In what she describes as the "austere surroundings" of a small apartment at 4200 Cathedral Avenue, Washington, D.C., President Bunting, following an established 'Cliffe tradition, is taking her year off.

As the first woman and the first biologist to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, Mrs. Bunting's year off is hardly a year of rest. It's not hectic, she insists, but it is faster-moving than life at Brattle Street, and it is busy.

On a typical day, a Commission car picks Mrs. Bunting up at 8:30 a.m. and takes her to one of her two offices-"usually I, or at least my secretary, know the night before which one it will be." One office is at Commission headquarters in Germantown, where the 2000 members of the Washington staff carry out the daily business of the AEC; at the other, in the center of town, she and the other Commissioners confer with members of Congress and coordinate the AEC's activities with those of the rest of the government.

Since it is the mammoth task of the AEC to administer $3 billion worth of contracts with private businesses and universities, these conferences with Congressmen are quite frequent. Proposed contracts or old ones up for renewal invariably benefit or ignore various local interests, any one of which is likely to be near to the heart of some legislator. In addition to their individual duties, the five appointed Commissioners meet "as often as necessary and sometimes every day" to deal with questions of general policy.

Despite her frenetic Washington activity, Mrs. Bunting talks about her new job with all the girlish enthusiasm of any Cliffie describing her year away from the grind: "I'm doing more reading than I've done for years. The first month I tried to go through everything that came to my desk--staff papers, letters, everything. I found it took a little more than a full day to get through it all--I've since learned to read selectively."

Mrs. Bunting pooh-poohs attempts to build up the symbolic importance of her position as the first female Commissioner, and she is irritated by journalistic attempts to characterize her as a militant crusader for women's rights. Far more important, she emphasizes, is the fact that the President has for the first time appointed a biologist to the Commission.

As for the professions of the other four Commissioners, one is a physicist, one a physical chemist, and two are lawyers. "It's really quite an ingrown group--four of the five of us have offspring at Harvard or Radcliffe." And the fifth? "He doesn't have any children."

Until recently, Mrs. Bunting explains, the primary concern of the AEC has been to control and consolidate the use of atomic energy, and this concern has been reflected in the occupations of the Commissioners. Her appointment indicates that the AEC is turning its attention to the biological effects of the use of atomic energy as well.

But an appointment of only a year is too short a time to do anything of lasting importance for the Commission, Mrs. Bunting feels. She foresees that the real benefits of her year off will be in the insights she gets from watching people "at points of control" in government and industry. And already she has plans to use what she has learned in what she regards as her primary role, that of an educator.

"An educator can't just keep doing the same things better," Mrs. Bunting says; a good educator has to have insights into the future because he is preparing people to live in a future world. "Most people tend to mentally put away the bomb without really thinking much about it," she continues, "because they're scared." When her appointment is over next July, she will look for ways to aid public understanding about atomic energy.

Mrs. Bunting has not given up being an educator to work for the AEC. Through "informal contacts" she is often asked about problems involving federal educational programs, and she has been asked to work with a new inter-departmental committee on educational planning.

And she is not completely severed from Cambridge. She confers with Acting President Mrs. Gilbert and other college officials by phone, and she commutes back every other weekend to teach students from her former seminars who are continuing their projects.