"Sneak Preview” Of Life Next Century

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31656, 17 April 1968, Page 6

"Sneak Preview” Of Life Next Century

Nuclear medicine will have a significant role in the 21st century in the view of Neisler Laboratories, Inc., a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation, which is delineating the newest developments in radiopharmaceuticals An over-sized illuminated panel depicts the various organs of the human body and explains how the technique serves such fields of medicine as neurology, psychiatry. internal medicine, and cardiology. Radiopharmaceuticals already are useful tools in the diagnosis and treatment of various tumours with less radiation exposure to the patient than with previous methods. Also featured is a "scanner,” the machine commonly used in radiopharmaceuticals to detect malfunctions in the body. Extreme cold as a surgical tool is already serving man as seen in an exhibit pre-

sented by St Barnabas Hospital in New York. Central to the display is a 15-minute colour motion picture showing the dramatic results in a '.eries of patients both before and after cryogenic surgery. Photographs and diagrams on the various panels explain how individuals afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease, muscular dystrophy and Wilson’s Disease are being ministered to with this safe, relatively simple and rapid method of surgery. “Megastructures” With the world population nearly doubled by the year 2000, the experts generally agreed, most people would live in or near big cities. The scientists project huge self-contained cities called “megastructt'res” unique worlds of apartments, offices,

shops, and recreation areas offering all the amenities of twenty-first-century civilisation. Some of these “megastructures” are almost 200 storeys high, and others consist of continuous, multitiered structures a mile wide and 20 miles long, connecting with each other like links in a gigintic chain. Some citizens live in “platform cities” erected on stilts, with local traffic tucked underground and feeding into expressways at either end of town, and with “ground level” uncluttered sidewalks nestling among green landscapes. The still more fortu ’te bask in the benevolence of temperature-controlled, domeshaped "megastructures”—living and working in an ideal climate all year round. The average life span has been lengthened by 20 years. Men grow older but remain younger—they are

more active, more alert. The memory loss . accompanying senility has been eliminated. The science of “bioengineering” has given the human organism a new toughness, a new alternative to organic decay and untimely death. Millions of people with malfunctioning, ageing organs—heart, kidney, liver, lung, arteries and veins—receive transplants of healthy organs or artificial and long-lasting mechanical parts through almost routine hospital surgery. Artificial arms and legs are motorised and linked to the brain by a computer, enabling the wearer to translate impulse into action. Computers have taken over as the central nervous systems of municipalities, businesses, libraries, hospitals, schools, and other storage centres of information.

People use computers as casually as they once used telephones. Centralised computers offer “computer publicutility service” to individual homes. Robots with computer insides and telescoping arms, fingers, brushes and suction tubes take care of housecleaning more efficiently than human hands. Computer Kitchens The kitchen is entirely automated. The housewife makes out her menu for the week, puts the necessary food into the proper storage spaces, and feeds her programme to a small computer Mechanical arms remove the pre-selected food, cook it and serve it. Dr Celina Pugarte, professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware, projected a latticed dome covering the entire city of Wil-

mington. It is possible today practically, structurally I and economically to build ' 12 miles wide she says. <

The domes would be built with prestressed steel cables and towers, supporting a “skin” of heavy plastic. New steel alloys make high-tension cables possible and greatly reduce the costs of construction. Advantages of such a dome would be many. It would provide climate control, among other things. No Traffic Another concept, advanced by Dr Athelstan Spilhaus of Philadelphia, was a city in which cars and trucks were totally banned except for some, perhaps, underground. Instead, everyone would ride, free, on semi-private pads, motorless, driverless, noiseless, all controlled by computer.

Such a transportation system would or eould be a new way of life, in a programme called Experimental City. The city would have a central core of homes, stores, industries, businesses, schools, hospitals with open green and farm and forests surrounding it. A typical population might be 250,000 people. It would be operated by a quasi-pub-lie quasi-private organisation, run like a hotel or a public utility. If 880 such cities, all of controlled size, were scattered evenly over the United States all Americans could live in them, said Dr Spilahus, and ‘we would not have the pollution problem, the trafficcongestion problem, the riots and many of the other ills that develop today when cities become too large.”—Copyright, 1968. Associated Newspapers Feature Services.