Paul Revere of Ecology

BARRY COMMONER is a professor with a class of millions--most of them real students, all of them deeply concerned about man's war against nature. At 52, the impatient microbiologist from Washington University in St. Louis has become the uncommon spokesman for the common man. He personifies the New Scientist--concerned, authoritative and worldly, an iconoclast who refuses to remain sheltered in the ivory laboratory. Air Pollution Expert Lewis Green calls Commoner a "Paul Revere waking the country to environmental dangers." Commoner's students agree.

In the past year, he has given 32 major speeches, written 14 articles, and traveled to numerous U.S. campuses, where he is revered as a voice of reason in a lunatic world. In print and in person, Commoner's message is the same: the price of pollution could be the death of man. Though he is sometimes aggressive and even abrasive, he is endowed with a rare combination of political savvy, scientific soundness and the ability to excite people with his ideas.

Commoner defines his philosophy succinctly: "The scientist has been put into the laboratory by the elaborate labor of society and has the responsibility to do something of value. Isolation is a method of solving a problem, not a way of life." What brought him out of the laboratory in 1953 was strontium 90, a product of atmospheric nuclear-bomb tests then considered harmless. Commoner's restless intellectual curiosity was aroused; he studied all available research on radioactive fallout. What he found frightened him --and he set out to share his concern with others.

In the process, he became a persuasive speaker. He has a formidable memory for facts and a talent for dramatizing them with human case histories. Commoner's efforts to make laymen think about science have irked some of his colleagues who think that a scientist's place is in the laboratory or at the ear of an important Government official. By contrast, he believes that scientific issues should be presented directly to the public, thus encouraging the people to join in shaping social policies.

Commoner is very much a commoner himself. His Russian immigrant parents settled in Brooklyn, where Commoner was born. His father was a tailor until he went blind. As a boy, Commoner roamed the streets and belonged to a block gang. It was the kind of rough-and-tumble existence evocatively portrayed in Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep, one of Commoner's favorite books.

Despite his steel-and-concrete environment, Commoner was fascinated by nature and became an avid biology student at James Madison High School, where he was put into a corrective-speech class to overcome his shyness. On weekends he prowled Brooklyn's Prospect Park for interesting "goop" to study under the microscope. He put himself through Columbia University with a variety of odd jobs, including researching medieval coinage for an economics teacher. He graduated in 1937 with honors in zoology and a faith in the liberal causes of the time, such as the Scottsboro boys and the Spanish Loyalists. Bright and ambitious, he went to Harvard, closeted himself in a laboratory for three years, and left with a Ph.D. in biology.

After service in the Navy during World War II, Commoner chose to teach at Washington University, where he eventually chaired the botany department. His early research was an investigation of the relationship between viruses and genetics that earned him an award from the A.A.A.S. in 1953. Switching from biochemistry to biophysics, he then studied the effect of "free radicals" (molecules with unpaired electrons) on cell metabolism. A research team led by Commoner was the first to discover that abnormal free radicals may be the earliest evidence of cancer in laboratory rats. In 1961, he startled the scientific community by disputing the Watson-Crick theory of DNA and its primary role in heredity. One of his greatest strengths as an ecologist is his holistic approach to science--a belief that wholes rather than parts are the determining factors of living organisms.

In the mid-'50s, Commoner began trumpeting the consequences of ra dioactive fallout. He helped establish the Committee for Nuclear Information, now the Committee on Environmental Information, and conducted a nationwide survey proving that strontium 90 had lodged in U.S. babies' teeth. The 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty was a distinct victory for Commoner and the committee, which had been vilified by McCarthy-era hecklers. Commoner sensed correctly that fallout was only one aspect of something bigger--the impact of technology on the entire environment. Soon he was delving into the "death" of Lake Erie. That led him in ever-widening circles to the problems of sewage, fertilizers, detergents, chemical pesticides, auto pollution and atomic power plants. In the process, his avocation became his vocation.

In 1966, Commoner saw a need to unite physical and social scientists into one cooperative whole focused on the total environment. As a result, he founded Washington University's Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, the first of its kind in the U.S. Commoner is especially pleased with a study of the ecology of ghetto rats that has helped St. Louis health officials eliminate the rodents more effectively. "We could just as well do a study of the fence lizard," Commoner explains, "but that wouldn't be as relevant to human problems."

This insistence on relevance carries over to the classroom. A superb teacher, Commoner is likely to start his popular course in basic biology by asking students from Cleveland: "How is the swimming in Lake Erie?" As the class listens spellbound, he spends the next six weeks deriving most of the principles of biology from that one example. If he cannot save Erie, he has unquestionably turned a notoriously dull subject into one of the liveliest courses around--at least at Washington University.

Unless he is off making another speech, Commoner leaves the office by 6 p.m. and walks a mile and a half to his Mediterranean-style house, where he has a vodka on the rocks with his wife Gloria, a pretty New Yorker who majored in psychology at Oberlin. Gloria once gave him a bicycle to get home faster, but he prefers to walk because "it's a great time to use your head." It also keeps his 5-ft. 11-in. frame trim. Now that his two grown children have left home, he and his wife actually go to movies and the theater. But not much. Commoner dislikes schedules; his workdays seem like a chaos of unorganized activity--at least to outsiders. His view is different: "I've sort of created my own life-style and the main thing is that everything is interrelated. It's like nature and ecosystems --intrinsic complexity."

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