Elementary

Over cocktails, an eminent U.S. chemist expressed his concern about the dearth of young people interested in scientific careers. A television producer in search of programs overheard him. "If you feel that way," he said, "you should do something about it." So the chemist, Nobel Prizewinner Glenn T. Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium, and the TVman, Program Director Jonathan Rice of San Francisco's educational Station KQED, got together. The result of this collaboration, a series of ten half-hour television lessons called The Elements, will begin in January over the 22 educational TV stations in the U.S.

Chief scriptwriter and star of the show is tall, earnest Chemist Seaborg, who believes that "science should be a part of the repertory of a cultured man." The films were put together with a paltry $44,000 budget by Rice and the staff of KQED, one of the most adventurous educational stations. In most of them Seaborg chats cannily about his favorite subject: nuclear science and the elements, "the building blocks of nature." His props include batches of the nine-odd man-made elements (plutonium, berkelium, etc.), batteries of blinking lights, clicking radiation counters, and black and white checkers to signify protons and neutrons. Seaborg uses them to demonstrate the manipulation of highly radioactive substance. In one film, for example, he extemporizes while a mechanical arm juts out from a wall, picks up a flashlight and directs a beam into a vat of boiling fluid. Another arm lifts a bottle of deadly radioactive fluid and pours a tiny but lethal amount into a test tube. A third mops the floor. Some of the shows deal with historic events in the young life of nuclear physics: in one, the University of California's Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence explains with magnets and diagrams how he invented the cyclotron.

"This series is the biggest thing we've ever attempted," says Rice, who has made some 85 educational shows (including a series with Atom Physicist Edward Teller). "It needed to be done, if only as a historical document." The document was crudely etched. Because both funds and the spare time of modern scientists were at a premium, there were few rehearsals and few retakes. Budgetary corners were sharply cut, e.g., when Seaborg asked for a relief globe he got a weather balloon, and when that burst, made do with a beach ball. But the producers and performers in The Elements were not haunted by the limitations of commercial TV, and therefore were able to build their shows on the conception that their viewers would look because they wanted to be taught and challenged. As a result, The Elements provides leisurely efforts to explain the method as well as the feats of science, along with laymanlike discussions of the structure of the atom, the history of chemistry, chemical processes in industry, the construction of the universe.

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