Largest Laboratory

In the halls and on the terraces of Mexico's modernistic, new Teachers College, two Brazilian scientists were doing the ablest lobbying job of the UNESCO conference. Their project: a scientific study of the Amazon basin.

Many a delegate thought that the Amazon could wait, but Scientists Paulo de Barredo Carneiro, biologist, and Carlos Chagas, biophysicist, were in no waiting mood. To fellow delegates, they kept hammering their points. Sample: "If [the Amazon] could be brought into food production, the world would be able to support its population." Last week they won. UNESCO set up an Amazon international institute, and appropriated $100,000 to get it going.

Science International. Actually, UNESCO's $100,000 was just a drop in the institute's bucket. Brazil would ante up $700,000 during the project's first year. Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and the Guianas, which border the Amazon basin, would kick in too. The "real progress," as Dr. Carneiro pointed out, was that the institute would be "the world's first truly international scientific undertaking."

It was not until 1850, three centuries after the Amazon's discovery by a Spaniard, that white men sailed up it to exploit and trade in this jungle area that is twice as vast as the Mississippi basin. Few stayed. Twice the Amazon has been tapped--by the rubber boom at the turn of the century and the mad rubber hunt during World War II. The first left a high-domed opera house at Manaos and the 226-mile single-track Madeira-Mamore Railway. The World War II boom established some of the beginnings of modern sanitation and medicine in a vast wilderness inhabited by some 200,000 people, most of them Indians.

Atabrine & DDT. Soon UNESCO's scientists will go to Belem, at the Amazon's broad mouth, to start their institute work. As the program gets under way, they will move upstream, analyzing the soil, trying to find out what man may do with it and himself in the heat and rain. Here & there they will come upon other pith-helmeted, mosquito-booted men laden with atabrine, DDT bombs, boxed instruments, and closely guarded notes. These are the geologists of the major oil companies looking for petroleum lands. Ever since Peru's Ganso Azul (Blue Goose) field proved that the Amazon had oil (TIME, April 22, 1946), surveys have gone discreetly ahead. What the oil geologists have found they do not say.

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