Red Wonders

Today's foremost Russian scientist is grouchy, white-whiskered, 86-year-old Ivan Petrovich Pavlov whose research on the salivary glands won him a Nobel Prize in Medicine (1904) even before his greater work on the conditioned reflex in dogs. Only Nobelist in the sciences Russia has had for three decades, old Dr. Pavlov does as he pleases, can bark with impunity: "I deplore the destruction of cultural values by illiterate Communists" A government of Communists gently pooh-poohs him, hands him an institute, a pension, endowments.

Yet the doings of a Pavlov and others like him who prefer to work in supercilious obscurity are not calculated to stagger the Russian-in-the-street and confound the Capitalist world. In a nation of peasants which is so excited by the parachute that it is training millions to jump, men with spectacular ideas are popping up by thousands. The U. S. S. R. has a guild of inventors whose membership in the Moscow region alone is reported around 30,000. Down to the last man they are eager to show Joseph Stalin what they can do. What they lack in formal training they make up for in imagination. Thus it is that Russia is flooded with garish science news and the Soviet citizen has hardly time to catch his breath after one marvel before another is upon him.

Recent Red Wonders:

Dr. M. I. Kuslik of the Leningrad Surgeon's Society astounded his colleagues with the news that he had removed ? second toe from the foot of a patient who had lost a forefinger, grafted it to the mutilated hand. Already, said Dr. Kuslik last week, the patient could wiggle the transplanted toe.

P: Scientists told off to help fishermen in the Barents Sea invented electric fish nets. The scheme is to lower a network of wires into the water from the fishing boats, pass a current through the water from wire to wire, creating an electric wall which the fish will not pass. The catch is brought in by opening a rift in the electric wall through which the fish swin into an ordinary net.

P: A professor in the Ukraine invented an electric eye to enable the blind to read ordinary books. A photoelectric cell scans the letters, converts them into electric impulses which make a specially constructed desk vibrate. The sightless reader is expected to put his fingertips on the desk, translate the vibrations.

P: A designer named S. Valdner built a model of a two-car streamlined train to run on an overhead single-rail track. The cars are carried on each side of a stout frame which holds the rail at its centre. Designer Valdner affirmed that two big propellers, each powered by a 530-h.p. Diesel engine, would drive his contraption 185 m.p.h.

P: Nearing completion in Moscow is a super-safe stratosphere balloon made of waterproof muslin. If something goes wrong at high altitude, the bag is designed to spread into the shape of a parachute, land men and equipment without damage.

P: Visitors to the Moscow Zoological Garden were permitted to look at turtles, snakes, lizards and bats which had been frozen for four months and warmed back to life. The new technique involves quick freezing of the outside of the creature, slow penetration of the cold to the vitals. While sudden or "one-sided" warming was fatal, gradual and uniform warming brought successful revival.

P: At Leningrad's Institute of Experimental Medicine, half of a monkey's blood was drawn off. While the animal was kept alive by artificial respiration, the blood was filtered and chemically purified, piped back into its owner.

P: At Moscow's All-Russian Wool Institute, a "depilatory'' was developed which, when mixed with a sheep's food, loosens the wool, saves the expense of shearing, increases the yield, does not harm the sheep.

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