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Science Editor Fred Golden first met Carl Sagan, this week's cover subject, in 1969, when TIME did a story on possible earth contamination from the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission. Golden, who had just come to the subject after writing for the World section, was eager to develop a list of specialists he could count on for expert advice and story ideas. He struck gold with Sagan and his gift for putting complex ideas into compelling language. Golden remembers him as a "very accessible and articulate young scientist who had a marvelous ability to get quickly...
...better scientifically informed public would be far more capable of dealing with the scientific questions which now confront us--like nuclear energy." He has immense sympathy for the efforts of popularization made by those like his ex-brother-in-law ("It's all very incestuous, you know") Carl Sagan...
...Broca's Brain, Sagan...
...Since Sagan clearly wrote the book for a general public, he should have trodden gingerly when he encountered political and religious issues. His consistent bumbling in these spheres is the unintentional leit-motif of Broca's Brain. When in doubt. Sagan shies away from the secular implications of his lofty ideas. In the course of declaring, for example, that we will one day have robots for garbagemen (at current prices, the human version are "expendable"). Sagan mentions hastily that "the effective re-employment of those human beings must, of course be arranged; but...that should not be too difficult." Such...
...future of science in general, and of astronomy in particular, has not tickled the public fancy quite the way Sagan and others thought it would. Broca's Brain constitutes an effort to revive interest. But in blundering as he does. Sagan suffocates his own cause. "Science," he writes, "is not a body of knowledge, but a way of looking at the world." Ironically, while Sagan touches dramatically on this body of knowledge, he never approaches, save in the lonely chapter on Velikovsky, that elusive point of view