Biologist's Bug

A longtime protege of Nobel Prizeman Thomas Hunt Morgan and now a famed geneticist in his own right, Dr. Calvin Blackman Bridges of Carnegie Institution of Washington breeds thousands of fruit flies in glass jars, studies their variations and heredity mechanisms under the microscope. Dr. Bridges knows a great deal about genes, the infinitesimal control switches of heredity, and he has detected in the chromosomes of his little insects patterns that may consist of the genes themselves (TIME, March 9). In Los Angeles last week photographers snapped the biologist standing beside a strange three-wheeled automobile. Designer and builder of the automobile was none other than Dr. Calvin Blackman Bridges.

This car, which Dr. Bridges calls "Lightning Bug," looks something like the Dymaxion designed by Architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (TIME, June 12, 1933), but is smaller and squattier. It is almost perfectly streamlined, even the license plates and tail-lamp being recessed into the body and covered with Pyralin windows flush with the streamlining. There are no door handles; the doors must be opened with special keys. Dr. Bridges pronounced the Lightning Bug crash-proof and carbon-monoxide-proof. "My whole aim," said he, "was to show what could be done to attain safety, economy and readability in a small car."

Newshawks discovered that for months, when he got tired of looking at fruit flies, the geneticist had retired to a garage, put on a greasy jumper and worked on his car far into the night, hammering, welding, machining parts on a lathe. Now & then, the foreman reported, Dr. Bridges hit his thumb with a hammer. Once he had to visit a hospital to have removed some tiny bits of steel which flew into his eyes. It was Calvin Bridges' splendid eyesight which first attracted Dr. Morgan's interest in him when Bridges was a shaggy, enthusiastic student at Columbia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.