I vividly recall the campaign mounted in Southern California in the '50s by Staff Warren--and his ally, Willard Libby, a new member of the UCLA faculty--stressing the importance of building bomb-shelters.

Believe it or not, this situation had its comic moments. Libby's house was a block from mine in a Bel Air canyon. When the flood rains came, the mudslides simultaneously filled my house and his well-stocked bomb-shelter (food and booze) from floor to ceiling.

Many of us felt that if we didn't have a nuclear war, Staff Warren might feel that his life had been wasted.

People were filled with fear--of nuclear war, of aggressive Communism, of spies, of enemy hordes in Korea, of litigation (there are incredible stories about how Warren and others in the AEC kept secrets in part for this reason), and of the raging politics of McCarthyism.

I am simply suggesting that when solemn wise men like Admiral Lewis Strauss, Staff Warren and General Leslie Grove made decisions in those years their last concern was the interests of downwinders. In my view that set the tone. There was a deep reluctance to do anything that might look timid or weak.

Something like that, I suspect, may have led the best of our scientists to an unwonted boldness they would later regret.

I am glad that a Faculty committee will be investigating what happened at Harvard in those distant days. I hope it will give appropriate thought to the ethical standards prevailing in those years. William S. Beck, M.D.   Professor of Medicine   Tutor in Biochemical Sciences   Fellow of Quincy House