Spring 2001 VOL. 3 NO.2

 The Very Fabric of  Life: Political and Social Issues 
in Scientific American in the 1960s

 By Mary Carol Zuegner, Ph.D.

The author is an assistant professor of journalism
at Creighton University , Omaha, Nebraska.
E-mail: czuegner@Creighton.edu

      The publisher and editor of Scientific American ventured editorially into social science and what they called socio-political articles in the 1960s because of their belief that science was “the very fabric of modern life.”[i] Using science and the authority of science to attempt to explain non-scientific problems or to offer an analysis of a political problem with its roots in science gave them the opportunity to add credibility and scientific resonance to issues they deemed essential to society. Editor Dennis Flanagan explained the philosophy:  “Everything under the sun, like support of science, economic development, every social issue that had any content of science or technology, we would make our business.”[ii]

Just how did publisher Gerard Piel and editor Flanagan make everything under the sun their business? An examination of each monthly issue of Scientific American in the 1960s and oral histories with each of the men about their involvement with the magazine and its editorial philosophy reveal a wide scope of what they considered their business. [iii] This paper explores how the two men’s belief in science as the “very fabric of modern life,” and their wide-ranging backgrounds propelled them to seek out and select articles that used science, social science and scientific methods to explore social problems as well as stories that explored what is more commonly considered the realm of science.[iv]

 Piel and Flanagan

           A  series of four announcements heralded the new owners of the 103-year-old Scientific American in 1947 and proclaimed the retooled magazine’s principles.  Piel, Flanagan and business partner Donald Miller Jr., bought the nameplate of Scientific American, which had deteriorated from a successful general science magazine in the 1920s into an ailing industrial-technology magazine by the 1940s.[v] The new magazine, the announcements said, would cover, in equal proportions, the physical, biological and social sciences as well as medicine and engineering-technology, defined as  “the art of applying science to the benefit of large numbers of people.”[vi]  The board of editors would work with scientists to create “a magazine which communicates scientific information to the intelligent layman in a language which is neither technical nor patronizing. In accomplishing this, the new Scientific American will fill a large gap between the scientific and technical press on the one hand and the general newspapers and magazines on the other.”[vii]  The publisher and editor understood the gap as one that gave them a wide latitude for subject matter.

            In envisioning a new science magazine, Piel and Flanagan drew on their own experiences — with science growing up, in school and at Life magazine where each had served as a science editor — to develop the philosophy behind the magazine. Neither Piel nor Flanagan was a scientist or even had taken many science courses in college. Piel, who had enough of science after prep school, studied sociology and history at Harvard, where he was a student of Robert Merton, a scholar of the sociology of science.[viii]  Flanagan had taken some science courses at college, but he was an English major who wanted to be a novelist. Flanagan, who never graduated from college, admitted he wasn’t a big academic star.[ix]  Part of Flanagan’s interest and curiosity about science came from his stepfather, an amateur astronomer.  His strength in editing a science publication, he said, was that very basic science knowledge: " I’ve always attributed whatever I was able to do as a journalist as having some very, very useful elementary experience to place it in context, even though I didn’t know very much. I’m a great believer in the importance of context." [x]

          Life seemed an appropriate place for the future publisher and editor of Scientific American to learn about magazines, science in magazines and context. Henry Luce started Life as an idea with the purchased nameplate of a dying magazine,[xi]  much as Piel and Flanagan would jump-start Scientific American.  Piel started at Life in 1938 and would work there until 1945.[xii]  Piel wasn’t immediately enamored of his assignment to the Life science desk; he wanted to be a war correspondent. In fact, Piel felt his assignment as science editor was just a step above dog editor.  He soon changed his mind after his work with Life editor John Billings.

I remember two stories that I did that exposed me to personalities that I   never dreamt existed and taught me something of what science is about,  and above all, taught me that science is not contained in the little green- covered book from which you can derive equations, but rather a human  intellectual and physical enterprise.[xiii]    

             Working at Life with scientists to prepare the stories, photographs and illustrations brought Piel two other insights that would shape the magazine to come, namely that the most interested audience for the science in Life magazine was scientists, and that the use of graphics and illustrations was essential.  Flanagan, who like Piel had started at Time-Life as an office boy, said he arrived on the scene at just the right time.

It was a wonderful place to go to school--that’s where I went to school.    Also, Gerry and I happened to come along at time when the damn thing was expanding faster than the speed of light, so practically anybody who  could man a typewriter was immediately pressed into service. If you weren’t any good, of course, you were pitched out, but, if you could cut it a little bit, you could hang on.[xiv]

             Piel continued his education when he took a job with industrialist Henry Kaiser for a year as a way to learn about business. He learned management skills and made contacts that later proved essential to getting the new magazine off the ground, but his year of work with Kaiser left him feeling that he wasn’t cut out to be an industrialist.  Piel left Kaiser in 1946 to begin the serious work on the new magazine with Flanagan and Miller, who operated the business end of the magazine.

 Piel and Flanagan breathed life into Scientific American in 1948 with a new format and a new philosophy incubated in a climate when the power of science seemed limitless. Instead of the industrial-technology emphasis of the Scientific American of the mid-1940s, the men created a magazine directed at the growing number of scientists and engineers, doctors, and people already interested in science. Scientists would write and journalists would edit the articles, which would be lavishly illustrated.  The magazine wouldn’t be a news-of-science magazine, but it would concentrate on scientific developments.  For the magazine’s new owners, science was not just an event or a breakthrough, it was a process. Their mission was to explain that process.  While the scientific results were important, Piel and Flanagan sought to situate science in context and to illuminate the scientific method. The mission and how it was carried out in Scientific American’s distinct style would set the magazine apart from the species of science writing in mass-circulation magazines or other popular science journalism and would set the magazine apart from peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals.[xv]

             The timing for such a magazine seemed impeccable. The power of science ignited demand for information. In her study of the images of science in eleven mass-circulation magazines from 1910 to 1955, LaFollette found that the number of science articles increased in those magazines dramatically after World War II and into the mid-1950s,[xvi] an indication of the growing interest in science and its growing place in society. Piel and Flanagan passionately believed in science and its importance.

          To Piel and Flanagan, as to science writers like Watson Davis, the best way to stimulate the scientific approach was not to advocate it explicitly,   but to present  the findings of science in a comprehensible, responsible  form. Science, they were convinced, was so obviously crucial to the modern world that presenting it intelligently would make its relevance and implications for society immediately apparent.[xvii]

            The new Scientific American saw itself as an advocate for science, science that could be applied to all areas of life with the growth of social science.

 The 1960s

The 1960s exploded into a go-go period for fashion, science and finance, but eventually dissent and the Vietnam War shadowed the decade. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 signaled the beginning of this scientific golden age, a surge fueled by President John F. Kennedy when he committed the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  This new age of science brought an even greater need for information and for context as science grew more complicated, more specialized and bigger.[xviii]  Federal budgets for science burgeoned, pushed by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, the race to the moon and competition for national prestige. During that time, Bruce Hevly contended that big science projects began to require social and political significance as well as scientific significance.[xix] 

Science and Scientific American flourished in this environment for at least part of the 1960s.[xx] The age supported Piel and Flanagan’s belief in science as the fabric of life, essential to understanding and achievement in the modern world.  Magazine investor and staff member C.L. Stong had described the faith in this way:  “Society’s destiny is inseparable from the dynamics of science and that man will reach his highest fulfillment only as he comprehends and employs the scientific method. Implicit in this is the need for laymen to understand what science is about.”[xxi]  Linking society’s destiny to the dynamics of science would cause complications as the decade drew on and consequences of science began to loom larger than the benefits in the face of war, environmental problems, and the dissent and cultural upheaval that also marked the 1960s.  

Scientific American addressed these issues with publisher and editor confident in science as the rational answer. Flanagan called the editors “left-left-liberal”[xxii] in their own political leanings, but he said the magazine attempted to keep a middle course with its explanations.  The belief and confidence in the rational answer never wavered. However, even choosing what topics to include in the magazine under that scientific rubric gave the editors an opportunity to add credibility and scientific resonance to specific viewpoints and concepts. For these articles on social issues, the necessity of a science “hook” meant that the coverage lagged behind the events or the newspaper headlines. Vietnam was a major story for mainstream American journalists by 1963, yet Scientific American had no major article on the war in Vietnam or its scientific consequences until the 1970s. However, the scientific side of the war did receive mention in the “Science and the Citizen” department, a monthly feature of short items that kept readers abreast of news, whether pieces on the conduct of science, political news — particularly arms control — and shorter stories on scientific developments gleaned from journals, from presentations or from meetings.

            What Flanagan called sociopolitical-lead stories abounded in the 1960s, ranging from stories on atomic-bomb shelters, hallucinogenic drugs, the effects of smoking, marihuana, poverty, race issues, and abortion. Medical stories, particularly those dealing with heart disease, appeared frequently, matching the advances in that field in the 1960s. The science and society stories fulfilled Flanagan and Piel’s image of a magazine that not only explained developments in science and social science, but a magazine that also made clear how vital science was to the workings of society. Piel acknowledged that the scientific authority of the magazine could mask the politics, and the editors used that authority to their advantage

          You know, the wonderful thing about our political stances on things like  that, I mean we were terrified at the outbreak of the arms race, and we never enlisted in the Cold War. We tried to put forward other uses of science and technology like economic development and real peacemaking. It was that total misunderstanding of what science is about that protected us. It was scientific, therefore it was OK. Since we were scientists, we knew what we were talking about.[xxiii]   The editors turned to social science to explain the sociopolitical questions of civil rights and poverty. The approach focused on delineating the scientific or technical aspects of the issues. 

Ecological balance

             The scientific and technological beliefs of the editors kept the magazine from an environmentalist slant.[xxiv] Piel said although he considered himself a liberal, he regarded the magazine as a middle ground where overheated rhetoric on both sides environmental issues could be doused.[xxv]  It must be remembered the Piel and Flanagan viewed science as a rational way to explain the world, relying on the method of science to provide answers or, if not answers, at least ways to consider controversial topics on a reasonable basis. The magazine published articles that voiced questions about the power of science, but the underlying theme was the reliance on science. The magazine used this approach in its review of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s book warning of the dangers of pesticides and insecticides caused an environmental uproar.  A Cornell ecology professor reviewed the 1962 book for Scientific American in a six-page essay that spelled out his problems with Carson’s use of the concept “balance of nature,” and lectured on the basic elements of the concept. The author, LaMont Cole, applauded Carson for writing the book, however partisan her point of view.

The fact remains that the extreme opposite has been impressed on the public by skilled professional molders of public opinion. It is surely time for laymen to take an objective interest in what man is doing to alter his environment, and Silent Spring provides many dreadful examples of how the environment has been damaged by the indiscriminate application of chemicals.[xxvi] 

           Cole noted in the review that the book prompted a counterattack by major chemical manufacturers.  The truth, Cole said, would lie in part with Carson, “who presents enough solidly established facts to justify some alarm,”[xxvii] but he noted that “insecticides that have a residual action have led man to some notable triumphs,” such as the use of DDT to stop a scourge of typhus in Italy in 1944. He concluded that Carson brought an aspect of what he called a threatening situation to public attention, which “may help us toward a much needed reappraisal of current policies and practices.”[xxviii]

             By 1967, George Woodwell leveled a more distinct warning about the problems of pesticides.  “The accumulation of persistent toxic substances in the ecological cycles of the earth is a problem to which mankind will have to pay increased attention.” He wrote of the danger of radioactive fallout and DDT in the earth’s ecological cycles, which he said, is  “ample proof that there is no longer safety in the vastness of the earth.”[xxix]  

            The magazine carried articles on environmental issues around the world, either as examples or as cautionary tales.  Israel’s reclamation of a desert and restoration of severely eroded land was both cautionary tale and example.

          On the anvil of adversity, the State and people of Israel have been hammering out solutions to problems that other nations must sooner or   later face up to. There are no more continents left to explore or exploit. The best lands of the earth are occupied and in use, all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, need the same measure of reclamation and conservation  that have succeeded so well in Israel. The frontiers of today are the lands under our feet.[xxx]

           A story calling for the use of native animals in Africa for farming or domesticating instead of attempting to bring in other species claimed that ecology had “assumed urgent importance in the maintenance of human habitat.”[xxxi]  Two stories focused on air pollution and smog in the United States, one on studies that showed smog to be a health hazard and one on efforts in Los Angeles to eliminate smog.[xxxii]

            Nuclear power, which would become a large environmental issue later, was barely mentioned in the magazine during the 1960s.  The danger of ecological effects of radiation was seen more as a problem because of bomb fallout or bomb testing than a nuclear power issue.  In the first issue of the decade, Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and one of the pioneers of nuclear fission, said the idea of using breeder reactors and nuclear power was becoming routine.[xxxiii] Woodwell wrote of experiments that showed forest trees and plants as the most susceptible to radiation poisoning while weeds and insects were the least susceptible.[xxxiv] By 1968, John Hogerton reported that nuclear power accounted for half of the power-generating capacity on order in the United States. [xxxv]

 Science and war

            Science had a part in almost every major political and social issue, and the war in Vietnam was no exception In fighting what turned out to be a guerrilla war, American forces used the science and technology at their disposal, advanced weapons such as earthquake bombs, anti-personnel bombs, chemical and biological agents to defoliate forests and burn crops, as noted by historian David Levy.

Americans have always been proud of their know-how, their ability to apply scientific ingenuity and industrial methods to special problems, to   find the right tool to do the job. To some, however, this particular exercise  of national prowess seemed a little unclean, a little perverse, somehow unworthy of a great and principled nation.[xxxvi] 

          Levy said an uncomfortable feeling came because this technologically superior country “had launched a war of destruction upon a primitive, peasant, essentially agricultural society.”[xxxvii]   The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 provided “crucial justification for the escalation of American involvement,” involvement that played out in American living rooms as the conflict was one of the most reported wars in history.[xxxviii]  After the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the war escalated quickly with sustained bombing of North Vietnam and commitment of American troops to the conflict. By the end of 1967, some 485,000 Americans were stationed in Vietnam.[xxxix]

            As noted earlier, Scientific American didn’t devote a main article on the scientific or other aspects of the war in Vietnam in the 1960s.[xl] However, reports in the magazine’s “Science and the Citizen” department illustrated a growing concern and uneasiness within the scientific community over the use of science in the war.  An item in the February 1965 “Science and the Citizen” discussed a report delivered to a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Montreal.  There, the AAAS Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare warned that the

scientific community is under increasing political, military and community  pressure . . . The result is that society has been bringing into play the  powerful tools of science without adequate understanding of their potential effects, and has been making essentially scientific decisions on  the basis of unscientific considerations.[xli]                                      

           An excerpt from a New England Journal of Medicine article by two Harvard medical school doctors warned that using chemical and biological weapons in Vietnam could backfire on the United States. “This position assumes that once a Pandora’s box of chemical and biological weapons is opened, only benign results will come forth.”[xlii] In November, the department carried an item that 22 American scientists, including seven Nobel prize winners, signed a petition asking President Lyndon Johnson for the armed services to stop using chemical weapons against the crops and people in Vietnam. Five months later, the department reported that more than 5,000 scientists, including 17 Nobel Prize winners, had signed that petition asking for a halt to the use of chemical weapons.[xliii]  In 1968, the department carried a summary of an article written by a Yale professor for a publication of the group Scientists Institute for Public Information. The article warned of unknown but possible ramifications to the land and to the ecological chain from the use of chemical and biological weapons. [xliv]

            One of the most contentious issues during the war was the draft, partly because of the impression that the impact of the war fell most heavily on the poorer segments of society.[xlv]  “Science and the Citizen” included a story on a study published in Trans-Action where Morris Janowitz investigated social and demographic factors involved in the draft.  The Scientific American item summed up the study this way: “The ‘public perception’ that selective service operations have a bias against men of lower socioeconomic class has an ‘important element of truth.’”[xlvi]

            The Cold War — separate from Vietnam — continued throughout the 1960s, highly visible in the first years of the decade, then fading from public interest, though no less real, as Vietnam and other issues clamored for attention.[xlvii] The Berlin Wall went up in 1961, followed by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. These events heightened the fear of potential nuclear attack or nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the midst of these crises, Kennedy called for a national shelter program and renewed the warning that civil defense measures were necessary. [xlviii] Scientific American published parts of a report of the sociological and psychological effects of a massive civil defense system. The social scientists predicted problems with any kind of national system beginning with its unfeasibility. The social scientists voiced concern over the impression such a program would leave with Americans, namely that the United States was on the brink of nuclear disaster. They also believed it would make negotiations to reduce the arms buildup more difficult. One of the more interesting conclusions from the report, which was directed by the Peace Research Institute, was that such a program would undermine confidence in scientists.[xlix]     

            Though the United States and the Soviet Union did sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty that banned ocean and above-ground tests, there still was the possibility of underground nuclear tests. Scientific American weighed in with two articles debating whether seismic equipment could be used to track the tests. The arms race continued, leading to an April 1969 article by George Rathjens on what feeds an arms race.

In the circumstances, it seems worthwhile to inquire into the nature of the forces that impel an arms race. In doing so we may determine how best to damp this newest cycle of military competition, either by mutual   agreement or by unilateral restraint, before it is beyond control. [l]

 The philosophy expressed echoed that expressed by Piel and Flanagan of the importance of writing about the nuclear issues. Flanagan explained his reason for that belief:

There aren’t many things that have the possibility of ending human life on the planet. That’s good enough for me. Anything that can be done to   prevent the probability of that is worth doing.[li] 

Science and the Great Society

             President Lyndon Johnson sought solutions to some of the formidable problems in America with his Great Society legislation aimed at civil rights and poverty.  Scientific American articles on these issues took a social science approach to the problems as a way to get to the causes and attempts to find solutions. The conclusions of the articles generally backed a liberal view that placed the need for change in institutions or the system.

            The civil rights movement became prominent in the 1960s with its high points — the Freedom Summer, the March on Washington in 1963, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Economic Opportunity acts in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Low points came with the violence that erupted when segregationists attempted to stop non-violent protests. Riots broke out in the ghettos of many American cities in 1964 and continued sporadically through 1968, particularly after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.  The explanation of this social issue in the pages of Scientific American relied on technical methods such as polling or analysis of census data to illuminate attitudes toward segregation, patterns of segregation, the need for black power and the possible reasons behind the rioting.

            Racial problems, like the environmental issues, were not new to Scientific American.  The article on segregation begins with a reference to a story in the magazine eight years earlier that predicted the racial problems of the South would become problems of the North.[lii]  Scientific American also published an article in 1956 on a poll surveying attitudes toward desegregation.[liii]  By 1964, the same poll continued to show steadily increasing support for integration. [liv] Author Karl Taeuber contended that residential segregation is one of the “most pronounced and most tenaciously maintained forms of segregation,” and one that leads to other forms of de facto segregation.[lv]  However, residential segregation also lends itself to quantitative analysis. Taeuber used a segregation index to investigate the problem in major U.S. cities where block or neighborhood data were available. He found strong evidence of segregation in every city in the North and the South. He cautioned that the index, though objective, did not reflect the subtleties of an actual situation. 

It does not indicate the character of the residential segregation in a city —that is, the strength of white feelings about where Negroes should live or the strength of segregation’s emotional impact on Negroes —nor does it reveal precise spatial configurations of Negro residential areas. In short, the best way to summarize the index is to say that it is a strictly objective measure, based on census data, of the general unevenness in the distribution of white and Negro households among residential neighborhoods.[lvi]

             Taeuber did use the index and various census-tract data from Chicago to investigate the idea that poverty is one of the main factors behind residential segregation. (Gunner Myrdal had suggested three factors for residential segregation: choice, poverty and discrimination.) Taeuber’s analysis showed neither free choice nor poverty “is a sufficient explanation for the universally high degree of segregation.”

Discrimination is the principal cause of Negro residential segregation, and there is no basis for anticipating major changes in the segregated character of American cities until patterns of housing discrimination can be altered.[lvii] 

             An analysis that traced the experience of the black American from slavery to the 1960s presented the idea that black Americans did not have the same opportunity as other immigrant groups to develop group power and influence. Attempts to develop that group power in the 1960s were seen as inflammatory because of militant overtones.  James Comer contended that a “ a form of black power may be absolutely essential,” because historical and psychological studies suggest

that the profound needs of the poorest and most alienated Negroes cannot be met — and that there can therefore be no end to the racial  unrest — except through the influence of a unified, organized Negro community with genuine political and economic power. [lviii]

 The power he envisioned would not, he said, promote riots.

            Researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research reported on their work for the government’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission.  The commission’s final report warned of a nation that had become two societies — one black and one white, separate and unequal.  Recommendations included creating new jobs, public housing, attacking de facto segregation in the North, but the recommendations were ignored because of President Johnson’s fear of a white backlash.[lix] The Michigan researchers had conducted a survey of rioters and nonrioters in Detroit and Newark, two places where major riots broke out in the summer of 1967. The investigators sought to answer the question of why the riots occurred, basing their hypotheses on three broad categories: the riffraff theory, the relative-deprivation theory, and the blocked-opportunity theory.[lx]   The first two theories attribute the cause of riots to individuals while the third attributes cause to the system, to white institutions.  Authors Nathan Caplan and Jeffrey Paige acknowledged that it would be easier to institute remedial programs or “prolonged confinement” to deal with the first two theories while the third would require changing institutions.  What the researchers found was that the survey data most strongly supported the blocked-opportunity theory.

One is led to conclude that the continued exclusion of Negroes from  American economic and social life is the fundamental cause of riots. This exclusion is a result of arbitrary racial barriers rather than lack of ability,   motivation or aspiration on the part of Negroes, and it is most galling to young Negroes who perceive it as arbitrary and unjust. [lxi]                                

             Stories on poverty outlined studies that would contribute to the understanding of poverty and the sociological and anthropological approaches necessary to win the war on poverty. [lxii]  The need for scientific information, for statistics to even make policy decisions was the focus of a story on a national health survey.

          Statistics are the underpinning for programs of action in almost any area of  human activity, and as a society assumes greater responsibility for the   well-being of its members, one of the chief difficulties has been the lag in social statistics.[lxiii] 

 Science and culture

            The 1960s marked a major change in society with campus unrest and the counter-culture. Scientific American did not include any stories on campus unrest, perhaps because by that time there was little science or social science devoted to the topic. Though the unrest appeared widespread, historian Levy has estimated the number of organized antiwar protests occurred on less than 50 percent of all campuses. Other polls and statistics showed a majority of college-educated people and college professors voiced support in some fashion for the war.  The overriding impression of so much unrest comes from the media attention to visible, vocal and energetic protest organizers and the concentration of antiwar sentiment on the campuses of the nation’s elite schools.[lxiv]

            One mantra of the counter-culture came from fired Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary who urged all to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”  Young people were experimenting with drugs, especially marijuana and the hallucinogenic LSD. [lxv]   Scientific American profiled hallucinogenic drugs in 1964 and marijuana in 1969. The subheads to the stories give an idea of the approach, definitely colored by 1960s liberal sensitivity: “Does the constructive potential of these substances outweigh their hazards?” on the hallucinogenic piece and “There is considerable evidence that the drug is a comparatively mild intoxicant. Its current notoriety raises interesting questions about the motivation of those who use it and those who seek to punish them.”[lxvi]

            Lester Grinspoon discussed the history of the marijuana (though he spelled it marihuana), various studies on its implications, including investigations by a committee appointed in the 1930s by New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Grinspoon contended the attitude in the United States toward marijuana was “charged with a hyperemotional bias.”[lxvii]

          There are also cultural and social factors that contribute to the public apprehension about marihuana. The still powerful vestige of the Protestant  ethic in this country condemns marihuana as an opiate used solely for the  pursuit of pleasure (whereas alcohol is accepted because it lubricates the  wheels of commerce and catalyzed social intercourse.)[lxviii]

           Grinspoon said investigations throughout the years found little or no evidence to support claims that the drug leads users to other drugs, to violence, to sexual debauchery, to physical degeneracy or psychosis.  After noting that the drug is used by some as an act of defiance against the establishment, Grinspooon linked marijuana use to the uncertain times.

                It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the increasing use of marihuana is  in part related to the fearful threats of overpopulation, racial conflict and nuclear war.  Conversely the same threats may indirectly be contributing   to the emotional campaign against this drug. It is conceivable that some of  the affect generated in the population by the violence and martial spirit of  our time is being displaced onto issues such as marihuana.  Regarded as  essentially evil and dangerous, adopted by hippies, yippies and others   who demonstrate and call attention to the aspects of reality and threats of  doom that most of us find too distressing to confront, marihuana is a   natural target as a scapegoat. [lxix]

 The era ends

            Through the first half of the 1960s, the go-go years in fashion, finance and the world of science, Scientific American chronicled science in context and sought ways to explain social issues. Piel and Flanagan did find ways to carry out their vision of science as essential to society as the magazine addressed major social issues while still presenting explanation of biology, chemistry, geology and physics. The space race to the moon, regarded by the editors as more of a political effort than a scientific one, did produce data for scientific analysis.  What the editor and publisher hoped was that scientific results would lead to rational conclusions on often emotionally charged topics.

             The end of the 1960s brought challenges to authority at all levels, even scientific authority, but not to the extent of other traditional authority figures. Science, which had experienced a golden age of nearly unlimited funds and prestige, was entering tougher times. The consequences of science, technology and industry were causing some to question whether the benefits of science were worth those consequences.  Questions about nuclear power, the environment and energy would begin to take center stage in the 1970s.  In most of the 1960s, however, the belief in science as a way to provide answers pervaded Scientific American, and probably nowhere stronger than in the beginning of an article about the use and misuse of game theory.

         We live in an age of belief -- belief in the omnipotence of science. … Today in  greater measure than ever before, scientists sit at the decision makers’   elbows and guide the formulation of problems in such a way that scientific solutions are feasible.  Problems that do not promise scientific solutions  generally tend to go unformulated. Hence the faith in the omnipotence of science.[lxx]          

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