Savants in Chicago

"There is nothing really new in my lecture," said tart, spry little William King ("Bill") Gregory to inquisitive newshawks last week, "but in order to get into the newspapers you have to say something that everybody has known for two or three thousand years."

And when Paleontologist Gregory, 60, of Columbia University and Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History delivered the only public lecture at the National Academy of Sciences convention in Chicago, he again proved that a dramatic simplification of an old scientific idea makes good listening for laymen. His theme was "The Transformation of an Organic Design," and the design he referred to was a longtime favorite of Nature's, the "self-moving grappling bridge."

Consider, said Dr. Gregory, the horse. The legs are like towers at each end of a bridge, the backbone is an arched cantilever system suspended from the towers, the chest and abdomen constitute the "live load." At the front end is an apparatus which can be raised and lowered like a derrick (the neck), and which car ries a grappling mechanism like a clam dredge or steam shovel (the mouth). Thanks to muscles which act as motors, tendons which transmit tension and skeletal parts which serve as levers and fulcrums, the tower-like legs may change into powerful jointed springs which propel the whole structure forward.

The horse is thus a successful animal partly because it is a fine piece of natural engineering. Man is a grappling bridge upended on its rear towers. This experiment in posture has been fairly successful, although strains and maladjustments resulting from the perpendicular positions are still visible in the human makeup. Among the apes, gibbons run on two legs; gorillas and chimpanzees can take a few upright steps without using their arms as crutches. These apes, "living fossils" which have changed little in 12,000,000 years, have failed to adjust their centres of gravity to the upright posture.

"Whether or not," Dr. Gregory concluded, "the self-named Homo sapiens will listen to the small voice of comparative anatomy and paleontology, the facts plainly indicate that the skeletons of both the horse and his rider, however much they differ in details, are but divergent modifications of the old grappling bridge type. . . . This elementary but far-reaching fact, which was well understood by Buffon, Lamarck, Darwin and all later evolutionists, is to this day ignored by the vast majority of mankind, including the writers of many textbooks on human anatomy."

Noteworthy discussions of the three-day session:

Telescope Robot. Photographing the spectrum of a distant star, even in Mt. Wilson's giant telescope, may take four or five hours. One of astronomers' most tedious chores is to sit on a lofty, cramped perch at the eyepiece during these long exposures, in order to keep the cross-wires of the telescope centred exactly on the star image. Beautifully accurate as it is, the drive mechanism which swings the telescope along with the star's westward movement cannot be synchronized with absolute perfection. Atmospheric disturbances also may dislodge the star image from the cross-wires. Last week astronomers Albert E. Whitford and G. E. Kron of the University of Wisconsin announced satisfactory preliminary tests of a robot which, they hope, will relieve stargazers of this dull task. Light from the star is split by a reflecting .knife edge so that two beams fall on a photoelectric cell. If in the telescope the star image gets off the cross-wires, the two beams become unequal. The proper adjustment is then made by a mechanism in which the photoelectric current is amplified one quintillion times by a Zworykin electron multiplier.

Age into Youth. The rule that what is young must irrevocably grow old is almost universal in Nature. But not quite. The bones of animals generate a young cell called an osteoblast, which becomes a middle-aged cell called an osteoclast, which becomes an aged cell called a fibroblast, which ultimately dies. Dr. Franklin C. McLean and his University of Chicago co-worker fed parathyroid extract to aged fibroblasts, turned them into baby osteoblasts.

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