Frontiers of Science

By Frederic Golden

A whole series of giant leaps for mankind

Perhaps the most dramatic revolution in the way people live was wrought by technology. In 1923 private telephones were still largely playthings of the rich. Many rural areas had no electricity. The automobile was beginning to appear in large quantities. Radio's early enthusiasts tinkered with crystal sets in their living rooms just as today's home-computer buffs hunch over their machines.

If that era's technology seems crude now, science was then, at least in some areas, in a similar state. Learned astronomers argued vociferously over whether our galaxy, the Milky Way, was alone or only one of many islands of stars. In medicine, the first sulfa drugs were unheard of. Physicists, having recently discovered that gravity could warp space and time, were now catching glimpses of an even wilder idea: that at its fundamental level, of atomic particles, the universe was governed entirely by chance. There was not a hint of the powerful forces these ideas would eventually unleash.

Newspaper coverage on science was also primitive. When an imaginative physicist named Robert H. Goddard talked of some day reaching the moon with a new breed of multistage rockets powered by liquid fuel, an editorial in the New York Times noted sarcastically that Goddard didn't know that a rocket had "to have something better than a vacuum against which to react."

Science reporting was a relatively rare journalistic pursuit. Whatever attention scientific matters received in the press was permeated with either an excess of awe or an abundance of naivete, or both. Even so, TIME decided to take science seriously, and its very first issue carried seven stories on the subject. One concerned the proposal of an inventor named

Hudson Maxim, who suggested that for pest control, boll weevil males might be lured into traps with the scent of females of the species. Years were to pass before sex-lure pheromones were taken seriously by entomologists.

Science coverage is not always so perspicacious. Though penicillin was discovered in the late '20s, it did not make big news until World War II. The discovery of DNA, too, took some years to become widely known. Some stories, however, were news from the start.

Within only half a year of its birth, TIME featured the first scientist on its cover: Frederick G. Banting, the Canadian physician who, with Charles H. Best, extracted the hormone insulin from the pancreas and finally provided a successful treatment of diabetes mellitus, until then almost always a killer. Two months later the spotlight focused on the naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, whose hunt for dinosaur and other ancient fossil remains in the Gobi Desert had fascinated the nation. In its second year, long before the id and the superego had become the chatter of the cocktail hour, TIME devoted a cover story to the controversial theories of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

The greatest public interest has always involved science's practical side: how it might improve humanity's lot. Thus worldwide fame struck Jonas Salk (1955), who created the first widely adopted polio vaccine, and Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard (1967), who first successfully transplanted a human heart. But there are also the less celebrated lab workers and experimenters who make such derring-do possible. One such figure whom TIME helped bring into the limelight was Harvard Virologist John Enders (1961), co-inventor of the technique for growing the polio viruses later perfected by the better-known Salk for making his lifesaving vaccine.

Often, however, scientific achievements transcend particular personalities. To mark the invention of oral contraceptives, which probably did as much to revolutionize sexual behavior as the temptation of Eve, TIME simply showed Pills (1967) on its cover.

Subject, rather than any individuals, dominated the treatment of such topics as the advent of genetic engineering, the concern over nutrition and coronary disease, the search for a cancer cure, and perhaps the most exciting breakthrough of all: the creation of test-tube babies.

New technologies, of course, have not always been used so benevolently. Still, the overriding message has been upbeat. Five years before the Soviets jolted the world with the launch in 1957 of Sputnik I, the first man-made earth satellite, a TIME cover discussed the future of space exploration. Since then, space flight has been the subject of more than a score of covers. Even 14 years after man's first moon landing, the description of Neil Armstrong's initial step on the moon from his fragile lunar module ("That's one small step for a man . . .") has the power to quicken the pulse.

In response to contemporary concerns, TIME has steadily enlarged its scientific coverage with the addition of several new sections. The Environment section was launched in 1969. The Behavior section first appeared that same year with the growing interest in psychology and wellbeing. Sexes followed four years later to explore the new complexities of the male-female relationship. The magazine reported the computer's impact on society as long ago as 1965; last year, with a flood of small, personal machines appearing all across the nation, it began a regular section on computers and designated the silicon marvel as its Machine of the Year.

--By Frederic Golden This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.