Included are a wide variety of characters - thieving and generous, lying and truthful, drunk and sober - cutthroats, fair damsels, monks, merchants, brave soldiers, cowards, and many others - possessing the usual cross section of virtues and foibles with which the human race has been blessed and cursed for thousands of years.

Standing at the apex of this society were the knights and their retainers, who possessed an extremely rigid and lofty code of personal honor. Although coarse brutality with hand weapons was a way of life for these men, they simultaneously held to a very high standard of truth, justice, and ethical behavior. This standard provided the glue that held their civilization together. Passed down through the centuries to us, their standard today provides essential principles that help prevent our modern civilization from descending into the base forms of anarchy whereto the darker aspects of the human spirit would lead.

"So they lived, these men, in their own lusty, cheery fashion -rude and rough, but honest, kindly, and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. The sky may darken, and the clouds may gather, and again the day may come when Britain may have sore need of her children, on whatever shore of the sea they may be found. Shall they not muster at her call?'' As it turned out, Britain did need them again, and they were there - as, in America, they have also been there each time their country has needed them - in war and in peace.

But whence do they come? Are they drawn from among our avaricious merchants, our lying politicians, our thieving lawyers, our self-righteous clerics, our lazy bureaucrats, our self-serving executives, or the numerous other negatively stereotyped groups who make up the American population? Yes, of course, they are. These stereotypes are wrong. We are not a nation of "good'' people and "evil'' people locked endlessly in a struggle with one another. We are, instead, a nation of "ordinary'' people (all of us) responding with the good and evil within each of us to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Given a glorious opportunity to be for a moment a white knight of the highest order, there is not one American in a thousand who could not rise to that occasion.

We cannot change human nature. We can only hope to adjust the human environment so that it draws out the best qualities within each person and suppresses the worst. Soon, we will be able to read the entire molecular library which contains the genetic code for a whole human being. Will we use this knowledge to eradicate human disease, or will we use it to eradicate human freedom by building a rationale for euthanasia and selective breeding under control of the state? We are, of course, capable of both. Soon, we will have a good understanding of our planet's atmosphere. Will we use this knowledge to enhance our lives through accurate weather prediction and, perhaps someday, benevolent weather manipulation, or will we use it as a rationale for the destruction of human freedom by government control of every human activity that affects the atmosphere?

Today, the almost unanimous answer from academic scientists and the publications of science which they control would be - "Send more government money. The 34 billion tax dollars that we currently receive annually for civilian research and development is not enough. Moreover, it is projected to decrease to about $30 billion by 2002. (See J. Kaiser, Science 272, p 941(1996).) If you want us to be at our best, you must send more money! Think of it as providing for the common defense - from the chaos that will reign if we are not given a blank check to pursue knowledge.'' But wait, does not the forcible transfer of money from those who earned it to those who did not earn it corrupt the ethics and decrease the productivity of the recipients? From ancient Rome to the modern welfare state, one wretched experiment after another teaches us that people who receive such money sink to very low standards of ethics. Why should you fellows be different?

"Oh, but we are different. We, are scientists. Look at the article by J. Friedly, Science 272, pp 947-948 (1996). In this case, just the suspicion that a government-funded scientist had traced a few lines from a figure in one of his own research papers and republished them in a later paper without revealing the source was the cause of a nine-year investigation by all sorts of ethical bodies including especially the Office of Research Integrity. When we suspected that this scoundrel had plagiarized himself, we spared no expense (of tax dollars) in our decade-long investigation. Science today is as pure as the driven snow, and we intend to keep it that way - if we get enough money.'' The human spirit rises to its highest attainments under a system of free enterprise, and it sinks to its lowest perversities under a system of socialism. Moreover, this latter tendency is one of the most dangerous influences faced by our civilization today - particularly regarding the use of science and technology. Two examples, one past and one ongoing, described in the articles below, may serve to illustrate this.

During the late 1960s and the 1970s, my coworkers and I conceived and built a new procedure for medical diagnosis which had the potential to markedly improve the diagnosis and quantitative evaluation of overt disease and also to make possible the detection of disease long before symptoms were evident, so that preventive medicine could become far more effective. Based upon the fast and inexpensive analysis of large numbers of the ordinary substances produced by human intermediary metabolism, followed by some unique computerized pattern recognition procedures, this approach has the potential to provide a substantial advance in the technological improvement of individual human health. See Access to Energy 23-4, pp 1-3 for a more complete description. Ultimately, our effort consumed approximately 100 man-years of laboratory work and many millions of dollars in government research grants and private contributions. Overhead from our government-funded profiling grants also provided much of the money that built what later was called the Linus Pauling Institute. In the course of this work, we built the finest entirely automated chromatography equipment that had ever been constructed, carried out tens of thousands of analyses of urine, blood, and breath, and showed that this technique worked for the analysis of conditions ranging from multiple sclerosis and cancer to the degenerative conditions of human aging. This work was done at the University of California at San Diego, Stanford University, and, finally, at the small Institute we founded in Menlo Park, California.

In 1978, my technicians and I completed a series of experiments on nutrition and cancer in mice that, if appropriately published, might have been embarrassing to Linus Pauling, who then, at the age of 77, was making increasingly wild public claims about Vitamin C and cancer. At the time, I was President of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and Linus was Chairman of the Board.

In order to prevent publication, Linus convinced his relatives and cronies, who made up a majority of our Board of Directors, to give him control of the Institute. As soon as he obtained control, he locked up all of the Institute's research records, which included over 60 large bound research books, 528 computer data tapes, and about 15 file cabinets filled with printed research records. These records included all of the data from the profiling work that my coworkers and I had done at the University of California at San Diego, Stanford, and the Pauling Institute (which is a 501(c)3 public foundation - with all of its property legally belonging to the public). This publicly-funded health research work comprised about 100 man years of work and cost many millions of tax dollars as well as large amounts of privately donated funds.

Still locked in those records, 18 years later, are over 20 unpublished health research experiments on breast cancer, malignant myeloma, numerous neurological diseases, aging, birth defects, and several other important subjects. Included is the field-ion mass spectrometry data .

Laurelee and I fought a five year legal battle with all of our personal resources to gain access to this data, but we failed. Pauling and his Board simply used huge sums of donated health research funds to give a blank check to lawyers instructed to stop us at any price. Our only success was in forcing Pauling to pay us $575,000 in 1983 for personal damages with $425,000 in payment of libel and slander - but our primary objective, recovery of the research work, was never reached. No one has ever been able to rescue those records from the locked room in which we have been told that they are kept.

At the present time, following Pauling's death, the Linus Pauling Institute is being dissolved, and its assets are being transferred to Ore-gon State University along with permission to use the Institute's name. OSU hopes to be able to raise money using the Pauling name.

During the past year, Dr. Jane Orient and Dr. John Mann have revived a special interest in one of the unpublished experiments. Dr. Mann and his coworkers had provided me with 1,000 urine samples from apparently healthy newborn infants. In the chromatographic profiles of these 1,000 samples, we made a new (still unpublished) discovery in 1978. The profiled substances exhibited bimodal and trimodal distribution functions, making it possible to divide the babies into many distinct groups with respect to their intermediary metabolism. At present, since the babies were born in the Kaiser-Permanente HMO system where Dr. Mann works, his records have subsequent 18-year health histories of these children. Do their health histories correlate with their urine profiles as measured at birth? This is a unique opportunity to answer a question that would otherwise be unanswerable, regardless of resources, for another 18 years. The Pauling Institute has refused to allow Orient and Mann to see the data or my calculations.

So, on June 3, 1996, a federal court in Arizona will consider tens of thousands of dollars of legal motions generated by Pauling Institute lawyers in opposition to Dr. Jane Orient's attempt to see this data . Dr. Orient argues that this data is public property paid for by government grants and tax-deductible donations. Even Oregon State University lawyers are refusing to cooperate with her. The reason - money. What if some of this long-hidden data proves to be of value to human health (and, I assure you, much of it is very valuable)? How much value will the Pauling name have then for their fund-raising program?

Is Linus Pauling the villain here? Not entirely. The fact that he seized the research records of numerous scientists, thereby preventing continuation or publication of their work is well known to many scientists. They are afraid, however, that scandal involving a big-name scientist will affect government funding. Everyone keeps quiet. Anyone risking the $34 billion piggy bank risks the displeasure of his peers.

1. Contrary to media hype, 1995 was not the "hottest year on record.'' Satellite measurements rank it as eighth in the last 17 years.