Scmdo's Amber

Dr. Charles Earl Sando, 45, U. S. Department of Agriculture biochemist, gets rather excitable when he has two cocktails in succession. One evening last week he had three. But it was quite an occasion. Philadelphia's Franklin Institute had opened the first big public showing of Dr. Sando's neat method of preserving biological specimens (and almost anything else, for that matter) in blocks of transparent, synthetic resin.

Entomologists have occasionally found ancient insects beautifully preserved in hunks of amber, which is fossilized natural resin. It occurred to Dr. Sando that if a suitable substance could be found, the same sort of thing could be done deliberately. After much experiment he chose Plexiglas, a mixture of monomers (methyl methacrylate, ethyl methacrylate, etc.) which hardens into a glassy plastic. In blocks of this stuff he immured small dead frogs, a tarantula, the bones of a human hand (see cuts); a rattlesnake's head, complete with fangs, a peacock feather, an iridescent butterfly, a garter snake, flowers, ears of corn, ears of barley. Secretary Wallace, Dr. Sando's chief, keeps a 13-inch ear of hybrid corn, forever young and fair, imbedded in Plexiglas on his desk. Spectators marveled last week at the realistic look of tiny hairs on the tarantula.

Like Secretary Wallace, Biochemist Sando* is an enthusiastic boomerang thrower, and he has made some fine boomerangs from Plexiglas for the Wallace group of boomerangers. The first ones were transparent, and so hard to see that, when they boomeranged, they sometimes bopped the thrower. Now Dr. Sando makes his boomerangs of red Plexiglas.

*The family name was originally Sandow. Dr. Charles is a distant relative of Eugene Sandow, famed oldtime strongman.

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