Men of Science

(NASA-CR-140052) MEN OF SCIENCE:

N74-75952 HUM5ERTO FERNANDEZ-MORAN (Chicago Univ.) 16 p

Unclas -' 3 15

FROM: SCIENCE YEAR 1973 WORLD. BOOK SCIENCE ANNUAL

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Men ofCIA

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Science The scope of scientific endeavor ranges from seeking the laws of nature to harnessing those laws for man's purposes. This section, which recognizes , ,• outstanding scientists and engineers, features1t,''. whose work represents each end of this resec* cale.

382 Humberto Fernandez-Moran by Richard S'tewis While probing the world of inner space to determine the cooperative nature of life at the atomic level, this multidisctphn&y scientist envisions a better role for science in his native Venezuela. -.

398 Christopher Kraft by William J. Cromie Adapting his talents to a newborn era, this space age engineer directed the manned space flights from their inception through the spectacular journeys that transported men to the moon.

414 Awards and Prizes A list of the winners of major scientific awards over the past year and summaries of the work that earned them special recognition.

423 Deaths Brief biographical notes on world-famous scientists who died between June 1, 1971, and June 1, 1972.

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Humberto Fernandez-Moran By Richard S. Lewis

Physician, inventor, and one of the world's great

electron microscopists, he has developed the

tools to search for the ultimate structure of life

On the campus of the University of Chicago, across Ellis Avenue from the famous Henry Moore statue Nuclear Energy, stands an unim-posing complex of buildings called the Research Institutes. In the base-ment, a door curiously marked "Clean Room" opens into a multi-million-dollar laboratory and an international staff of scientists and assistants headed by a man who has been variously called a wizard, a poet, an artist, and one of the great electron microscopists of our age. The man is Humberto Fernandez-Moran, the A. N. Pritzker Professor of Biophysics in the Pritzker School of Medicine.

Physician, biophysicist, and inventor, Fernandez-Moran is known principally for having developed two great tools for scientific research. One is the superconducting electron microscope, through which he can see many of the structural patterns of matter and life at the molecular level. The other is the diamond knife, a "scalpel" with an edge so sharp that it can literally slice through individual molecules.

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In his superclean laboratory, where visitors must don nylon smocks and plastic overshoes to avoid tracking in dust, Fernandez-Moran's far-ranging and energetic mind keeps both visitors and staff dazzled. His laboratory is the only one of its kind in the world. The research there ranges from studying three-dimensional laser holography and the phenomenon of superconductivity to the visualization of the deox-yribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule and the fine structures of moon rocks returned by the crew of Apollo 15 from the Hadley Rille. But most of the time Fernandez-Moran pursues his primary interest—the examination of the fine structure of nerve membranes. Under the su-perconducting electron microscope, he has identified membrane sub-structures—incredibly tiny biological units that form the building blocks of the brain and central nervous system. At the age of 48, he be-lieves his greatest work is still ahead of him. It is a search for the funda-mental structure and order of living systems. He regards this search as the key to understanding life.

Fernandez-Moran is a compact man with short dark hair, luminous dark eyes, and a nose that was slightly flattened years ago in a student boxing bout in Germany. His manner still has the gallantry of the Venezuelan gentry from which he came.

The author: Richard S. Lewis is the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a past contributor to Science Year and was science editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1924, Fernandez-Moran had earned a B.A. degree from Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf at Sallfeld, Germany, by the time he was 15 and an M.D. from the University of Munich at 21. He survived the chaos of Nazi Germany because of his neutral Venezuelan passport. Returning to Venezuela in 1945, he en-tered the University of Caracas to study tropical medicine and received his second medical degree at 22. Fascinated by diseases of the central nervous system and the brain, he interned in neurology and neuro-pathology at the George Washington University Medical School in Washington, D.C., in 1946.

He then went to Stockholm, Sweden, to begin his lifelong investiga-tion of the brain. From 1947 to 1949, he was a research fellow at the Nobel Institute of Physics. The director, Karl Marine Siegbahn, in-spired Fernandez-Moran to develop the diamond knife, a tool that would enable electron microscopists to probe the nature of living mate-rial at the molecular level.

The sharpest and most sophisticated cutting instrument in the world today, the diamond knife is about a tenth of an inch long and has a cut-ting edge from 20 to 50 angstroms thick. (An angstrom [A] is V,00-

millionth of a centimeter, about the diameter of an atom.) The width of a red blood cell, by comparison, is 80,000 A. This instrument, widely used today in surgery as well as in biological research, is regarded by some surgeons as the most important advance in surgical tools since the steel scalpel. For example, it has been used extensively and successfully in eye cataract operations. It is also an important tool in industry and research. It can slice any material, including metal. Fernandez-Moran uses it today not only to slice thin sections of brain and other nerve tis-

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Fernandez-Moran, with Mitsuo Ohtsuki, seated,

sue for examination under his superconducting electron microscope, and Ralph Vicario, but also to cut ultrathin sections of moon rocks so scientists can analyze checks the controls of their fine, crystalline structure, the superconducting

The diamond knife earned Fernandez-Moran the prestigious John electron microscope.

Scott Medal awarded by the city of Philadelphia in 1967, putting him The only instrument

in the company of former medal winners Marie Curie and Jonas Salk. of its kind, it produces In Stockholm, the young scientist continued his postgraduate work a highly stable image

and research at the Institute for Cell Research and Genetics of theat very high resolution.

Karolinska Institute, where he received an M.S. in cell biology in 1951. The following year, at the age of 28, he received a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Stockholm. During his studies in Stockholm, he also was a clinical assistant and resident at the Serafimerlasarettet Hos-pital. In addition, he served as the Venezuelan scientific and cultural attaché to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark from 1947 to 1954. Along the way, he somehow found time to meet, court, and marry a tall, blonde girl named Anna Browallius, sister of Irya Browallius, one of Sweden's best-known writers.

Fernandez-Moran returned to Venezuela in 1954, planning to fash-ion a career that would combine medicine, biology, and the education of the scientists that Latin America needed. The government quickly authorized him to develop a center for research in neurology and brain physiology—a center that ultimately would cost $50 million and be-come a magnet for researchers from all over the world. The Instituto Venezolano de Neurologia y Investigaciones Cerebrales (Venezuelan Institute of Neurological and Brain Research) was chartered on April

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Fernandez-Moran inspects some of the components of a 29, 1954. At the end of 1955, a $3-million medical research building new type of high field was dedicated atop Altos Pipe (Pipe Mountain), near Caracas. superconducting lens system that he and his

In 1955, Fernandez-Moran headed a Venezuelan delegation to the

colleagues developed. first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Ener-gy, held in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1957, he led another delegation to the first Inter-American Symposium on Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. Attracted by the fundamental nature of nuclear physics, Fernandez-Moran, on his return, persuaded the Venezuelan govern-ment to invest in an atomic reactor for his institute.

Then, in January, 1958, came a shattering blow. A military junta ousted the regime of Colonel Marcos Perez-Jiminez. For a single day during the coup, when all other officials in the deposed government had fled, Fernandez-Moran stayed at his post as minister of education and then turned over the government, as head of state, to the new re-

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gime. Then he, too, was persuaded by the new re-gime to leave the country with his family. His de-parture, however, was not without grace. He was given a lifetime diplomatic passport in recognition of his scientific and educational contributions to his Venezuelan homeland.

The Venezuelan scientist was cut off from his in-stitute just four years after he had founded it. After-wards, the institute's academic nature was altered from specializing in brain research to become a broader research and training center in science and applied technology. That was not the kind of insti-tution the "Wizard of Altos Pipe," as Fernandez-Moran has been called, had in mind when he pains-takingly planned it. He wanted to build a great world center of neuromental physiology on the Altos Pipe. But that was not to be, and that is his personal tragedy.

Fernandez-Moran became, in effect, a political exile. He went to the Massachusetts General Hospi-tal in Boston, where he organized the Mixter Laboratories for Electronic Microscopy. He served for four years as an associate in neurosurgery and was also a visiting lecturer in biology at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology and a research as-sociate in neuropathology at Harvard University.

In Boston, Fernandez-Moran began to focus his creative energy on improving the resolving power of the electron microscope. But it was not until he came to the University of Chicago in 1962 that he made a dramatic improvement.

The electron microscope uses a beam of electrons to illuminate an object instead of the conventional beam of light of optical microscopes. Magnetic fields focus the electron beam instead of the optical instrument's glass lenses.

Optical microscopes are limited in their ability to magnify an object by the size, or wave length, of light waves. Even the shortest of light waves is hundreds or thousands of times larger than some of the objects researchers want to look at. The most powerful light microscopes can magnify an object only 2,000 times, and can resolve objects no smaller than 2,000 A wide.

The electron microscope, invented about 40 years ago, pierced the light wave "curtain," and made it theoretically possible to see atoms. Electrons have wave characteristics similar to those of light, but their wave lengths are several hundred thousand

In the ultrahigh-vacuum bell jar, a thin film of metal is evaporated onto a glass slide. The film is used to convert black and white electron micrographs to color.

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In his early 20s, Fernandez-Moran invented the diamond-knife ultramicrotome, above. A modern version, right, prepares ultrathin slices of brain tissue for viewing under the electron microscope.

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times shorter. A beam of electrons, generated outside the microscope, is injected into the instrument from the top and directed by an electro-magnetic lens onto a thin specimen. As the particles of the beam pass through the specimen (which is the reason it has to be sliced very thin), they are scattered, but they are then focused by other magnetic lenses to produce an image of the specimen. Near the bottom of the micro-scope, the focused beam strikes a fluorescent screen, which transforms the electronic image into a visual one, seen through a small window.

A major problem in all electron microscopes has been the "thermal noise," or heat, generated by the electric current in the electromagnets that focus the image. Heat tends to jiggle the lenses and distort the image. Fernandez-Moran virtually eliminated this problem by im-mersing the windings of the electromagnetic lenses in liquid helium at temperatures of 4.2° Kelvin, just above absolute zero. At this low tem-perature, a phenomenon called superconductivity appears in the wind-ings. All resistance to the flow of electricity through them vanishes.

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A section of the electron microscope laboratory can be seen through the lenses of the laser optical bench. The bench is used to reconstruct 3-dimensional images from holograms taken by electron microscopy.

Thus, no heat is produced and current continues to flow indefinitely, even after the power is turned off. The heatless flow of electricity sus-tains a constant magnetic field and produces an undistorted image.

The superconducting electron microscope magnets at the University of Chicago are cooled by a huge refrigerator that occupies five stories of the Research Institutes. Liquid helium is a superfluid; it travels virtual-ly without resistance through the more than 40 feet of chilled pipe. Be-cause of this, the superconducting, superfluid microscope system will continue to produce undistorted images for nearly 30 minutes after the electricity to the helium pumps and magnetic lenses is turned off.

Fernandez-Moran has spent 12 years improving this superfluid heli-um system. His reward has been the ability to see crystalline lattices as small as 2.06 A wide and, in biological specimens, structures 3 A wide. In addition to eliminating thermal noise, he has reduced building vi-bration, another barrier to high-power microscopy, by mounting the nine electron microscopes in his basement laboratory on individual concrete blocks. The blocks are supported by springs and insulated from floor motion by shock pads.

Designing electron microscopes is the work of an electronic engineer or a physicist, rather than of a physician, but Fernandez-Moran's mo-tives arise from his medical training. "I was a practicing physician who was depressed by the utter futility of seeing patients die of brain tumors despite all our efforts. I turned to basic research with the desire to learn more about these tumors," he said. With the electron microscope, Fer-

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I -it The components of the power plant of the cell," the mitochondrion, were isolated and identified using the electron microscope. A model of a mitochondrion appears to the right of its textbook illustrations.

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nandez-Moran was able to see the structure of the nerve fiber in the brain for the first time.

Under the microscope, a filigree structure of the nerve's myelin sheath, which encases the nerve fibers, reveals a grouping of molecules much like that in a crystal. This paracrystalline order suggests to Fer-nandez-Moran that the brain itself is like a liquid crystal. "The discov-ery of the paraci-ystalline character of the myelin sheath was so impor-tant to me," he says, "since it meant that a major constituent of the brain was invested with exquisite regularity and elaborate, coherent, and meaningful design."

The electron microscope also revealed fibers that Fernandez-Moran postulates act as wave guides for electromagnetic energy in the infrared or ultrahigh-frequency ranges generated in the crystalline brain tissue structure. By this mechanism, the brain transmits an orderly beam of electromagnetic energy, much like a laser beam. Such laserlike energy, he believes, can be used to retrieve stored information (memory) from any part of the brain. Remembered images can be seen again and again in the "mind's eye" much like a hologram, the stored three-dimensional image produced by intersecting laser beams.

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In developing the tools to examine the ultimate structure of life—the diamond knife to pare thin sections of membrane, and an electron mi-croscope chilled by a superfluid helium system to magnify them mil-lions of times—Fernandez-Moran has built a new concept of the way living systems work. He believes these systems have a moving order, a "momentum order," through which energy flows and in which the chemical components function cooperatively. Possessing momentum order, the whole cell becomes greater than the sum of its chemical com-ponents. It becomes alive.

On this aspect of the Venezuelan scientist's work, the Austrian-born biochemist Hans Selye observed: "It is true that the further you take things apart optically, as Fernandez-Moran does, or chemically, the better you may understand life. But life is a correlation of parts which, in themselves, are not life. As [Albert] Szent-Gyorgyi has said, in the study of life you dive from the highest levels to the lower until life fades out and you have atoms and molecules."

Under the microscope, Fernandez-Moran could see how the compo-nents of living systems are arranged in a static order—life frozen under an electron beam. This shows him how the parts, such as the cell's mito-chondria that energize living systems, are arranged, but not how they cooperate as moving parts. This is somewhat like trying to diagnose an automobile's mechanical problem without starting the engine. Fernan-dez-Moran wants to see life at the molecular level, in its running state, with its engine turned on.

To understand life, he realized, he had to understand momentum order, which must be the underlying principle of all cooperative phe-nomena in nature. All living things are examples of cooperative phe-nomena—components that work together to develop and sustain the whole being. Such an investigation can take a lifetime or more. He has decided to devote the rest of his productive years to it. "The best part of my coming years I want to devote to nailing down momentum order and the nature of cooperativity," he says. "The real thrust of the next decade in biology is to explore cooperativity in the biological domain."

Cooperative phenomena, Fernandez-Moran believes, may also be seen in the functioning of human societies. One can visualize mo-mentum order throughout all aspects of life, in fact—in the reproduc-tion and genetic differentiation of cells, in the functioning of the brain for the storage (memory) and retrieval (recollection) of information, and in the rhythmic flow of a ballet troupe on the stage. Perhaps this principle divides life from nonlife. The ability to perceive momentum order in natural systems, in living cells, in nerve fibers, and membranes may reveal the way to cure the neuromental diseases of mankind.

Fernandez-Moran is convinced, too, that successful human societies exhibit a trait similar to the cooperativity that guides the flow of life at the molecular level in biological systems. Society in the United States, in particular, has exhibited such cooperativity throughout its short his-tory in developing so rapidly, he observed.

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After a long day in the laboratory, Fernandez-Moran meets his wife, Anna, for a leisurely stroll across the University of Chicago campus.

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On the way to their lakefront apartment, the Fernandez-Morans pass the newly constructed Joseph Regenstein Library.

"It may be regarded as the typical and most suc-cessful example of what I might call Homo-Cooper-ativity Phenomena," he said. "It is precisely this rare quality of being able to elicit the best efforts from individuals of all nationalities without distort-ing them in the process that accounts for the phenomenal success of the American team effort, ranging from the economic to the scientific and en-gineering cooperative projects. It explains why the United States now controls two-thirds of the world's capital, using only 5 percent of the world's qualified labor force to do so. Nowhere are conditions more favorable for attainment of true cooperative phe-nomena at present than between the Americas."

Perhaps Fernandez-Moran applies biological principles to social organization and functioning in the hope of unifying the two worlds. In this way, he became, as he puts it, "a wanderer between two worlds." His worlds are those of science in the devel-oped nations and education in the underdeveloped. "handicapped" countries. He still lives in b worlds, his intellect at work in his Chicago labor,i ry, his heart on Pipe Mountain.

Emotionally, Fernandez-Moran cannot aban d,) hope that someday he may again play a role in Ven-ezuela's scientific development. Latin America har-bors a virtually untapped source of singularl talented human beings, he told the American-Vene-zuelan Alumni Association in November, 1971, in Caracas and Maracaibo. If he has any political ambitions, they are tied to "a vital urgency to overcome the present wide discrepancy in the scien-tific and technological levels of development be-tween the Latin American countries and the more developed countries in North America, Eu-rope, and Eurasia."

Not only is he one of the most distinguished scien-tists of a country where science and politics mix, but he is also a member of an economic elite in a land that has been ruled by one elitist group or another since it won independence from Spain. His father. Luis, was an official in the Bolivar- Maracaibooil district. He is proud, too, of his Basque and Sephar-dic Jewish heritage and its admixture with Carib Indian blood. It represents to him an elite of exiles and suffering. Among his ancestors were two gener-als, Jose Trinidad Moran and Jose Rafael Urdane-ta, who both fought for liberation 150 years ago under Simon Bol(var. Fernandez-Moran is imbued

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At home, above, they are joined by daughters Veronica, left, and Brigida and the family cat, Bubbles. Left, Fernandez-Moran examines a rare book from his priceless collection.

with Bolivar's dream of Pan American union. "The Americas represent an indivisible entity. It will ei-ther survive as the backbone of this planet in a com-plete and voluntary cooperation between north and south, or it will disintegrate piecemeal," he said.

Despite his intense patriotism, Fernandez-Moran is not a political activist, but a dreamer of a Messi-anic deliverance of his people from the handicaps of poverty and limited education. Only in science is he an activist. But he is, as he says, "a prisoner of my dreams." Would he re-enter politics to realize them? Selye dismisses the idea. "Nobody as interested in science as he is could possibly be a politician," said Selye. "Yet, his patriotism is remarkable. Not many scientists have it."

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Among Fernandez-Moran's prized possessions are documents and awards from his diplomatic and scientific careers, above,

and a German telescope, be/ow, made more than 100 years ago

Looking to the future of his scientific work at the University of Chicago Fernandez-Moran admits that his hope of establishing a great brain Fernandez-Moran stands in front of a

research center for Venezuela may have been quixotic. He tends to

reminder of his past- view himself as fated to challenge the unknowable and seek the impos-

an antique map of his sible. On many occasions, he has met with reverses. But this quality of Venezuelan homeland. accepting reverses with grace and persistence is what Selye says he ad-

mires most in the Venezuelan. It might appear that the life style of Fernandez-Moran is confusingly

varied, almost chaotic. But he has been "inoculated against chaos," he explains, in the manner that children of the very poor in his native Venezuela were immunized as infants against poliomyelitis—by expo-sure to it in the squalor into which they were born. His varied interests are, in fact, related quite logically in his far-ranging investigations.

To the Venezuelan scientist, the microscopic world "is the key to the future." If, for example, the electron microscope could be used to make small objects appear larger, it could also be applied to make large objects look smaller. It could demagnify—reduce sheets of data to mi-croscopic size, for storage on microfilm. Perhaps this is what the brain does with data perceived by the senses from the environment. The brain may encode certain electromagnetic radiations in the spectrum of visible light, certain oscillations in the atmosphere it interprets as sound, certain molecules of gas it senses as odors, and certain tactile im-pressions produced by the sense of touch. These are stored somewhere in the billions of brain cells, retrievable on demand. In the brain, which is millions of times more efficient in storing information than a com-puter, a staggering amount of information is reduced to a submolecu-lar imprinting and stored.

Using his superconducting electron microscope, Fernandez-Moran could make a start toward realizing, in a synthetic information storage system, the storage potential of the brain. He and his laboratory team could reduce the printed page of a book 1 million times in a single im-printing, mount the print on an electron microscope slide, and store it for retrieval by remagnification. An entire book could be reduced in

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this way to the size of a dot, hardly visible to the naked eye. "Such techniques" he says, "make it feasible to think of storing the entire Li-brary of Congress miniaturized on a sheet the size of typewriter paper."

His ultimate goal in information retrieval is to duplicate the fine structure of the nervous system, down to the molecular level. The ulti-mate in the condensation of data is the DNA molecule, which contains the blueprint for the cell and the whole organism. These spiral struc-tures can be seen with the superconducting electron microscope. Fer-nandez-Moran believes that he can use the diamond knife and the elec-tron microscope to practice a rudimentary form of genetic engineering. The knife makes it possible to slice the DNA molecule and restructure it, thus reshaping the entity that evolves from it. Such microsurgery may one day free mankind from its burden of hereditary diseases.

He thinks eventually it should be possible to synthesize the compo-nents of nerve cells—to make prosthetic neural circuits that would re-pair or restore nerve, motor (muscle), and sensory damage.

It may also be feasible to hook up the human sensory nervous system to a computer so that a person could communicate directly with the machine. An airplane or spacecraft pilot might be connected, through sensory organs, perhaps in the fingertips, to his guidance computer to learn the relative position and attitude of his vehicle in space.

Tvisions of Fernandez-Moran are far-ranging ones, enhanced by an enormous body of specialized knowledge and uninhibited by fear of failure. He has been described as a "renaissance man" because of the diversity of his interests, because he is something of a classical scholar as well as a scientist and linguist. But the Wizard of Altos Pipe is essential-ly a modern scientist, working at the molecular pole of biology.

Selye dedicated a book, In Vivo (1967), to Fernandez-Moran, "As a token of my great admiration for his work on the finest particles of life." This is a mark of esteem, indeed, for In Vivo is a defense of supramolecu-lar biology, the biology of the whole human being, as opposed to Fer-nandez-Moran's focus on the microscopic details of cell structure.

"We stand at opposite poles and that is the cause of our mutual at-traction," said Selye. "He is quite prepared to lose perspective to get to the finest detail, while I am willing to sacrifice detail to reach the broadest perspective." Between these two great scientists ranges the whole spectrum of biological research.

One day, Selye relates, he visited Fernandez-Moran's laboratory. "I began to realize the grandeur of his scientific contribution. There was the latest model of his famous diamond knife, with which he could physically cut glycogen molecules into smaller sugars. Then there flashed the terrifying thought through my obsolete mind: Imagine this great genius using all his enormous intellect and knowledge to build an instrument with which to restrict his visual field 2 million times!"

But it is at such resolutions, in his tiny, submolecular, restricted world, that Fernandez-Moran believes the tools he has fashioned will make it possible to perceive the ultimate structure and order of life.

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Christopher Kraft By William J. Cromie

His decision-making skill and coolness

in crises helped to land men on the moon

Chris Kraft was sitting at the management con-sole in the Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston when the message came in saying things had begun to go awry. It was April 20, 1972, and the Apollo 16 astronauts had separated their lunar module, Orion, from the command module and were pre-paring to make man's fifth landing on the moon. Suddenly, Thomas K. Mattingly, piloting the mother ship, discovered that something was wrong with the backup control system for the engine that would bring the astronauts back to earth. He re-ported the problem to mission control, and Chris Kraft, new director of the Manned Spacecraft Cen-ter and veteran flight director, swung into action.

Kraft knew that it would be dangerous for the as-tronauts to stay in lunar orbit without a backup control system to get home in case the main system failed. Should both control systems fail, there

The Manned Spacecraft Centers director sits behind models of Skylab and the space shuttle.

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