In the new age that is just beginning the news of Science will loom larger than ever in our lives--so this week meet Dr. Gerald Wendt, the full-time technical adviser of the writers and researchers of our Science news.

A colorful figure he is, too--a stocky, slightly-balding man with a Mephistophelean mustache and imperial (he offered to shave the whiskers off when he came to TIME if we thought them less in keeping with his new career as a journalist than they had been in his former calling as Dean of the School of Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State College).

Twenty years ago he himself made headline news with his own experiments with atomic power, and The Literary Digest carried a long report on how Dr. Wendt had released atomic energy by bombarding tungsten in a vacuum tube at a temperature six times as hot as the sun and transmuting some of the tungsten into helium.

Dr. Wendt had printer's ink in his veins long before he came to TIME, for he put himself through Harvard for his Ph.D. in science by working as a reporter on the Davenport, Iowa, Democrat.

Since then he has been a captain in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I, a chemist in the U.S. Bureau of Mines (where he helped develop a new way to extract radium), research director of both Standard Oil of Indiana and General Printing Ink Corporation, a professor at the University of Chicago, dean at Penn State, and Director of Science and Education for the New York World's Fair.

But all those years he was also busy writing and editing--Matter and Energy, Science for the World of Tomorrow and a six-volume series of textbooks on The Sciences.

TIME'S Science Consultant has a comfortable home in Connecticut, but he seldom gets to see it; when he came to work for us he rented an apartment two blocks from our offices so our researchers and writers could always get in touch with him. Its walls are lined with yards of scientific books and papers, and its closets are packed less with clothes than with new products and gadgets--fabrics made from glass, steaks and biscuits made from yeast, three-dimensional photographs in full color, a portable cosmic ray detector, portraits painted in fluorescent paints that can be seen only in the dark. (One of his prized possessions is a Krazy Kat cartoon --"Why is somebody always trying to smash the poor I'll adam?")

A steady stream of cables, wires, newspaper clippings, press releases and trade journals pours across his desk, and he reads them all for leads for TIME stories. But Wendt is no armchair journalist: he spends some six months of every year piling up as many as 92,000 miles visiting the government, industrial and college laboratories he likes to call "the birthplace of the future."

This week, for example, finds him at the Boeing Aircraft plant in Seattle -- off on the first leg of a journey that will carry him to science centers in every state.

Cordially,

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