The Daily Alaska empire., 1950-05-18
T H ESE D A Y s
 - B Y-- GEORGE k. SOKOLSKY
SCIENCE DELIRIOUS


 ton of the University of Virginia is concerned with great problem greater than the Mccarthy Tydings Chavez Budenz fights or even liar ry Truman's whistle-stop trip across the country. It is the eternal problem of what to do with the unfortunate human race.
 The learned professor would like
 our researchers to breed monkeys with human beings to see what would happen. To be scientific he wants to use apes for his pur- pose and to breed them by arti- ficial insemination. This, it would seem to me, is science in its most delirious stage. Don't we have troubles enough without that?
 I must admit that the professor sees some of the troubles ahead. He fears that if the human race got hold of these half and haH folks, they would use them as slaves. Apparently, he is certain that the ape-men would not use humans as slaves. The professor is opposed to slavery, but not to the debasement of human beings.
 For instance, does he not realize that after a while, some politician would demand social security for the half -and-half folks and that liberals would want to be married to them to prove their total lack of prejudice? And suppose the half-men decided to discriminate against the aboriginal whole hu- mans. Horrible thought, but not very original.
 had never heard of Dr. s. w. Britton before, but he must be a big-shot in the scientific world because he made a report to the National Academy of Sciences, which is a professorial trade asso- citation where they exchange ideas, methods, etc. However, no one got terribly excited about it, partic- ularly not the apes, who probably would go on a strike if forced to produce a half-human progeny. The apes may not like it at all When the apes look at some of those who govern us, they undoubtedly recall Alexander Woollcott's remark about the most interesting place in Wash ington being it's zoo.
 Science for sciences sake is very much like art for arts sake or politics for politics sake-it can move from confusion to confusion without purpose. It is trial and error, hit or miss, without thought of consequences. Admittedly, the benefits of scientific research have been great ard valuable, but if the ultimate of this activity is the des- truction of the human race, either by bomb that would throw the crust of the earth into it's atmos- phere or the denaturing Of man into lower order of ape by inter marriage and assimilas,on-then science needs restraint by morality. There is the basic problem of our age: The restoration of moral criteria
 And that essentially is why our scientists are beginning to be so frightened by their own products. They know that their greatest work today-the transmutation of matt ter-produces destruction. WhiIe, on the one hand, human life is being prolonged through scientific research, the same process is pro- ducing method for the totl annihilation of the human race, and for that matter, of everything.
 Fortunately, no one has yet pro- duced a hydrogen bomb, but on paper it seems possible, and both the United States and Soviet Rus sia are engaged in a race to man.
 ufacture it. What such a bomb
 could do to the human race is
 as yet only within the realm of
 the imagination, and whichever
 nation first succeeds in producing
 it will reduce all others to it's win,
 no matter how savage.
 Maps have been produced to show the range of destruction, but
 those maps only deal with the
 earth. What could be the effect
 of such an explosion on the uni
 verse? What would happen to
 climate if even an atom bomb, to
 say nothing of a hydrogen bomb.
 were exploded on the polar cap. Would we loose the ice of the Arctic so that icebergs and glaciers moved southward, turning our world into new Ice-Age? Would We be flooded by the immense
 downflow of water from the Arctic area, as the increase of the ice- flow met the warmer areas too soon?
 There is a balance in nature which man challenges at his peril This balance is heinz challenpad