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Cancer, too, is a target of molecular biology. Harvard's Dr. John Enders, a virologist whose tissue cultures made polio vaccine possible, believes that some cancers in lower animals are certainly caused by viruses. "Recent work has shown," he says, "that malignant cells that develop after infection by a virus do not necessarily continue to hold the virus. They lose the virus but continue to grow, and can pass cells to other animals without the virus' being present. It looks as if the function of the virus is to start the cell going wrong. Then it can continue to go wrong by itself." This may happen in human cancers, too, and since viruses carry only small packets of genetic material, improved molecular biology may prevent them from starting cancers, or may even reform the lawlessly growing cells that have been led by viruses into evil ways.
Out of This World. But no matter how profound the significance of the work being done by the physicists, the molecular biologists and the practitioners of a dozen other pure sciences, it is the "science" of space that is of most absorbing interest to the peoples of the world. Man's reach toward the heavens is indeed the stuff that dreams are made of—and some scientists are inclined to scoff at it for precisely that reason. But others, of equal stature and equal dedication to scientific truth, not only share in the out-of-this-world dreams but are devoting their great talents toward cracking the secrets of the infinite beyond.
Among those at the most practical pole of space science is Astronauticist Charles Draper. In his capacity as head of M.I.T.'s Instrumentation Lab, Draper in 1960 was working on guidance systems for space vehicles of the Dyna-Soar type —vehicles with supporting wings to get them out of the earth's atmosphere. He sees little future for manned space exploration in Project Mercury, which uses a ballistic missile, which is shot like a bullet, has no wings and not much control after it is fired. "That's sort of like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel," says Draper. "You don't expect to find many people making a career of it." Draper's Instrumentation Lab has also designed on paper an unmanned payload to circle Mars and return to earth with photographs or other observations. "All that remains is to do it," says Draper. "We've got a habit of confusing the final generation of a satisfactory piece of hardware with the specifications on paper. We have proved that this can be done and shown how. Now we have to make the thing."
Instrumented space research already has proved its vast scientific worth. James Van Allen, of the State University of Iowa, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, testifies that unmanned U.S. satellites are teaching earthbound scientists a tremendous amount about "that nuclear physics laboratory called the sun."