Harvard's Nobel prize-winning biologist, George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, has joined the late Sen. Everett M Dirksen and the Archies in the battle for the top of the record charts.

Released last week by Caedmon Records, the album-entitled "A Generation in Search of a Future" -contains the speech which Wald made at a symposium called by M. I. T. professors March 4 to protest increasing ties between science and the military.

In the speech-which he delivered extemporaneously-Wald. discussed the causes of student unrest. "I think I know what is bothering the students." he said. "I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future."

Listing the Vietnam war, the threat of nuclear war, and the growing power of the military in American life as causes, Waid said, "Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed."

The forty-minute address electrified the audience at M. I. T. and several days later the Globe printed the entire text on its editorial page. The paper was deluged with requests for prints, and eventually distributed more than 85,000 before discontinuing printing it because of costs.

Other newspapers-including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Post-ran the text and the New Yorker sold more than 55,000 reprints of its "Talk of the Town" section, in which they had printed a lengthy excerpt.

Caedmon Record Co, a New York firm which specializes in spoken recordings, then asked permission to make an album from a tape made at the symposium by a crew from WGBH. and Wald agreed.

"I have not refused anyone permission to use it." Wald said. "I consider this as in the public province."

The record company said it had no figures on sales, since an advertising cam-

paign in cities where the reprints had been successful will not begin until next week. Coop officials, who have 200 of the albums in stock, plan a window display of the records and reprints of the speech.

Wald also said yesterday that another of his speeches, given in May before a Washington meeting of a group called Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace, had been made into a film.