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Show Fossils Intrigue Bright Young Scientist-Farmer One of 40 Talented Youth Honored With Trip To Washington; Many Ponder Careers As Atomic Researchists. By BAUKIIACE Nwn Anaty.it and Commentator. r rxi! ; ' , ' ' I - '' I i I WNU Serving, 1010 F.yc Street, N.W., Washington, O. C. He knew what a sphygmomanometer sphygmomanom-eter was u.serl for; that a decigram equals 1.5132 grains; and that septicemia and anaphylaxis are different. dif-ferent. Besides that, he collects fossils fos-sils enough to Q 11 the farm kitchen at his home near Ellens-burg, Ellens-burg, Wash. That's why 18-year-old Jim Gibson got a free trip to Washington, Wash-ington, D. C, where he ate buffalo steak at the zoo; drank tea at the White House; gave congress a critical criti-cal once-over; and listened to Llse Neitner, physics wizard, talk on atomic energy. .Tim Is one of 40 bright young high school seniors selected as finalists in the fifth annual science talent search, sponsored by Science Service Serv-ice of Washington, with scholarships offered by Westinghouse Electric company. Sixteen thousand scientific-minded boys and girls, from every section of the country, took competitive examinations on such things as sphygmomanometers and decigrams; wrote essays on "My Scientific Project"; were interviewed inter-viewed by leading scientists. Three hundred of them won special recognition; recog-nition; 2G0 were given honorable mention; and 40 "finalists," Includ- fossils under the bed so long as they I don't interfere with Jim's cooking, j Yes, Jim does most of the cooking, but he's deprecatory on this score, J saying his culinary exploits de- j pend largely on a can-opener. Likes Collector i Of Brains Girls? Well, to appeal to Jim, they'd have to be as smart as Lise ! Neitner. The little gray-haired femi- I nine scientist whose research led directly di-rectly to the development of the atomic bomb, impressed him most of anything or anybody he saw in ! Washington, with the exception ol ! the cyclotron at the bureau of stand- ! ards. However, there was one girl j he met at the Science Talent institute insti-tute who he admitted was "interesting." "interest-ing." She collected brains. He knows all about running a farm and he keeps bees as part of his 4-H club work, but Jim Gibson isn't keen about farming as a living. liv-ing. He prefers fossils. And he's casting a speculative eye on the field of nuclear physics ... as are well over half of the scientific-minded scientific-minded youngsters who came to Washington this year. Incidentally, at the same banquet, Science Service Director Watson Davis mentioned a few "firsts" this filth group of young scientists had chalked up. They ate broiled buffalo buf-falo steak without a qualm after viewing the live variety at the Washington zoo; they prepared a "talk back" report of their opinions on the atomic energy and Kilgore bills to be submitted to congressional congression-al committees . . . and among the group was one Missourian, said Mr. Davis . . . the first Missourian, he added, who had ever gone into the White House and had not come out with a federal appointment. There is a strange paradox in congress con-gress and it may cost the Democrats Demo-crats the pro-tern presidency of the senate. It's the exact reverse of the "unholy alliance" of today the coalition between the southern Democrats and the northern Republicans Repub-licans and this is the way some of the crystal-gazers on Capitol Hill expound ex-pound it: k - i James Gibson There have been no real issues before be-fore the country over which the voters could tear their hearts asunder. asun-der. But there have been some bitter bit-ter ones within congress and among the Democrats in the senate especially, espe-cially, which have caused incendiary incendi-ary intramural political friction. Senator McKellar, Democrat of Tennessee, has been, in the eyes of some of his more progressive colleagues, col-leagues, a brake on the wheels of what they consider their progress. Senator McKellar has sturdily and steadily bucked administration legislation, not merely the Fair Employment Practices bill, but other measures which the "libera1" "lib-era1" element on both sides of the aisle have supported. Nobody denies that after the next election the Republicans Re-publicans are going to get some of those 17 seats in northern and western west-ern constituencies away from their Democratic opponents. They may get enough of them so the parties will be at least more evenly balanced bal-anced even in the opinion of the more conservative prognosticators. That is half of the proposition. The other half is the growing wrath of some of the liberals on the Democratic Demo-cratic side who are very sore at McKellar for deserting the party line. It is not out of the picture that enough of these liberals will be willing will-ing to kick over the traces and vote for a Republican president pro-tem or at least vote against McKellar and thus produce the strange but possible phenomenon of a representative represent-ative of the minority party presiding presid-ing over the senate. This is not a prediction but It is the presentation of a paradoxical paradoxi-cal possibility, granted the trend of the times becomes the course of tomorrow. to-morrow. The FCC must decide whether the new telephone recorder destroys the telephone's privacy. It might keep people from wasting telephone time, and think of all the things you wouldn't say if you knew they were going to be on the record! For one thing, it might make people more sympathetic toward radio commentators. lng Jim Gibson, came to Washington, Washing-ton, D. C, to attend the Science Talent Tal-ent institute. I met Jim at the banquet which wound up the hectic weekend of Interviews and sightseeing tours, and asked him how he'd hap--pened to start collecting fossils instead in-stead of stamps, birds' eggs, or matchbox covers. Jim, a ruddy, rumpled, serge-suited farm boy, scoffed at stamps as "dull." Fossils Fos-sils aren't. One Fossil 20,000 Years Old Why, just this year, he was nosing nos-ing around some cliffs in his part of the state of Washington, and he came upon an interesting rock. That is, it would look like a rock to you and me. Jim saw something embedded em-bedded in it. Maybe a bone. He and his fossil-minded companion hacked out the rock, and with considerable effort, lugged it into their car. It weighed 120 pounds. At home, Jim "liberated" what he had seen embedded em-bedded in the rock. A small piece of wood. He took it to a scientific professor friend of his,- and learned that what he had found was a 20.000-year-old fossil. Jim was as excited as if somebody had presented present-ed him with a brand-new 1946 model auton"i":le. The serious, brown-eyed youngster young-ster tosses decades and centuries around with great ease. Over the mushroom soup, he dug around in his crowded pockets and produced an odd-looking object. "See this?" he asked. "Um," I said. Another piece of rock. "It's a shark's tooth," Jim explained. ex-plained. "It's eight million years old. Dr. Foshag of the Smithsonian Smithson-ian Institution gave it to me." I hurriedly rolled the conversational conversa-tional ball back to 1946. "What does your family think of your fossils." I wanted to know. Well, it turns out that Jim, and his father, a dairy farmer, "batch it." Mr. Gibson has no objections to |
