Science: Empire & Emperor

The Carnegie Institution of Washington is the biggest scientific empire under one management in the world.* Its expeditions study archeology in Mexico, terrestrial magnetism in Peru, anthropology in Java; but its eight major provinces lie in the U. S.: Mount Wilson Observatory, perched on a mountain top near Pasadena; its division of plant biology, with headquarters at Stanford University; its department of embryology at Baltimore; its department of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island; its geophysical laboratory and its department of terrestrial magnetism at Washington; its nutrition laboratory in Boston; its division of historical research, whose headquarters are in Washington.

Andrew Carnegie—who was a practical man, but believed in pure science, and was especially fascinated by astronomy—set up the Institution in 1902. His total endowment was $22,000,000, since grown to $34,000,000. This week, the Institution completes its 1939 disbursements—from a total budget of $1,519,000.

The new emperor of this well-revenued scientific empire is Dr. Vannevar Bush. Dr. Bush's annual report and the Institution's Year Book are packjammed with accounts of what the empire got for its money in the 16 months ending last November. Samples:

Stars & Galaxies. At Mount Wilson, Dr. Seth Barnes Nicholson discovered two new, tiny satellites of Jupiter—only 19 and 15 miles in diameter—bringing the known total of Jupiter's attendants to eleven (of which four have been known since Galileo turned one of the first telescopes on the big planet). Professor Alfred Harrison Joy plotted the rotation of the Milky Way—the great star galaxy, six hundred thousand trillion miles across, to which the sun and all other visible stars belong. The regions near the centre of the galaxy are rotating fastest, the outermost regions slowest. By measuring the speeds of Cepheid variable stars, Professor Joy found that the region of the sun, two-thirds of the distance from the centre, rotates once every 207,000,000 years.

Mice & Men. Leukemia is a blood disease in which white blood cells proliferate wildly, invade organs and tissues. At the Department of Genetics, Dr. Edwin Carleton MacDowell and his co-workers found that leukemia is not transmitted by a bacterium or virus, that it is a malignant disorder resembling cancer. Moreover, they discovered that some mice could be made immune by shooting into them leukemic cells inactivated by mild heat (115° F.). So far, this work has not produced a cure for leukemia in man, but may lead to one eventually.