-water factory into Hitler's hands; the fall of Belgium gave the Germans access to uranium, and the fall of France gave them access to a cyclotron then being completed under the direction of Frederic Joliot-Curie.
Experiments were being conducted, though the results were not entirely encouraging: bungled measurements suggested, wrongly, that graphite was too effective at absorbing neutrons to be used as a moderator, leaving heavy water as the prime candidate. Work was also performed on selection of an industrial-scale process to separate U<235/92> and U<238/92>; the German researchers were startled by the estimates of the expense, and for the moment the focus was to be on use of heavy water as a moderator.
In the meantime, the Japanese were thinking about the atomic bomb as well. In April 1940, Lieutenant General Takeo Yusuda of the Imperial Japanese Army's (IJA) Aviation Technology Research Institute, who had been following scientific reports on fission, assigned a technically-trained aide, Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuaburou Suzuki, to investigate the concept. He came back with a report in October that generally focused on the availability of uranium, there being no reason to consider details if the raw materials were not available for further investigation. The report concluded that Japan had adequate access to supplies of uranium in Korea and elsewhere.
Consideration of details was passed by General Yasuda on to physicist Yoshio Nishina in the Riken laboratory of Tokyo. Nishina, who had been one of Niels Bohr's disciples in Copenhagen, set his people to work on investigations. In the spring of 1941 the IJA would authorize an atomic bomb development program.
* FORMATION OF THE NDRC: Back in the USA, work on the atomic bomb was slowly accelerating. In April 1940, while Tizard's committee was poring over the Frisch-Peierls report, Leo Szilard was chafing at the lack of motion from the US government: he had to prod his government contacts to even provide the inadequate sum that Teller had requested, and having done that the government demonstrated no more particular interest in the matter. To add to Szilard's frustration, Fermi still didn't seem particularly convinced himself that the chain reaction was practical.
After a spat between the two men, Szilard went off to Princeton to talk to Einstein. They composed another letter, this one emphasizing German nuclear research -- scientists who had recently left Germany for the United States brought with them alarming tales of German interest in the matter -- and sent it to Sachs. Sachs then went through a bureaucratic shuffle with the president, Pa Watson, and the Briggs Committee. The government's attitude was that the ball was in the physicists' court: at the initial meeting, they had asked for the money to buy graphite to see how useful it would be as a moderator and now the committee was waiting on the results of the experiments before proceeding further. A second meeting on 27 April yielded precisely the same answer.
There was nothing to do but go on with the experiments, with Fermi determining that graphite would prove a useful moderator. Other experiments being conducted in parallel by his colleagues at Columbia demonstrated the superior possibilities of a chain reaction with uranium-235 over "natural" uranium, which was mostly composed of uranium-238. Szilard had finally managed to prevail on his colleagues to maintain secrecy; they weren't published and the Axis didn't get their hands on them.
In addition, the attitude of the US government also took a turn for the better. The change in weather was due to Vannevar Bush, who had not long before been a vice-president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but who had in 1939 become head of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, a foundation set up by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1902 to promote scientific research. Bush had worked on US government defense technology development programs in the First World War and found it generally a case of the right hand, the military, unable to coordinate with the left hand, the scientists. With America obviously heading for involvement in a second world war, Bush decided that this time around things would be different, and he took the job at the Carnegie Institution to be close to the centers of power.
Bush wanted to set up a national research organization that would coordinate defense technology development, reporting directly to the White House so the military wouldn't just ignore it, and with its own source of funds so it would have a degree of independence of action. During the spring of 1940, after talking the matter over with prominent scientists, Bush came up with a proposal and arranged a meeting with Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's chief aide and right-hand man. Bush and Hopkins hadn't met before but they hit it off well, with Bush finding that Hopkins was thinking of an "inventor's council" along the same lines. Encouraged, Bush spoke to contacts in the armed services, Congress, and the US National Academy of Sciences. On 12 June 1940, Hopkins introduced Bush to the president, with Bush pitching the idea. The meeting only took ten minutes -- Hopkins had discussed everything with Roosevelt ahead of time -- and ended with the president's approval. The "National Defense Research Council (NDRC)" was born.
The Uranium Council was absorbed into the NDRC, which meant the scientists and engineers, not the military, were in the driver's seat for funding nuclear research. For the moment, however, the NDRC was busy with a bewildering list of things to investigate, and NDRC officials still thought the atomic bomb sounded too much like science fiction. Since the Germans were clearly working on the concept, it had to be investigated, but the expectation was that the investigation would show the atomic bomb to be the fantastical rubbish it sounded like it was.
* NEW ATOMIC ELEMENTS: However, new discoveries continued to erode that impression. On the West Coast, at the University of California at Berkeley, an experimental physicist named Edwin M. McMillan had begun bombarding uranium oxide samples with neutrons in early 1939, and came up with traces of unfamiliar radioactive materials. He suspected that he had found the next element beyond uranium, element 93, though proving the matter was tricky. McMillan enlisted the help of Emilio Segre, who had discovered technetium a few years earlier and was then at Berkeley, but Segre's chemical analysis came up negative.
McMillan wouldn't let go, however. In the spring of 1940, a Dr. Philip Abelson came to Berkeley on vacation. Abelson, who had a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Washington State University and a doctorate in physics from Berkeley, had been performing scientific research at the Department of Terrestial Magnetism, a laboratory of the Carnegie Institute run by a prominent physicist named Merle Tuve. Back in California, Abelson was also skeptical of Segre's results, and so McMillan and Abelson took another shot at it. This time the elusive element 93 was positively identified. The first "transuranic" element had been discovered; McMillan dubbed it "neptunium", on the basis that the planet Neptune was the next beyond the planet Uranus.
A paper reporting the discovery was mailed off to the journal PHYSICAL REVIEW in late May 1940. Abelson then went back East, with McMillan pushing on to hunt for element 94. There were speculations floating around among the nuclear physics community at the time that transuranic elements might have significant implications for atomic power, and when James Chadwick saw the paper, he was shocked. A formal protest was channeled through the British embassy to the authorities in Washington DC and Ernest Lawrence, boss of the Berkeley lab, was reprimanded for giving away potentially dangerous secrets to the Axis. Even though America wasn't at war yet, people were finally taking security seriously.
* The increasing security went hand in glove with increasing Anglo-US cooperation. In the late summer, Churchill dispatched a team under Henry Tizard to the USA carrying Britain's most secret advanced technologies, particularly for radar, with a new high-frequency tube, the "cavity magnetron", taking center stage. (It is now found in every microwave oven.) Meetings took place, under the sponsorship of Alfred Loomis, a millionaire businessman and amateur scientist who was very well connected. Ernest Lawrence was a significant participant. The end result of the "Tizard Mission", with a little networking by Vannevar Bush, was the formation of a well-funded radar laboratory at MIT, know by the bland cover name of the "Radiation Laboratory" or just "Rad Lab".
The Rad Lab soaked up a significant component of America's best young technical minds, with Lawrence helping bring physicists into the fold; McMillan was working at the Rad Lab by the fall of 1940. Back at Berkeley, the hunt for element 94 continued, under the direction of a young chemist named Glenn T. Seaborg and with assistance from Emilio Segre. Using the cyclotron in the Berkeley lab, they accelerated charged particles and slammed them into a block of paraffin to smash loose neutrons and shower them into samples of a uranium compound, and by March 1941 had identified tiny samples of element 94. Since Pluto was the next planet beyond Neptune -- it was still regarded as a planet in those days -- Seaborg eventually decided to name it "plutonium". This time around the discovery was, with complete wisdom in hindsight, kept out of the science press. Further studies indicated that plutonium was an excellent material for building an atomic bomb.
* As far as Fermi and Szilard's work on an atomic pile went, on 1 November 1940 the NDRC finally came up with the funds -- $40,000 USD, not the paltry $6,000 USD Teller had asked for. With resources available, Fermi and Szilard were finally able to start building an atomic pile to prove that a chain reaction was really possible. Theory was all very well and good, but all the calculations did was demonstrate possibilities that had to be proven in the real world.
Although Szilard and Fermi were on good terms, they didn't work hand-in-glove, and so Szilard focused on procurement of pure graphite and uranium oxide while Fermi worked on the experimental setup. Szilard made inquiries to Monsanto, US Graphite, and other potential suppliers to find graphite of the appropriate purity, while he also obtained 225 kilograms (500 pounds) of uranium oxide from the Eldorado Radium Corporation. It wasn't easy to obtain such materials and it would take some months to track them down.
* BUREAUCRATIC DITHERING: In the winter of 1940:1941 James Bryant Conant, a prominent organic chemist and then president of Harvard University, went to Britain to follow up the technical contacts of the Tizard Mission by establishing an NDRC liason office in the UK. He met with King George VI, Winston Churchill, and figures of lesser rank. Conant's mission was diplomatic, not technical, and he was reluctant to get too involved in details. Worried about security, he was downright skittish when atomic bomb work was mentioned to him, even after Prof Lindemann described a "bomb of enormous power" over lunch. Conant didn't follow up the matter, considering the notion too outlandish and figuring that it was no business of his.
Nobody else in positions of power in the USA seemed to think it was particularly their business either, and Ernest Lawrence was becoming increasingly frustrated with the status quo. He resolved to change matters, meeting on 17 March 1941 at MIT with MIT with Alfred Loomis and Karl Compton, president of MIT and a physicist by training, warning them that America could not let the Nazis be the first to build the atomic bomb. They were impressed by Lawrence's pitch, but when matter worked its way up to Vannevar Bush, he came to the conclusion that Lawrence was a loose cannon. Bush talked to Lawrence in New York City on 19 March and told him to toe the line: the NDRC was his show and if Lawrence wanted to lobby he would have to do it the normal channels. If he didn't, the NDRC would shut its doors to him.
However, Bush had been mainly concerned with protecting his authority in the confrontation with Lawrence, and was actually more confused about what to do about atomic bomb research than he let on. Reports were filtering back from the UK on MAUD work, saying the matter was too important to be ignored. Bush finally became uncomfortable enough to work with Briggs and Arthur B. Jewitt, head of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), to set up a review committee that had the technical expertise to pass judgement on the prospects of an atomic bomb. The NAS committee ended up with three members: Ernest Lawrence; a prominent retired physical chemist named William D. Coolidge who had run General Electric's research labs; and physicist Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago.
Arthur Compton was the younger brother of Karl Compton and had won the Nobel prize for his discovery of the "Compton effect", the scattering of photons -- light particles -- by electrons. He was bright, pleasant, vigorous, with the looks of a 1930s movie leading man, and very devout -- his father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother a Mennonite dedicated to missionary work. Although Mennonites are pacifists, the war in Europe had already convinced Compton that the need to defeat the Nazis overrode an abstract consideration of principle. When asked to head the review, he was quick to accept.
The NAS committee deliberated for several weeks in the spring of 1941, finally producing a seven-page summary report that was handed over to Jewitt on 17 May 1941. The report concluded that it would be possible to produce radioactive materials for poisoning enemy territory, use atomic power to propel ships and particularly submarines, and build "violently explosive bombs." The report concluded that an atomic bomb could be available as early as 1945 and said research should go forward.
Jewitt was generally impressed with the NAS report, but Bush paid it little mind -- partly because he was distracted at the time, being engaged in strenuous political lobbying and organizational politics. The NDRC was a fine thing but it had one major limitation: it was strictly a research organization, with no capability to develop weapons and tools. Bush was working up a new organization, the "Office of Scientific Research & Development (OSRD)", which would be headed up by Bush and would report directly to the President of the United States. It would be formally created in June. The NDRC would become an advisory organization to the OSRD, with Bush lining up James Conant to take charge of the earlier organization.
Conant looked over the NAS report and said to Bush that his conclusions from it were "almost entirely negative". It wasn't surprising that Bush seemed confused about the matter, unwilling to give up on it but uncertain about a course of action.
* The night Blitz against England had faded out in May, much to the relief of Britons, but the silence left open the question of what Hitler was planning. Thanks to radar developments, the RAF had been taking an increasing bite out of the night raiders, but not to the extent of inflicting unacceptable losses on the Luftwaffe and driving them off. It wasn't too difficult to suspect that German air power had been withdrawn from the skies of Britain to be put to use elsewhere. On the morning of the summer solstice, 22 June 1941, Hitler invaded the USSR, massively escalating of the war.
This event had the effect of making Conant even more uncertain about atomic bomb research: he believed that resources needed to be put into weapons that would be available very soon, not into blue-sky projects that might pay off four years down the road. Conant discussed the matter with Bush, who realized that he needed to make a decision. The NAS review committee was reconstituted to review the original report, with the staff adjusted to provide a more practical and less theoretical viewpoint. Compton dropped out, Coolidge took charge, and two senior engineers -- one from Bell Laboratories and the other from Westinghouse -- signed on. They went over the first review in early July and endorsed it. Bush continued to equivocate.
However, American visitors to the UK also provided more detailed feedback on the MAUD work to Vannevar Bush, and when the committee issued its final report on 15 July 1941 -- to then disband -- Bush got a draft copy. The report was a detailed blueprint for the development of the atomic bomb; it concluded that it would be practical to build such a weapon, that it would be decisive in the war, that the work should be performed at the "highest priority", and that collaborative efforts with the USA be extended to that end. Bush now tilted towards embracing the atomic bomb, but he remained cautious. During July he spoke with Vice-President Henry Wallace -- a plant geneticist by training -- about the prospects of funding an atomic bomb development program, but then Bush decided to stall again, waiting until he obtained the full MAUD report.
* Edward Teller, who had along with his wife become an American citizen in March 1941, had been teaching at George Washington University but chafing to get more involved in fission research. Through the help of some friends he managed to obtain a position at Columbia, where he could work with Fermi and Szilard. Teller was skilled at helping smooth out the disputes between the two physicists and his presence was appreciated.
Sometime in September, Teller remembered later, he had lunch with Fermi, who passed on a suggestion to Teller on the way back to work. Suppose, Fermi said, one was to use an atomic bomb to heat up a mass of deuterium, heavy hydrogen. The temperature would be so high it might cause the deuterium to fuse into helium, producing a bang several orders of magnitude bigger than that produced by a fission bomb. Teller found the idea of a "fusion bomb" fascinating and dove in, performing calculations to see if Fermi's idea was possible. A week later he told Fermi it wasn't, and Fermi saw no reason to question the conclusion. In fact, Teller would turn out to be wrong.
Fermi actually wasn't the first to suggest the idea: a Japanese physicist named Hakutaro Hagiwara of the University of Kyoto had come up with same notion back in May. No matter who thought of it first, at the time it was an almost irrelevant speculation, since a fusion bomb would need a fission bomb to set it off, and nobody was close to building a fission bomb just yet.
TO BE CONTINUED
* THE RISE OF EUGENICS: One of the unfortunate fallouts of the discovery of Mendelian genetics and hard heredity was its influence on eugenic thinking. Richard Dugdale's Lamarckian ideas had allowed him to believe that the likes of the Jukes could be improved by improving their environment, but to a later generation armed with much more solid ideas about genetics, that seemed like nonsense. If the degeneracy of the Jukes was born and bred, they would stay degenerate, generation after generation, and there was no changing it. The notion would be expressed later by the phrase "biological determinism".
The obvious solution was to make sure the Jukes and their kind didn't breed. The Eugenics Education Society of Britain was set up in 1907, with a focus on negative eugenics; an elderly Galton was made honorary president. Galton also provided funding for the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, London, which performed research for the Eugenics Education Society; Charles Darwin's middle son Leonard was its president from 1911 to 1925.
The primary advocate of eugenics in the USA was the Eugenics Record Office at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor genetics laboratory, set up in 1910 by Charles Davenport (1866:1944). Davenport had a strong liking for the sort of hereditary statistics pioneered by Galton. He took it to something of an extreme, writing that the Twinings family was inclined to have characteristics including "broad shouldered, dark hair, prominent nose, nervous temperament, temper usually quick, not revengeful. Heavy eyebrows, humorous vein, and sense of ludicrous; lovers of music and horses."
Later generations of researchers would laugh at his notions, particularly at an analysis of the Herreshoff family of boat-builders, in which it almost seemed Davenport thought there was a gene for boat-building. In any case, in 1915, the office published an updated edition of Dugdale's study of the Jukes. Psychologist Henry H. Goddard (1866:1957) of prominent Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys & Girls in Vineland, New Jersey, summed up the mindset of the updated report by pointing out that if the Jukes were feeble-minded "then no amount of good environment could have made them anything else but feeble-minded." The conclusion of the report was that the likes of the Jukes should be sexually segregated to prevent them from reproducing, or simply sterilized.
Goddard relied on the new "intelligence quotient (IQ)" tests to figure out who the feeble-minded really were. Goddard suggested that a minimum threshold be set at an IQ level comparable to that of a 13-year-old; in his view, those below this level, who he dubbed "morons" (from a Greek word for "foolish"), should not be allowed to reproduce. Goddard was thinking small: other eugenicists believed that persistent criminals and others with antisocial tendencies, as well as those with deformities and other conditions believed to be hereditary, ought not reproduce either.
* The British novelist H.G. Wells (1866:1946) was a true believer in Darwinism. In his novel THE TIME MACHINE, a time traveler visiting the far future encountered two post-human races, the pretty and useless Eloi -- a race of dumb blondes, so to speak -- and the brutish troglodyte Morlocks, evolved (or rather devolved) from the aristocratic elite and the working class of our times respectively.
Wells was a particular enthusiast for eugenics, writing in his 1902 speculative book ANTICIPATIONS about the enlightened leaders of his hoped-for utopian "New Republic" in a way that makes odd reading to a later generation: "They will naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime." As for any lawless sort who just refused to get with the program, the New Republicans would "consider him carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime."
After considering the horrors of unregulated reproduction and suggesting greater supervision of the matter, Wells goes on to ask: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?" Despite their inferiority, he certainly thought there was a place for them in his New Republic: "Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come -- white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test." However, once again there was the problem of those who refused to get with the program: "And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?" He concludes: "They will have to go ... it is their portion to die out and disappear."
Wells made no mention of exactly how their disappearance would come about. One might generously conclude that he meant they would just not make the grade in the Darwinian race for survival and gradually become extinct, but the general tone of Wells' argument suggested that was probably not what he had in mind. Wells is often cited as advocating the murder of the impaired and the extermination of the nonwhite races, but a closer reading shows those assertions to be exaggerations. Unfortunately, they were only slight exaggerations, and the only argument over the matter in hindsight is whether he should have been horsewhipped or hanged. Its seems that the feedback at the time was not overwhelmingly positive either, and Wells never again expressed himself in such extreme terms.
* Wells and his kind, however, were not able to prevail in Britain and pass laws for the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit". Eugenics was never a mass movement anywhere, likely for the sensible reason that most of the citizenry might well wonder if they might end up looking down the barrel of eugenics laws sooner or later, and it was only promoted by an enthusiastic elite. Attempts to drive eugenics laws through Parliament in 1912 and 1913 foundered, with Josiah Wedgwood -- another son of the Darwin-Wedgwood clan -- fighting his own party to block it. The co-founder of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, also blasted the exercise, calling it the notions of an "arrogant, scientific priestcraft."
Elsewhere, eugenics foundered in nations where the Catholic Church was a political power, since the Vatican opposed it as a matter of policy. However, eugenicists were able to prevail in America, with 32 US states passing compulsory sterilization laws. In fact, the US was a pioneer in the legal enforcement of eugenics, with Indiana creating a compulsory sterilization law in 1907, and from beginning to end about 60,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized. Most were inmates of mental institutions, but in some cases the laws covered criminals as well.
* THE FALL OF EUGENICS & SOCIAL DARWINISM: Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1932. Hitler was obsessed with race and racial supremacy, and he was very impressed with the eugenics laws passed in the United States. A sweeping compulsory sterilization law was passed immediately after he came to power in 1933, with over 300,000 Germans sterilized up to 1939.
In that year, Nazi Germany decided to take a more drastic approach. By the spring, Hitler was on a path towards war, and the attitude was that "useless eaters" in institutions ought to be removed permanently to free up resources to take care of wounded soldiers. A formal scheme was set up in which invalids were killed, first by lethal injection and then gassing them with carbon monoxide, with one of the prime movers behind the effort being Dr. Karl Brandt (1904:1948), who would later become Hitler's personal physician. Tens of thousands of invalids were murdered into 1941, when public outrage forced the government to formally give up the program -- though it lingered informally after that. The exercise suggested to the leadership that when the time came to kill the defenseless on a larger scale, as it did within months, it would need to be done with much greater discretion.
The Nazis also adopted positive eugenic measures, matching mates to provide good Aryan babies, but even in this measure their efforts were sinister. During the war, the Nazi occupation of Europe was accompanied by the widescale kidnapping of children who seemed to fit Nazi physical ideals from occupied countries. The program was named "Lebensborn (Font of Life)", with the children then adopted by German families -- sometimes families of dedicated Nazis, but also families who had no idea their adopted child had been kidnapped, having only been told that the child was a "war orphan".
* The irony was that by the time the Nazis were taking to eugenics with a vengeance, enthusiasm for the idea was fading out in the US. During World War I, IQ tests administered to US Army soldiers had demonstrated shockingly low scores, suggesting to eugenicists that something drastic needed to be done. However, many soldiers who had low IQ scores turned out to be heroic and resourceful, suggesting there was less something wrong with them than with the IQ tests and their advocates.
In the 1920s, social scientists such as Margaret Mead (1901:1978) began to strongly question the idea of biological determinism. Thomas Hunt Morgan, having been originally attracted to the eugenics movement, was on the board of the Genetics Record Office but resigned in 1928. The rigorous Morgan had finally decided that eugenics was bogus science -- as well he might, since by that time Davenport was working on studies showing the eugenic perils of race-mixing. The Great Depression that began in 1929 also suggested to the population at large that people might be more prisoners of their circumstances than of their genes. The Nazi abuses helped hammer the nail in the coffin of American eugenics; in 1940 the Carnegie Institute quietly shut down the Eugenics Record Office.
The full savagery of the Nazi eugenics program was not revealed until the trials after the war. Karl Brandt and six others went to the gallows in 1948 for their involvement in the Action T4 program and for other crimes. Eugenics laws remained on the books in the US and elsewhere until the 1970s, but the steam had gone out of the movement well before then. Few were willing to promote eugenics in the postwar period, though the idea did crop up along the margins in science-fiction novels and the like.
Well-known postwar sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein (1907:1988), a great admirer of H.G. Wells, was enthusiastic about the idea, envisioning the selective breeding of geniuses or long-lived humans. Another science-fiction writer, Cyril Kornbluth (1923:1958), published a well-known short story titled "The Marching Morons" in 1951 that featured a future Earth overrun by moronic humans, with a small elite trying to keep things running. With the help of a 20th-century conman revived from suspended animation, the elite finally came up with a grotesque scheme for tricking the masses into neatly killing themselves off and disposing of their bodies in the process. To the arguable extent that Kornbluth was serious about the idea, by the 1950s it was clearly comic-book nonsense, antique notions dressed up as futurism.
The fundamental problems with eugenics remained. There was its tendency to quickly descend into racism: a postwar enthusiast, Nobelist William Shockley (1910:1989), one of the inventors of the transistor, also published studies to show that black folk seemed to be inferior to whites in some regards. Shockley, incidentally, contributed to a eugenic sperm bank, citing his "breeding qualifications" as a Nobelist -- though those who knew him might have cited his disqualifications as an crankish paranoid.
There was also, once again, the difficulty in getting from here to there. A human has about 25,000 genes, with about 6,000 of them being variable, or alleles. These thousands of genes can have complicated effects and their action remains far from completely understood. In addition, human development can be, is, affected by external factors, such as diseases that damage the brain in infancy. Impaired individuals may be as sound genetically as the people around them.
Such considerations make attempts to "improve the race" through selective breeding difficult, to put it mildly. What genes were to be selected and which were to be discarded? On the basis of what information? Once such decisions were made, how would the genes be selected in any sensible fashion through selective breeding? To be sure, there is a way to artificially select for specific genes -- it's called "inbreeding", and it's often used with domestic animals and plants to optimize gross properties such as size or growth weight. However, nobody would suggest it as a good way to breed "superhumans", since in practice inbred human populations tend to be unusually prone to otherwise rare genetic disorders. It's hard to concentrate desireable sets of genes without also concentrating undesireable ones -- when it's even possible to pin down which is which.
Eugenics notions still tend to pop up in various ways -- the concept is too obvious, if it was somehow erased from all the books and memory it would be quickly reinvented -- but they are handled with the extreme and well-deserved caution generally used in dealing with any potentially dangerous booby-trap. Modern genetic testing does allow couples to determine when having kids together is unarguably a bad idea. The rapidly increasing knowledge of genetics also suggests that in time humans will be able to manipulate their genome. These controversial issues will be discussed in more detail later in this series.
* The Nazi regime also did much to put the final nails in the coffin of Social Darwinism. It had always been something of a fraud -- although Darwin made much of the savage struggle for existence between predator and prey, he also understood that natural selection involved the group interdependence of the hive or herd, the symbiotic cooperation of flowers and pollinating insects, and the nonviolent sexual competition of the displays of ornamental birds. It was never a simple question of the undiluted rule of sheer brute force.
Not only did Social Darwinism have an unrealistic view of nature, it was based on an entirely dubious ethical premise, pointed out by the British philosopher George E. Moore (1873:1958) in his book PRINCIPIA ETHICA, published in 1903. As Moore pointed out, Social Darwinism suffered from the "naturalistic fallacy", the idea that what is natural is also ethically correct. This is actually entirely contrary to common notions of ethics, one of the underlying premises of which is the idea that humans ought to behave better than beasts. Social Darwinism, in contrast, tried to set up beasts as role models.
Role models? As the modern saying has it: Mother Nature is a bitch. Darwin expressed the same notion more articulately in a letter in 1857: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!" The naturalistic fallacy, taken to an absurdist extreme, is like saying that since the law of gravity causes things to fall, then in obedience to the law we should go jump off a bridge.
TO BE CONTINUED
* Website additions for the month include:
Updated documents include:
New reviews include:
This last month's online blog entries include items on: communications infrastructure, THE MAKING OF THE FITTEST, voice input on the rise, Estonian oil shale, Swiss bomb shelters, smarter radiation therapy against cancer, Google bashing, Frananglais in Cameroons, reviving the 1918 flu, counterfeiting holographic seals, Moscow casinos, gift card scams revisited, and eyeglasses for poor countries.
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