All right: modern man was in the New World well before we thought he ought to be. So what? Well, the problem is, how did he get here? The Asian land bridge across the Bering Straits opens and closes periodically with the advance and retreat of the glaciers during Ice Ages, and is the only really credible route (unless you credit the Eskimo with a far older culture and water-faring technology than anyone ever has dreamed of); which of those temporary periods brought men from Asia to North America? There have never been any Neanderthal remains found over here. None at all—and at the moment, the oldest remains of Modern Man we know of seem to be associated with California. Very interesting.
Now back to viral cancer and human evolution. No one knows whether viruses cause cancer, are caused by cancer, or prevent cancer; indeed, each of those statements is true under certain circumstances, and actually it's more confusing than that: certain viruses certainly cause cancers, but those same infectious viruses are actually generated, created, by healthy animals who are themselves more or less immune to that kind of viral cancer. The theory is that these animals have evolved the cancer-virus-creating mechanism as protection—a kind of self-vaccination process. That evolution takes a long time.
The worst offender is the baboon, some species of which constantly contaminate their environment with cancer virus. Fairly obviously, any animal susceptible to that form of viral cancer has got to evolve protective mechanisms; certainly a species that's immune to baboon viral cancer has a better chance of survival.
Now of the great apes, the gorilla and chimpanzee are the most closely related to Man. This is not in dispute on scientific grounds except as part of a general attack on the whole evolutionary hypothesis mounted mostly by religious authorities. (The Catholic and most Orthodox churches have long ago come to accommodation with evolution, but many Protestant sects continue to oppose the theory, and some of their spokesmen have excellent scientific credentials; I don't care to get into that discussion here.) If though you accept that Man, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee all had a common ancestor, as most evolutionary theorists do, the viral evidence becomes important: because the chimps and gorillas, alone of the Great Apes, have evolved defenses against African baboon viral cancer. Neither Man, nor the gibbons, nor the orangutans have done so.
Baboon virus is infectious to Man, New World monkeys, and Asian apes. Incidentally, the common house cat has also come to terms with baboon virus, but not totally, arguing that the cats reached Africa well before Man, but not as long ago as gorillas and chimpanzees.
Dr. Todaro's conclusion is that somewhere after Man, the Gorilla, and the Chimpanzee differentiated—say 12 million years ago—gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors made their way to Africa and stayed there. Man did not, but must have spent nearly the whole of the Pliocene Era, all that time until perhaps a million years ago, in Asia. The data, he says, "suggest that. . . the older Australopithecines found in Africa, though clearly hominids, were probably, therefore, not in the main lineage to Man, but rather, unsuccessful offshoots whose progeny have not endured to the present." (Beneviste and Todaro, "Evolution of type C viral genes," Nature Vol 261:101, 13 May 1976)
Which brings us back to my earlier statement, that if you're looking for a field that needs some really new contributions, anthropology is ready for a new genius.
So much for anthropology; now for something practical like energy. There were two speakers, Dr. Robert Thresher of Oregon State University who is part of an ERDA project on wind energy, and Dr. Moshe Lubin of the University of Rochester on fusion.
There's either not much, or far too much, on wind: that is, there is no startling new information, only a very great number of studies and experiments designed to inch our way forward to a time when wind might provide as much as 5% of our national electric power; and while 5% is respectable and very much worth working on, it's not going to change the world.
The largest windmill ever built was a 1.25 megawatt machine on Grandpa's Knob in Vermont. It was called the Smith-Putnam machine, it worked in the 40's and it was a failure: it couldn't compete economically with coal, and eventually suffered a catastrophic accident. (Windpower experts study "loss of blade accidents" the same way that nuclear engineers study loss of coolant accidents in fission plants.)
There was once a 200 kilowatt machine working on the city island of Gentzer in Denmark; at present that mill is tethered, but the Danes are thinking of refurbishing it. What's important are the numbers: a modern electric plant generates something like 1000 megawatts; the biggest windmill ever made was 1.25 megawatts; and ERDA's big new experimental windmill, the Mod Zero constructed near Cleveland to study stresses and strains of putting all that much metal up in the sty, is a 100 kilowatt device. It takes a lot of windmills to make significant amounts of power, which isn't to say that windmills won't be useful, particularly in remote windy places far from other fuel sources.
Fusion, on the other hand, is generating a bit more excitement. You'll recall from previous columns that fusion has its ups and downs: a few years ago, everyone thought it was the new hope of the future. Last year at the AAAS meeting you could cut the gloom with a knife. The present mood, according to Dr. Lubin (whose work at Rochester is in laser fusion) is one of controlled optimism.
First, nobody has changed their mind: fusion will not produce direct on-line power in significant amounts before the years 2010 to 2020, exactly as I've reported previously.
Second, the national energy plan still calls for about 50% of US baseload electric power to come from nuclear fission by 1990; and thirdly, present uranium reserves cannot sustain nuclear fission power at the rate of consumption for more than forty years.
That's the energy dilemma: we need nuclear power. If you think strip mines are bad now, wait until 1995 without nuclear, when there will be enormous freight trains running about the country carrying nothing but coal; coal-slurry pipelines will cross the deserts and rivers and wild places; black-lung compensation payments will be in the tens of billions of dollars a year. The precipitated flyash and other waste products will accumulate in billions of tons, and must be disposed of somehow, and even then millions of tons of pollutants will get into the atmosphere even with the best cleanup technology. We need nuclear power, which is to say fission power (the only kind we've got) to get to the end of the century: but the nuclear power fuels can't last very long after that.
Two ways to go. One is to make more nuclear fuel, which is to say breeders. I used to be a big enthusiast for the fast breeder, and I'm still willing to argue the case for them; after all, breeder technology, which we invented, is now in use in England, France, and the Soviet Union although we've yet to build a commercial demonstration plant. However, the breeder has its problems. Plutonium is nasty stuff. The nuclear fuel cycle has vulnerable points in it, times when terrorists might be able to get their hands on weapons-grade plutonium, or at least manage to get something that could be chemically refined into a weapon. Nobody, deep down in his heart, loves plutonium (but nobody really loves blacklung and other coal side effects, though we already put up with them).
What would be really marvelous would be a system that lets us invest in conventional Light Water Reactors (LWR's), a proven technology that we've got on the shelf, and operate them without nuclear fuel reprocessing. It turns out there may be two ways to do this.
One is the "slow breeder": Thorium, a relatively plentiful element, can be bred into U-233, which can then fuel conventional reactors. That's relatively expensive power compared to burning natural uranium, but it has the advantage of being a nearly eternal source of energy. Alas, it also requires a new technology, including mining and refining techniques, and it doesn't do anything with the truly monstrous amounts of uranium we've already mined.
There is enough U-238 around in mine tailings, stockpiles, etc., to last the world at least a thousand years. The value of the U-238 already mined in the US is one trillion dollars—a national treasure indeed if we can use it. U-238 won't fission, though, and has to
be bombarded with neutrons to turn it into plutonium—and we've already discussed that. Nobody wants all that plutonium.
But suppose we could make the plutonium safe? Paradoxically, the best way to do that might be to make it more dangerous. That is, nobody in his right mind is going to try to steal spent fuel elements. "Used" fuel rods contain not only long-lived plutonium, but also various fission products, which are short-lived and thus very radioactive. You don't want to get close to them, and if you have the technology to work with things like that, you don't need to go steal your fissionables: that is, it takes something like a wealthy government to be able to make useful weapons out of spent fuel rods. The dangerous part of the nuclear fuel cycle comes when the plutonium has been extracted and is lying about by itself; that can be handled with only moderate care.
So now comes the point. Fusion power systems produce neutrons. (For a lot more on this subject, see "Fusion Without Ex-lax") When neutrons interact with U-238, they turn it into plutonium which can be used to power an ordinary LWR Suppose, suppose we took spent fuel elements, left them in the sealed rods, and inserted them into a "recharging" system? Can we do that?
According to Dr. Lubin, we can.
The current status of fusion research is summarized in Figure 27. You can see there are some problems, but we're moving toward getting useful power from fusion devices. However, as will be pointed out in "Fusion Without Ex-Lax," once you have achieved fusion you still do not have a useful power plant. What you've got is a lot of fast neutrons; they still must be caught and their energy extracted. You've still got to build turbines and generators or a big MHD (magneto-hydro-dynamics and don't worry about it) tunnel, or some other very massive and very costly system for taking neutron energy and turning it into electricity. That can be a very large problem, although it hasn't been emphasized much by fusion enthusiasts.
But—fusion makes neutrons. Neutrons are what's needed to "recharge" spent fuel elements. Spent fuel elements, whether "recharged" or not, are so dangerous that they're safe: that is, they can be shipped about in huge containers stressed to withstand hundreds of g's, and nobody is going to open one of those things. With "recharging" there is never a point in the fuel cycle where weapons-grade material exists; the Pu concentration in a "recharged" fuel element will be around 5% of the oxide (while weapons-grade is about 90% enriched metallic) so that even if a demented terrorist group stole the fuel elements they'd be useless. (Oh, sure, they'd be dangerous, but so would the equivalent weight of TNT or plastique.)
At any rate, the concept is fascinating, and provides one bit of evidence for my basic thesis: that we are not doomed, the Club of Rome is wrong, and mankind has a very good chance at "Survival with Style."
Now, in keeping with the title of this book, let's get far out.
In Blish's classic Cities In Space series one basic element was antiagathic drugs: a pharmacology that cures death by reversing the effects of aging. Now in principle such things must be possible: certainly it must be possible to take a human being at some arbitrary stage of development and stimulate continuous regeneration so the system never "wears out." "In principle" is not practice, though; nobody knows how to do this.
However, Dr. Allan Goldstein of the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, may well have taken several giant steps down that road. Dr. Goldstein, with Dr. Abraham White at Albert Einstein University, some years ago began work on immunological deficiencies in humans. All our textbooks tell us that the thymus gland, that lump on the breastbone, degenerates at about age 40 to 50. The older textbooks say the function of the gland is unknown; bolder spirits even asserted that it was useless, something like a vermiform appendix. That turns out not to be the case.
Human beings have two periods of severe danger: in childhood, before the immune system develops; and in old age, when the immune system deteriorates. In both those times we are vulnerable to various cancers, infectious diseases, and auto-immune disorders. Next, let us plot the levels of thymosin in the blood at various ages. (Thymosin is one of the secretions of the thymus gland.)
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Figure 27
THE CURRENT STATUS OF INERTIAL
CONFINEMENT FUSION RESEARCH
1012 Watts = 1 terrawatt or TW.
Inertial confinement: pellets of Deuterated polyethylene about 100 microns in diameter (1 micron = 1/25,000 inches) are bombarded with particles.
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The results are interesting: as the thymus gland vanishes, which it does until at age 40 only about 10% remains, and at age 80 it is virtually gone, the thymosin level falls, and our susceptibility to diseases of aging—those very ones that were so dangerous to us in childhood before the immune system developed—mounts rapidly.
Dr. Goldstein has used thymosin to treat children with immune system deficiencies. The results have been dramatic. Not many studies have been done: although several children were selected for this treatment, most died before the PDA gave permission for this very new drug to be used in humans.
The obvious next step is to try thymosin in persons age 40 and above, bringing the level up to what it was when they were 20 or so. That may take a while: it is estimated that it would cost $30 million in studies to get aspirin approved by the PDA even given what we already know about it; I wouldn't care to estimate what the costs of getting thymosin approved might be.
However, Dr. Goldstein has pretty well proved that the thymus gland is the "master gland" of the immune system, and that treatments with thymosin have been very useful for very young children with immunity disorders; that thymosin stimulates the development of certain cells which control phagocyte (while blood cell) cancer control activity—that is thymosin stimulates development of T-cells; T-cells somehow detect cancerous mutations and secrete a substance that brings phagocytes to the area; and the phagocytes eat up the cancer cells before they can multiply. Dr. Goldstein is emphatic in stating that thymosin is not the "magic bullet" for curing old age—but he strongly suspects that it can be useful in letting one age gracefully, without many of the pains and ailments so common in those over sixty.
He's also rather excited about all the developments in biochemistry and immunology. We are on the threshold of a new era in medicine. Understanding the immune system will of course make transplant technology much more reliable; may provide the key to cancer, and almost certainly will help keep patients alive long enough for other cancer treatments to be effective; and may well be the means for all of us to stay alive gracefully at least to the biblical three score and ten.
I have always had the view (not original with me) that the human organism is designed to self-destruct shortly after age 40. In a tribal society we ought to have the good grace to die when our children reach child-bearing age, with a few of us hanging around to be tribal elders, but most getting out of the way. Primitive communities which don't have lots of old people have more food for young ones, and their tribes increase. Modern technology changes this; now technology may find a way to overcome the self-destruct mechanism; and I find it no surprise to discover that our immunological master gland quietly vanishes about the time we're forty years old . . .
I wonder if the PDA will ever let physicians give thymosin (which is already used in treatment of cancer patients and young children) to normal people of middle age? I think I could find a number of volunteers.
Stepping a bit further out, alas, we take a step backward. According to Dr. Albert Ghiorso of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, we have not found element 126 and the "magic island of stability." Pity.
Dr. Ghiorso is probably the discover of element 104.1 say probably, because the Russians like to claim they found it first. I haven't space to review all the evidence. The upshot is that an international committee has been appointed, three Soviets, three Americans, and three neutrals. The committee has never met, but it is supposed to decide who, the Americans or the Soviets, gets to name 104. (As of 1978 it still has yet to meet-—JEP)
Meanwhile, Ghiorso
has reviewed the evidence of the Florida State-Oak Ridge National Laboratory collaboration of Cahill and Gentry, which had hoped to find element 126 in primordial samples (the Soviets were searching for it in very old stained glass window leads) and found it wanting. Working from the other direction—if you can't find it in nature, can you make it?—Lawrence Laboratories and the Soviets at Dubna have been bombarding 248 Curium 96 with 48Calcium20 in an attempt to create super-heavies—and found none.
It's a great pity because I've just finished a science fiction novel whose plot depends on the discovery of superheavies; but all is not lost. It's true that we haven't found any natural superheavy elements, and best efforts haven't made any, but the search is still on and they're still theoretically possible.
A Step Farther Out Page 24