The Most Exciting Game

By Gerald Clarke

The Search for Solutions, PBS, starts June 10,9p.m. E.D.T.

"Science moves, but slowly slowly," complained Tennyson, "creeping on from point to point." Just so, and generations of students have been unwilling to walk the tedious trail that might eventually lead to a career in the laboratory. The loss is society's, and the answer to the horrors of a Three Mile Island or a Love Canal is not clamping down on science, but training more and better scientists. This remarkable PBS series is a welcome attempt to answer that need. Science, it says, is not only the world's biggest game; it is also the most exciting.

As the title suggests, the fascination is in the hunt, in the search for solutions. Problem: a small tribe in New Guinea, the Fore, was threatened with extinction. For unknown reasons, most of its women were being attacked by a nerve disease that began in giggles and ended in death. Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, an American epidemiologist, arrived in 1957 and investigated. He gave the victims every medicine on the shelves. He checked the water in the streams, the soil, even the ashes in the cooking fires. Finally, after months of inquiry, he discovered that when someone died, the Fore buried the corpse, then, as a way of preserving his spirit, his relations dug him up and ate selected portions. Nothing might happen for years, but eventually the women, who were the main participants in this unsavory ritual, started the fatal giggles.

With that information, Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts, uncovered a new kind of pathogen, a slow virus that may be akin to those that cause other degenerative diseases, like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. The solution for the Fore was a government mandate that keeps the dead out of the stew pots; by the end of the century the Laughing Death should be eradicated. Gajdusek's discovery may have brought a step closer a solution for victims of other slow viruses as well.

The three-part series looks into every field. One of the photographic teams visits another scientist, Dr. Ralph Nelson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, who is trying to learn the secrets of hibernation in bears. Unlike humans, who simply waste away when they go without food for long periods, hibernating bears exist for months on only excess fat.

If humans could do the same, they might go for months without eating, and famine might be eliminated. An astronaut 40 Ibs. overweight, says Nelson, could survive three months in ursine hibernation.

The stories and the images flash by in tantalizing bits: a forest of radio telescopes in New Mexico that look like giant desert toadstools; shrimplike creatures that are found under the ice of Antarctica; a microscopic closeup of a sugar cube dissolving, creating a miniature tidal wave in a glass of water. The cameras record the compelling beauty of the scientist's search, as well as its frequent frustration and occasional loneliness.

Produced by Manhattan-based Playback Associates for Phillips Petroleum, this imaginative series has already been distributed to some 10,000 schools and colleges around the country. For those of school age, it should be the best recruiting film ever made. In an effort to show that research is not a club for white males only, there are many examples of women and members of minority groups at work.

For adults, watching it on PBS, the shows may be an inducement to open those dusty old texts and resume reading where they left off. -- Gerald Clarke

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