Roar

56-425

September 17,  1969

To the Editor:
The Maw ?brk Times
229 Nest 43rd Street
New York, New York,

Dear sir:

The triviality of the scientific returns fran the ran-on-the-moon
prograa is finally becoming evident men to those -- mostly non-
scimitists -- who had been misled by publicity and by the play on
popular imagination indulged in by Coverment and the mass media.

llm moon rock samples, about which full columns of news me released
by NASA, cannot even answer the few questions some geologists are
interested in solving.

It is important that this be made clear because of the current
discussion about big versus small Mars-landing programs -- probably
3 billions a year for 30 years or 10 billions a yrar for 15 years.
This at a time when the Institute of General Medical Sciences of the
NfH has announced substantial cuts in new health-related research
projects, a nms that has received much less prominence than any one
of the rock-ncms from NASA.

Bven apart from the social benefits that American health research has
been in the habit of delivering, such as polio, measles, and flu
vaccines and hundred other medical advances, almost any one of the
hundreds of projects that the National Institutes of Health cannot
fund has Intrinsic scientific interest at least as great as a trip
to the moon -- in terms of the nmber of intelligently concerned
pee+ and additim to htaaan knowledge.

Technology, however sophisticated, is not science unless its goal is
knowledge.  Intellectual priorities are at least as important for
human culture as socio-economic priorities, and both are being
distorted by the space program.

It is time the American people be told frankly that the present space
program is technically impressive, scientifically trivial, culturally
misguided, and socially preposterous.

S, E. Luria, M.D.
Sedgwick Professor of Biology

The writer is a manber of the National Acaday of Sciences, the American
Philosophical Society, and the American Acadamy of Arts and Sciences.