Environment: Paul Revere of Ecology

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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.