Tomorrow

At Chicago's Century of Progress a young chemical engineer who teaches at Yale went about inspecting the welter of exhibits purporting to show what Science had done for Mankind. What he saw did not impress Engineer Clifford Cook Furnas. The festoons of electric lights, he knew, burned with an efficiency of less than 2%. The television was blurry. The loudspeakers were squawky. There were sleek, fast automobiles which converted less than a tenth of their fuel into motive power. Display after display recounted the triumphs of medicine while a preventable outbreak of amebic dysentery in Chicago sickened 721 people, killed 41.

Dr. Furnas, 35, decided to write a book not about the Fair, but about the multitude of questions it did not answer, the problems not yet solved. This week he publishes The Next Hundred Years: The Unfinished Business of Science,* in which he displays a vast store of information in fields other than his own, and in casual, lucid style examines the way in which tomorrow's world may be fashioned. The book is one of two January choices of the Book-of-the-Month Club (see p. 35).

Some matters like television and smoke elimination are already overdue, while others such as the synthesis of living matter and the explanation of old age may not be realized for thousands of years. Thus, despite his title, it is no cocky portrait of 2035 that Author Furnas paints. "We cannot see the goal," he observes, "but we can see the nearer sections of the road leading to it. After all, that is the part that interests us most. . . . We need something better than leather, and a raincoat that lets body moisture out. We need road surfaces that will last at least a century and roofs that will never leak. We need a superconductor for electricity. We need artificial teeth that are as good as natural, . . . paper as permanent as parchment, fabrics and dyes that wind and sun cannot touch, a spring metal that will not fail with fatigue and rubber that will last a century. We need a satisfactory anesthetic for childbirth."

Autopsy surgeons can spot a lifelong city-dweller by the accumulation of soot in his lungs. Effect of this on health remains unknown, but there is no doubt that coal smoke is a costly nuisance. Dr. Furnas foresees cities made clean by complete conversion of coal into fuel gas at the mine, by piping the clean-burning gas to metropolitan centres. Gas distilled from coal leaves a coke residue-which can also be converted by the water-gas process. Currently, artificial gas for heating is a luxury because it takes about $48 worth to equal a ton of coal. Three-fourths of that cost goes for distribution. If it were consumed on a vast scale in factories and homes the cost would be diminished to a point where few people could afford not to use it. Then U. S. grime would be localized in the mining centres which would send out not only fuel by pipeline but electric current by long-distance superconducting cables.

To the old chestnut of what to do for power when oil, coal and natural gas reserves are used up, Dr. Furnas has two answers. One is to burn plants, which every year store up 50 times as much energy as the world uses. Powdered cornstalks blown through pipes would fire furnaces as well as powdered coal, yield 50% as much energy, pound for pound. If cultivation of a huge fuel crop is too much for the soil, despite new synthetic fertilizers, it might be better to imitate the way plants themselves hoard energy from the sun--photosynthesis. With chlorophyll as a catalyst, plants use carbon dioxide and water to store solar energy in formaldehyde. When one or two details are solved, such as finding a synthetic catalyst as good as chlorophyll, plans for the solar power plant can be drawn. It will probably consist of a vast shallow lake of carbonated water which will absorb sunlight passing through to make formaldehyde. The latter would be electrolyzed in chains of thousands of cells, and at electrodes of streaming air would oxidize to give back the original carbon dioxide plus electrical energy at 90% efficiency.

Medical researchers confront a mountain of unfinished business. No one has ever isolated a microbe or filterable virus which could be shown to cause common colds. No one has yet devised a remedy which will cure a cold.

Undeniable boon though it be, insulin is no permanent cure for diabetes. It is a makeshift which, if taken steadily, enables the diabetic body to burn sugar. Its chemical structure has never been determined. It must be injected by needle because if taken by mouth the gastric juices destroy it. Overdoses mean shock, convulsions, death. The next step is a substance better than insulin which diabetics can swallow comfortably, and without danger if they take too much.

Dr. Furnas: "Less than 1/2000 of an ounce of thyroxin is all that stands between Einstein and imbecility." Yet, though thyroxin has been isolated and made artificially, no one understands how it or any other hormone does its work. Of a dozen or more hormones the chemical structures of only three have been definitely determined. When they and the glands that secrete them are more thoroughly understood, the picture arises of having a thyroid adjustment with no more trouble than getting a haircut.

The flint-makers of the Stone Age knew as much about the cause of old age as any Nobel Prizewinner. "If you ask a good biologist if we will ever know what senility is and if we do whether we will be able to control it and thus postpone death indefinitely, he will just look at you over the top of his glasses. . . . The answer is so far beyond the present knowledge that the expert cannot allow himself even to think about it. The biologist does not hold the key to really fundamental knowledge. He must wait upon the work of the biochemist. Meanwhile we keep dying and he writes theses upon the sex life of the earthworm."

--Rcynal & Hitchcock ($3).

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