If You Don't Like Milton

When Public Relations Director Lynn Poole first began talking about his idea around the Johns Hopkins University faculty club, some members of the science departments were frankly dismayed. "Appear on a television show?" they cried when Poole approached them. "Certainly not." Most of them pleaded that they were too busy; others candidly damned television as a pest and a bore.

Nonetheless, Poole tapped enough faculty men who did like the idea to start the Johns Hopkins Science Review. In 1948 the Review opened on Baltimore's local station WMAR-TV. Later, after a CBS tryout, DuMont picked it up for a network spot. By last week, Tuesday-night televiewers in Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, New York and Washington could tune in Johns Hopkins' eminent scientists if they felt like it--and didn't mind missing the last half-hour of Milton Berle.

Poole and Hopkins scientists are tailoring their show strictly for people who don't mind missing mugging Miltie. "There is a strong feeling among our faculty," says Poole, "that scientific advances have been so rapid in the past 20 years that people are confused. They don't know how these advances apply to them, or what they mean." To show what they mean, Poole uses a bag of tricks and props, from jars of Puffed Wheat (to demonstrate how electrons act), to a line of cocked mousetraps (to demonstrate a chain reaction).

Once, to show how fear affects the human body, Poole had a scientist toss a king snake at a woman who had been wired for reaction; the audiometer recorded her leaping heartbeats. Another night, X rays were taken of a woman's lungs, developed and held up for the TV audience to inspect. Review viewers have seen how polluted water looks under a microscope, how plastics are made, chemists trained, and atoms frozen.

Though Hopkins scientists are not always polished performers (Poole once had to give a physicist a sharp kick in the shins to keep him within his time limit), Review no longer has much trouble persuading them to appear. By last week, they were receiving fan letters at the rate of 875 a week, fewer than Berle (who doesn't bother to count them anymore), but enough to suggest that there is a TV audience for something besides comics.

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