When most people think about a population studies center, they imagine gloomy Malthusian statistics and birth control pills. When Roger Revelle, director of the Harvard Center For Population Studies, thinks about population, he worries about getting more protein to India, reducing child mortality, and using the energy of the Aswan Dam to cut the birth rate in Egypt.

In the old days of demography--the study of population statistics--the experts would have considered Revelle's ideas strange and alarming: A population center deals with improving the quality of human life; controlling the quantity of population incidental to this larger goal." But today most population experts would agree with this statement.

The population centers at Chicago and Princeton dominated the old guard of demographic study. They were limited in their activity to analyzing trends in population figures, rather than developing solutions for the problems they uncovered. But in recent years population studies have been revolutionized at new research centers, like the ones at Harvard, Michigan and Johns Hopkins.

When the Harvard Center for Population Studies was established in October 1964, it initiated a more ambitious program than any other center in the United States. Its membership includes engineers, divinity students, psychologists, computer experts, medical researchers, educators, economists. They study the ethics of birth control, the physiology of the reproductive system, and the allocation of resources in poor countries to further population control.

The job of directing these diverse activities requires a man with an equally wide range of experience, and Revelle is a distinguished natural scientist as well as an experienced administrator. A former oceanographer and director of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography, he was honored by the National Academy of Sciences in 1964 for "Outstanding Contributions to Oceanography." The same year he became Dean of Research at the University of California. As science advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall in 1962, he served as chairman of the Pakistan Project, which conducted a general review of the agricultural conditions in West Pakistan. Also, he was one of the five permanent foreign members of the Indian Commission on Education, which is now concluding its final report.

Harold A. Thomas Jr., Gordon McKay Professor of Civil and Sanitary Engineering and a member of the Center, worked with Revelle on the Pakistan Project and was instrumental in bringing him to Harvard from California. "He is such an effective director of experts," Thomas has said of Revelle, "because his genius allows him to become the second best expert on anything in a short amount of time. He is on top of everything that goes on at the Center."

Thomas himself, who is studying the relationship between resource utilization and population change in underdeveloped countries, is engaged in one of the Center's most spectacular projects. Through his research, he hopes to develop efficient computerized methods for bringing population control to underdeveloped areas.

From Thomas's viewpoint, the greatest benefit from applying computers to large socio-economic problems like overpopulation lies in their ability to consider a vast number of background factors in terms of an equally large array of alternative actions. A tremendous backlog of information on actual socio-economic conditions in different areas has to be acquired before a computer model for development can be produced. Presently, the center is operating one field station in Egypt; Thomas hopes to establish other outposts in Sweeden, India, the Pacific islands. Latin America, and Africa.

The project in Egypt is sponsored by the Ford Foundation as a pilot study to determine the best of the water from the High Aswan Dam and its subsequent effects on Egypt's population crisis. The water could be used as irrigation for expanded agriculture or as hydro-electric power for industrialization. If it were used to industrialize--the course Thomas favors--a general immigration from farms to cities would be started Past experience has shown that populations are most amenable to birth control techniques during this period of transition. Also, Thomas said, throughout history, whenever a new water technique was introduced, a population change accompanied it.

The industry resulting from the utilization of water power can also be planned to reduce the population problem. For instance, Japen helped to stabilize its birth-rate by drawing women into the working community. Industries can thus be created that use techniques which appeal to women's special abilities. So if planners have a choice, they should build an electronics industry, which makes use of the sustained precision effort for which women have an aptitude.

The computer model which Thomas envisages would make analyses of this sort but on a fantastic scale. Even for small nations, several man-years of effort would be necessary to incorporate all the fine-grained statistics need for an effective plan. Although each nation requires a different population policy in accordance with its particular development program, the computer could easily adapt its core of "hard knowledge" gained from research in the field.

The varying factors which determine the population structures of different countries are also the subject of two research projects conducted by David MacA. Heer'50, assistant professor of Biostatistics and Demography. In the first study, Heer is concerned with the Soviet Union's demographic transition from an underdeveloped nation with high birth and death rates to an industrial society with low vital rates.

One significant fact which Heer has discovered in his research is that although birth and death rates in the USSR and the U.S. are approximately equal, total births per woman of child-bearing age in Russia are somewhat lower than in the United States. This paradoxical situation occurs because there are more Russians than Americans in the prime fertility age, between 20 and 29 years old. The Great Depression drastically reduced the prime fertility age group in America today.

But there are other factors contributing to Russia's low fertility. The terrific strain of its rapid socialization is partially responsible. Although party propoganda has always encouraged a high birth rate, the use of women in the work force and extended period of inadequate overcrowded housing have depressed the birth rate. In addition to these natural causes of a low rate of birth, there are, in fact, indications that a majority of the Soviet population favors birth control, either through conventional techniques or abortion. Heer believes the government legalized abortions in 1955 only because doctors were already handling a great many illegal abortions and because the flaunting of the law threatened Party morale. No matter what the party dogma says, Heer sees a definite change in the Soviet leadership's attitude toward population limitation: "It appears that they've decided it's just too expensive to raise their birth rate."

Heer has discovered other factors that mark a decline in the birth rate of a nation which are common to both Russia and the United States. They are concurrent with industrialization and improved medical techniques.