During the past two centuries, Americans have demonstrated that they, their form of government, and their institutions and institutional flexibility are well suited to the invention and implementation of science and technology. No people has originated more of the world's technological accomplishments, and no country has more institutional momentum with which to continue to lead the advance of human civilization.

At the same time, Americans have fallen victim to a number of ancient scourges which demonstrate that we are no more than an ordinary people who have risen to extraordinary opportunities. Oppressive, enslaving taxation; extreme moral decay, especially within our institutions of higher learning; and the emergence of a vast welfare class of nonworkers and pseudoworkers have sapped our national strength and are gradually slowing the great flywheel of American industry.

In addition to the personal talents, character, and faith of our individual citizens and those from other countries by whom we are continuously reinvigorated through immigration, we have two great resources from which to draw protection from these scourges. First, the ongoing advance of technology continues to yield surprising new capabilities such as those from the current computer revolution. Second, the accumulated wisdom of the most outstanding of our people is stored and available in our books and other literature.

One of the greatest of these books was written by a 40-year-old black man (he would have said "coloured'') who lived the first few years of his life on the dirt floor of a slave cabin and who, freed from slavery at the age of six at the end of the Civil War, was put to work in a salt furnace and then a mile underground in a West Virginia coal mine. Yet, before he was 40, he (and three wives, two of whom worked themselves to death beside him) had built the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, a university with 66 buildings and 1,400 students, which had received such world-wide acclaim that the President of the United States and his Cabinet had traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, to honor it. Many people, of course, have fought their way from humble beginnings to great accomplishments. It is not the Horatio Alger story in this book nor the racial aspect and post-Civil War setting that bring tears to the eyes of the reader. It is the great depth of Booker T. Wash-ington's wisdom concerning the specific knowledge, ethics, and actions that were needed by his people in order to permanently free them from all forms of slavery and prejudice.

As we look at America today, we can see that only part of the black people bear the legacy of Booker T. Washington. Many others have fallen victim to the traps that he worked so hard to teach them to avoid. Moreover, a substantial part of the white population has fallen into those same traps and is now similarly enslaved.

In fact, such a large part of our population is currently enslaved and unproductive that America's leadership in science and technology is weakening, and our future as a nation of opportunity, high living standards, and reasonable personal safety is insecure. To explain why, Booker T. Washington would only need say, "read my book.''

Science and technology do not exist in a vacuum. They must be melded with people - ordinary people with ordinary strengths and weaknesses - or they will be lost.

The greatest weakness that Booker T. Washington saw in his newly freed people was the tendency to try to "live by their wits'' rather than by productive work. He taught that any man who produces something that truly enriches the lives of others will earn their respect and admiration. Whether that man is producing food, bricks, or furniture in 19th Century America or food, computers, or electrical energy in the 20th, it is skill and productivity that earns the cooperation of others and melts away their human prejudices.

While many blacks have learned this lesson and thereby earned their way out of slavery to a prosperous, free life, a substantial part of America's white population has forgotten these precepts and sunk into lives of slavery and prejudice with some members of other races.

Literal armies of bureaucrats, "decision makers,'' paper shufflers, and welfare recipients of various types make up a very large part of the American "work'' force. These people do not produce - they only consume, and they are continually in the way of those who are still trying to produce. Moreover, they do not have the respect of productive, useful people. They return this lack of respect with envy and subliminal hatred even of those who ultimately feed and clothe them.

A man who does not do useful work - even if he is paid very handsomely for his nonwork - knows that this is so, and he gradually loses his self-respect. He comes to hate and even fear those upon whom his life actually depends. How long will they continue to trade him something for nothing?

Science and technology are the modern tools of those who make the world work - those who do things. Moreover, these tools have made each individual person more and more productive and thereby widened the gap between the doers and the others.

It is a terrible thing to be physically enslaved and unable to do things with your talents because you are constrained. It is far more terrible, however, to be so enslaved by lack of ethics and ability that you cannot do anything of value even if you are physically free. This sort of slavery twists the human mind to hatred.

American technology will not have a bright future unless this sort of hatred is diminished. The mob of welfare recipients at a demonstration against nuclear power or Northwestern logging; the faceless bureaucrats who add years to productive undertakings; and the edu-crats who turn our schools into moral sewers for social engineering rather than places to hone the skills of our children's minds all have much in common. They are populated by people who have learned to "live by their wits'' rather than by their personal worth.

We do not respect them because they are of negative value to our lives. They do not respect us because we seem to them to be an un-derclass that is not clever enough to live by its wits.

We are not directly enslaved, but we are entangled in chains such as onerous taxation and regulation created by the unproductive. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, an autobiographical voice from the distant past, points in a direction that we all need to travel.

 

In a series of publications several decades ago, Roger Williams articulated the fact that each individual person is biochemically and physically unique - to a much greater extent than is usually realized. (See, for example, Biochemical Individuality by R. J. Williams, Wiley, New York 1957). In addition to intrinsic genetic differences, the different paths that we travel in life generate differences. Ultimately, the degenerative processes which accumulate and eventually end our lives produce even more differences - differences that we would like to eliminate or, at least, postpone.

Our health is, in part, a function of our biochemical environment. Since we are each unique, it is likely that the ideal chemical conditions for each of us are also unique. Even these "ideals'' are individualized, since the aspirations, for example, of a long-distance runner are different from those of a physicist or an expectant mother. If all three happened to be biochemically identical, the goals of each would probably be optimized by different chemical environments.

This applies to both our internal and external chemical environments. A farmer in Iowa might differ from a farmer in India. One might prefer DDT on his crops alone, while the other would apply it also to the walls of his home in order to prevent malaria.

The wonders of modern chemistry have enabled us to synthesize a great many of the chemicals that affect our lives such as vitamins and hormones. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides have also enhanced the efficiency of modern farming to such an extent that we have a wide variety of foods available with different chemical compositions. Medicines are, of course, another chemical benefit.

The trick is to know how much of each substance to introduce into our own individual environments to achieve optimum health. Moreover, this is not a question that any of us can postpone. We are living now in a chemical environment over which we have a substantial amount of control. We do not have the ability to delay our lives and live them at some future time when more knowledge is available.

Everyone, therefore, guesses. Even the drug addict guesses, although his guess is obviously wrong. Obviously wrong also are the guesses of ignorant people who decide to fear that which they do not understand and seek escape from "chemicals.'' The editorial "How to Survive the Perils of Eating'' by Thomas H. Jukes, The FASEB Journal 9, pp 991-992, August 1995 gives current examples of this.

The stakes are high as is illustrated in Figure 1. As Jukes points out, life expectancies are steadily rising in the United States. This is happening largely as a result of modern chemistry. Still, millions of lives are unnecessarily shortened as a result of limitations in our abilities to optimize our chemical environments.

Figures 1 to 7 are from the paper "Quantitative Measurement of Human Physiological Age by Profiling of Body Fluids and Pattern Recognition'' by A. B. Robinson and L. R. Robinson, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development 59, pp 47-67 (1991). Figure 1 shows the life expectancies (violent deaths omitted) of two experimental groups of American men - one group in their 20s and the other in their 50s and 60s. Notice the large group of young men who will be outlived by the older men and the large group of older men who will die long before some of the others. Moreover, there are many years of deteriorating health and suffering associated with most of these early deaths.

In order to intelligently adjust a chemical system, one needs quantitative information about that system and a quantitative evaluation of the results of each adjustment. This is especially true of the biochemistry of a human being - a system so complicated that it cannot (during our lifetimes) be directly and entirely understood.

It is ironic, therefore, that today there are tens of millions of people sitting at computers that are providing them with a river of information about the outside world but which are providing no information at all about the individual health and biochemical well-being of these people. Yet, measured by their own self-interest, this internal biochemical information is far more important than most other information.

Suppose, for example, that you have just read the popular book The Melatonin Miracle by W. Pierpaoli, W. Regelson, and C. Colman, Si-mon and Schuster, 1995, have examined some of the underlying research papers, and have decided to adjust your melatonin level. The book contains some guesses about dose as a function of age, but how much is best for you individually? More importantly, how are you going to know whether or not the dose you decide to take has a positive or negative effect on your health? (We could just as well have used vitamin C in this example or any one of the thousands of other low-cost chemical modifications that are available to most Americans.) Melatonin has been shown to reverse and retard some of the degenerative effects of aging in mice. Will it do the same for you? Since the effects of such systemic changes are usually slow and people prone to self experimentation usually try numerous supplements, most mela-tonin users will never know whether or not it has helped them and most will discontinue it eventually. Few will ingest an ideal dose.

If, however, your personal computer had been daily measuring and tracking the physiological age of you and your family members by means of biochemical indicators in your urine or breath, you could obtain objective information about your melatonin experiment. If it slows your rate of aging or diminishes your personal probability of serious diseases, then the computer could help you adjust the dose for an optimum effect. If not, then you could move on quickly to something else.

Also, even though there is substantial biochemical individuality, there are many similarities between different people. As experience is accumulated, your computer should be able to direct you toward the most promising modifications.

Aging occurs slowly, but death-dealing conditions focus one's attention immediately. Each of us has his own examples. A close friend of ours died of lung cancer - metastasized from colon cancer which could have been surgically stopped. A family member died of hemorrhagic pancreatitis, also without the chance that surgery could have provided. In these cases, surgery might have saved their lives, but they did not know that they were ill. A computer interfaced to look daily at their biochemical profiles could have provided that knowledge.

Are such interfaces available in the marketplace? No. Could current technology provide them to the marketplace at prices comparable to good laser printers? We are sure that the answer is yes. These interfaces will not be provided by the deadwood of tax-financed inquiry and they will probably not be built by those parts of the medical industry whose executives count their profits in human suffering, but they will certainly be built by free enterprise. The only question is whether or not they will be built in our lifetimes.

We believe that a peripheral device for the personal computer of about the same size and cost as a laser printer can be built which has the capability of quantitative measurement of 50 to 100 substances in a sample of breath or urine. All of the software required to interpret this information was written and tested many years ago (see references in Robinson and Robinson paper mentioned above). The building of a prototype of this peripheral device is a primary goal of our work at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Even one or two substances can contain substantial amounts of information. Figure 2 shows, for example, the successively increasing diagnostic coefficients as a function of age in fruit flies calculated from only two substances. Figure 3 shows the summed values of only two substances in the casual urine of men as a function of age, while Figure 4 gives age diagnostic coefficients calculated from 15 human urinary constituents - 8 of which increase with age and 7 of which decrease.

In the case of Figure 4, quantitative measurements of 15 substances in casual (ordinarily provided without special instructions or requirements) urine samples have been compressed by calculation into a one-dimensional parameter of the sort illustrated by Figure 5. It is these one-dimensional compressions that guide decisions.

It is important to recognize that the substances measured in these experiments did not include any special selection based on aging. Approximately 30% of the substances in human urine are moderately to strongly age correlated, so virtually any random selection of metabo-lites can lead to the same result. Since this is true of many aspects of our systemic health, it is to be expected that a single computer peripheral could evaluate most conditions of interest.

Figure 6 illustrates a simple use of this technique. From the diagnostic coefficients from Figure 4 scattered along the life remaining axis in Figure 5, the men can be classified as young or old by choosing an arbitrary point and calling everyone to the left "young'' and everyone to the right "old.'' By using all possible arbitrary points, Figure 6 can be constructed. The curved line shows a theoretically perfect result (taking into account the overlapping life expectancies), while the stepped line is from the experiment. Imagine that we were instead classifying colon cancer or pancreatitis.

Returning to our problem with the melatonin pills, the daily quantitative measurement of your own physiological age would give you and your computer a longitudinal baseline which takes into account your own biochemical individuality and rate of aging. After you have been taking melatonin for a while, the computer could simply calculate the probability that it is affecting your physiological age. If the results are pleasing, you could vary the dose to find an optimum.

This is not science fiction. We originated part of this field of inquiry and have worked in this area for many years. These machines can be built now, and they eventually will be built. It is then that the computer will be a truly interactive tool for the benefit of ordinary people.

Through optimum nutrition; through hormone adjustment with age; through early application of procedures such as surgery; and through other techniques - guided by the computational power of microchips that track our personal health within our own homes (entirely independent of the deadwood of government and medical bureaucracy), our aging curve will eventually improve as illustrated in Figure 7.

How much can we expect to adjust our fate by the intelligent use of chemistry? Many years ago, I designed a series of experiments on cancer in mice which were then carried out over a two-year period by technicians under my direction and extended later by F. C. Westall. (See Robinson, A. B., Hunsberger, A., and Westall, F. C., Mechanisms of Aging and Development 76, pp 210-214 (1994). The results of one part of those experiments (increased rate of cancer growth with vitamin C supplements) caused so much trouble that Linus Pauling went ballistic and even now, after his death, his relatives are still publicizing myths about the incident.

This controversy over vitamin C obscured, however, the real result. In experiments on squamous cell carcinoma in 1,846 mice using about 30 different diets, we were able to vary the rate of growth of cancer over a 20-fold range by diet alone. Obviously, the possibility of giving each cancer victim (or potential victim - which includes us all) a tool for quantitative health measurement to guide his own nutritional self-experiments should be turned into a reality.

 

The Uranium Information Centre Newsletter, September-October 1995, available from GPO Box 1649N, Melbourne 3001, Australia, reports about nuclear fuel rod disposal. In Sweden, used nuclear fuel rods are "waste'' and are put in underground storage. In France, the rods are raw material and go to a reprocessing facility that makes new fuel rods. In America, they go nowhere. The federal government assumed responsibility for them in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. In 1994, the Department of Energy announced that a waste repository was at least 16 years from completion, although over half of the $10 billion dollars paid into the waste fund by consumers has been spent - to finance the federal deficit.

This dishonesty has now prompted action by the Louisa County, Virginia, board of supervisors, who have asked the State of Virginia to place future consumer payments in an escrow account if the federal government fails to provide storage in 1998 as previously promised.

The mandated wastefulness of keeping reactor grade plutonium combined with other materials and stored in repositories was originated by the Carter Administration. Most countries recognize that this wastes both fuel and storage space, so they do not follow this policy.

In another development, Nuclear Energy Insight, October 1995 available from the Nuclear Energy Institute, Suite 400, 1776 I Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006-3708, reports that an effort is now being made to use bacteria to clean the walls of concrete structures contaminated with nuclear waste. Since only the top few millimeters is usually contaminated, sulfuric acid excreted by the bacteria can dissolve away the contaminated layer and avoid storage of the entire structure as nuclear waste.

• Outcome Based Education by V. M. Fareed in Issues & Views: An open forum on issues affecting the black community, Winter 1994, available from P. O. Box 467, New York, NY 10025, describes the National Education Association program that is being installed throughout the United States under the titles of "Master Learning,'' "Outcome Based Learning,'' and "Outcome Based Education.'' Fareed writes, "In the ideal OBE classroom, less content (basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic) is taught, while teachers encourage students to concentrate on developing specific values, attitudes and 'orientations.' The objective is to control the minds of the students and to nullify their ability to think independently. The child is coerced to conform to the correct attitude on particular subjects or issues as desired by the program administrators. Otherwise, the child risks retention at the same grade level in the next school year.
  
  "'Learning outcomes' are designed to affect the student's thinking on everything - from environmental issues to social issues to notions about his own self-worth. In other words, the children must adopt the value (worth) of themselves, that program administrators determine is correct - and they must do the same for over 50 learning outcomes.
  
  
• "OBE is designed to 'level' all children to a common denominator of learning and beliefs. Sound knowledge of a subject is not considered as important as the student's 'social attitudes.' In effect, OBE is a form of attitudinal indoctrination.'' This phase in the destruction of tax-financed schools and the minds of students who attend them parallels the situation on university campuses where politically incorrect remarks can result in expulsion. At first, the social engineers just combined their wares with academic subjects thereby diluting them. Now, they are beginning to demand that those with "incorrect attitudes'' be given failing academic grades.
  
  
• The Deweese Report 1, p 5 (1995) available from 14140-L Parke Long Court, Chantilly, VA 22021, reports that the following pledge was read in tax-financed schools throughout America, presumably on "Earth Day'' - "I pledge allegiance to Planet Earth, mother of all nations; and to the infinite universe in which she stands; our planet, among millions, expressing truth and unlimited possibilities for all!''
  
  
• Oleg Khabarov of the Russian Academy for the Protection of Life has proposed a spaced-based laser defense system - against CFCs. Russia is complaining that it does not have $600 million to eliminate CFC emissions from its factories. The laser system on 30 to 50 satellites would, according to Khabarov, ionize oxygen and produce atmospheric ozone at a ten-year cost of $100 billion.
  
  Perhaps we should buy just one of these satellites and aim it at the seasonal, naturally occurring ozone reduction area over Antarctica. We could pay for the satellite with the no-longer-needed funds that are currently being used to study Antarctic ozone. Since ozone over the rest of the earth is not being significantly reduced, the whole issue would go away, and we would get to keep our refrigerators.

• Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington and 130 other good books in the Self-Teaching Home School curriculum available on six CD-ROMs from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, P. O. Box 1279, Cave Junction, OR 97523. The image files on these CDs are identical to the original books when viewed on a monitor or printed with an inkjet or laser printer.
  
  
• CO2 and the Biosphere: The Incredible Legacy of the Industrial Revolution by Sherwood B. Idso, October 1995, a monograph with 361 references published by the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108.
  
  Access to Energy has described the remarkable work of Sherwood Idso and his colleagues in several past issues. Atmospheric fertilization by carbon dioxide is sharply increasing the world-wide abundance of plants (and the animals that depend upon them). Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is probably the most beneficial environmental phenomenon in human history.
  
  
• "Ozone Variations and Accelerated Phaseout of CFCs,'' testimony by Sallie Baliunas before the U. S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, September 20, 1995 available from the George C. Marshall Institute, 1730 M Street, N.W., Suite 502, Washington, DC 20036-4505

• "The Ozone-CFC Debacle: Hasty Action, Shaky Science'' by S. Fred Singer, Technology: Journal of the Franklin Institute 332A, pp 61-66 (1995) and testimony by S. Fred Singer before the U. S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Sep-tember 20, 1995 available from The Science & Environmental Policy Project, 4084 University Drive, Suite 101, Fairfax, VA 22030-6812.
  
  Drs. Baliunas and Singer summarized the evidence concerning the possible decreased ozone in the atmosphere and concomitant increase in UV light at the earth's surface that is claimed to result from CFCs and other human-caused effects. This phenomenon, if it exists at all, cannot be proved at present because it is evidently much smaller than natural fluctuations in ozone and UV light. The CFC ban is a political action that is not justified by scientific experiments or theory.
  
  
• "High-Level Radioactive Waste'' by Howard C. Hayden, The Physics Teacher 33, pp 450-454, October 1995. This is a clear, high-school level explanation of the facts about radioactive waste - one of which is that it is an easily solved problem when rationally understood.
  
  
• The Publications Catalog of the Washington Legal Foundation available from Washington Legal Foundation, 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20036 and the Property Rights Reader published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1001 Con-necticut Avenue NW, Suite 1250, Washington, DC 20036. These are useful tools for the protection of free enterprise.