The basic concept and mission of the Biophysical Sciences Group originated not at Minnesota, but in the fertile scientific climate of Washington University in the early 1930s. The belief that a new major integrated area of science and technology The Biophysical Sciences - was ripe for emergence from its parent disciplines of classical Biology, Physical and Chemical Science, as well as Mathematics and its new implementation by computer, was easy to see within this concentrated group of diversified excellence. Physics and Chemistry had emerged in much the same way from Natural Philosophy a few generations before.

The roots and potential growth pattern for a new major scientific epoch were discernible within this unique group of diversified excellence at Washington University. This distinguished cluster of approachable and ever tolerant faculty was willing to cooperate as official and unofficial advisers in setting up and participating in a multidisciplinary - not interdisciplinary - program for a Ph.D. study including full majors in Physics, Zoology and Mathematics. Representing Physics were Professors Arthur Hughes and Lee Dubridge; for biology and Medicine were Professors Herbert Gasser, Joseph Erlanger, both Coris, Caswell Grave and F. O. Schmitt, with Professor Frank Rubb representing Mathematics, basic and applied. The array of Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors conferred on these individuals and the scientific and academic achievements of this group is history.

The thesis program leading to the design, development and demonstration of a fully functional iterative analog-nerve-axon simulating computer was novel for its day when computers were nearly unknown and mathematically realistic electrophysiological models of the nerve transmission line were uncommon. It is notable that this model had to he doctored to prevent the transmembrane potential from reversing sign during the excitation impulse, for it was firmly believed by authorities that this could not happen. This dogmatic belief changed a few years later in the light of contrary experimental evidence.

Out of this venture and associated biophysical research side trips came various innovations; an electronic hysteretic trigger circuit, the emitter follower chopper DC amplifier and differential amplifier circuitry, heat pipes, the thyratron stimulator and precision thermostat, the linearized CRC sweep and various other technical concepts. There was also the growing suspicion favoring~ the feasibility of partial excitation of nerve in defiance of the all or none law.

The scene then changed to the Marine Biological laboratories at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where J. Z. Young, who had recently discovered the squid giant axon, F. O. Schmitt and I had agreed to meet to test with some precision this new electrophysiological wonder, the giant axon, obviously evolved by nature to promote basic nerve science. Using a semi-computerized nerve precision stimulation and recording system, we clearly demonstrated the suspected partial excitation and incremental-decremental propagation.

Going on to postdoctoral study at University College, London, where Professor A. V. Hill directed perhaps the only so-named Biophysics Laboratory in the world, I was allowed full participation in his research program studying nerve and muscle quantitatively. As Secretary of the Royal Society, he graciously gave me full access to the weekly deliberations of that famous body. Thus fertilized, the unified Biophysical Sciences concept grew. In collaboration with J. Z. Young, Bernhard Katz - now Sir Bernhard - William A. H. Rushton, Alan Hodgkin and R. J. Pumphrey, it was possible to do the first really quantitative measurements of the giant axon, and with Katz to prove experimentally the mathematically predictable, but physiologically unaccepted, phenomenon of inter-axonal phase locking of impulses propagating in adjacent axons.

Biomimetic analysis and the need for measurement instruments faster and more sensitive than those mechanically fabnicatable led to development by active synthesis of galvanometric and other mechanical recording systems obeying second order linear differential equations where desired values of inertia, damping and restoring spring constant could be achieved by multi-derivative feedback with choice of sign. A summer of work at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Plymouth, England, with this early semi-computerized equipment revealed much new information about the nerve process.

In response to a request in 1939 to A. V. Hill, as a leading light in "Biophysics", from Dean Tate, the grand old man of physics at Minnesota, for a candidate to establish at Minnesota an experimental program merging Physical Science with Biological Science, I was invited to come as instructor in Zoology and Physics. Professor Maurice Visscher, possibly influenced by his brother at Washington University, very likely had a hand in this invitation. The appointment was already identified with Biophysics, with fully symmetrical membership in both departments, reporting jointly to Dwight Minnich and J. W. Buchta, heads respectively of the two departments. Limited office and laboratory facilities were provided in both departments and a teaching and research program on nerve axon, membrane electro physiology and biological ultrasonics was initiated with a substantial undergraduate teaching load to earn my $2500 annual salary.

An offer from Karl Compton, president of MIT, in 1941 invited me to move our biophysics operation to MIT. Minnesota, in response, offered tenured status as associate professor in Zoology and Physics, which was accepted.

There was already important Biophysical research and development at Minnesota in several widely scattered locations and sub disciplines. Karl Stenstrom pursued an active research in Radiation Biophysics, E. J. Baldes was well established in Biophysical research at Mayo and was fully cooperative in building an integrated faculty group including Mayo. Earl Wood was already distinguishing himself in Biophysics Bioengineering at that time with his giant flywheel human-rated "G" tester. C. F. Code and Julia Herrick willingly participated. Burr Steinbach - general physiology - and Maurice Visscher in human physiology, who was one of the instigators of the plan, also conferred their blessing on the formation of a loose graduate Faculty Confederation to consolidate Biophysical Science academically at Minnesota.

Now war became imminent and biophysical science missions had to be mothballed and indulged in only by subterfuge. We accepted personally from Vannever Bush, head of the National Defense Research Council, soon to become CSRD, Office of Scientific Research and Development, one of the first contracts under his program. We were to develop solid state electronic controls and measurements via the Uranium Semiconductor Thermistor strategy. This was necessarily highly classified and required establishment of "secure' laboratory quarters in the sub-basement of Physics where we had the bare earth floor concreted and built a "Dungeon". A number of inventions, incidentally including the immediate direct-reading clinical thermometer, emerged from that project. My wife had to be hired on the project in order to obtain military clearance but at a salary of zero dollars per year to meet Minnesota nepotism rules.

Dean Tate had become co-chairman with Dean Pegram, of Columbia University, of Division 6 of NDRC-OSRD relating to Undersea Warfare Technology and Countermeasures. As the loss of merchant shipping to German submarine torpedoes grew to ghastly proportions, he asked me to abandon my research and teaching duties to come to Quonset Point Naval Base where PRY "Catalina" bombers were based, to try to develop, on an extreme emergency basis, means for combating this menace. Cut of this original group of six principals, there eventually grew the Airborne Instruments laboratory, now a large industrial R & D facility.

Within one month we were able to get into the air working MAD prototype detector systems depending upon sensing the tiny magnetic anomalies in the earth's field due to the presence of a steel submarine. The somewhat dubious procedure by which some of us as civilians were rather aggressively participating in these experimental patrol missions and operating the breadboard equipment on the navigator's desk to control dropping of distinctly unfriendly 300 lb. depth charges was eventually solved by a device familiar to modern computer scientists. By being designated as a "simulated" Navy officer - "sharing the responsibilities and privileges ordinarily accorded a Commander" we would operate more or less legitimately and even wear a uniform if necessary without losing civilian status.

As the submarine menace was gradually reduced, the laboratory, which had now moved to Mineola, Long Island, N.Y., turned, beside producing MAD equipment and training pilots, to urgent Division 15 problems of Military Electronic Countermeasures.

Dozens of inventions and developments occurred during these years, many based on biomimetic designs from Biophysical Science. A contact analog pilot training attack simulator abounded in these concepts and contained many elements of the now growing art of analog computer design. Several hundred Navy pilots were trained with these devices.

One of the most valuable developments of this period was the procedure for computing a display of data that had been received in one coordinate system and transformed into another. For example, three dimensional data could be shown as it would appear when viewed from different azimuths, elevations and positions of origin. Biophysical computation was developed to generate separately the left and night viewpoints as seen binocularly to give stereoscopic vision. In effect the airplane attack or victim pilot could see from his own in-plane viewpoint, data acquired at a remote ground based radar station and transmitted to him by radio. These coordinate transformations have become stock in trade of modern computer displays. A biomimetically designed automated simulator was developed to plot automatically the radiation patterns of all antennas on U.S. Naval aircraft. We also designed jamming equipment, useful at the reinvasion of Europe, based on physiological and psychological principles. Airborne Instruments laboratory developed a whole division assigned to one of my students, Walter Tolles, who later developed one of the first computerized attempts at cancer diagnosis.

Returning to Minnesota in March of 1947, it was necessary to pick up the pieces of the idealistic Unified Biophysical Sciences project. Substantially expanded facilities, eventually encompassing much of the south half of the basement floor of Physics, were made available but joint participation in the staff activities of Zoology and Physics was preserved. The Zoology professorship was not declared invalid and resulted in faculty meetings even after the most unusual decommissioning of the department of Zoology. The Biophysical Science seminar, in cooperation with General Physiology, was initiated in collaboration with Burr Steinbach and held its weekly meeting in the Zoology building. After Steinbach's departure from Minnesota to head the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), it was continued under the auspices of the Biophysics Group until its absorption into the expanded Biophysical Sciences Graduate Faculty program. From the time in 1958 when magnetic tape recording became economically available, these seminars were recorded and are currently a valuable student and faculty resource in emerging Biophysical Science. The seminars moved to the TNCE building in 1965 when greatly increased space became available in this "temporary" building from WW II and Electrical Engineering accepted Physics' prime responsibility for keeping the group's official fiscal records and provided an additional appointment as Professor of Electrical Engineering and subsequently of Biomedical Engineering to provide a wider field for the Biophysical Sciences to recruit cooperation.

A semiformal biophysics faculty in the Graduate School was established early after our return to Minnesota in order to provide a vehicle for students doing Master's or Ph.D. degrees in the multidiscipline of Biophysical Science as against those desiring to work within traditional departments doing work with Biophysical flavor of one or another area.

Students for the Master's degree were expected by common faculty consensus to demonstrate modest qualification in physical, biological and mathematical science to about the level of a student entering Graduate School with a major in that area. As the emphasis was to be on quality, not quantity, Plan A programs with "Little Ph.D." thesis projects were encouraged so that only students primarily oriented toward teaching or those who would suffer a severe hardship by completing a thesis were invited to do Plan B Master's. These students were expected to write three reasonably comprehensive Plan B papers under supervision of appropriate faculty members.

As we were well acquainted with the one-quarter memory span student who can cram to pass exanimation only to forget most of the material within a few weeks, qualifications for entering the Master's and Ph.D. programs were not based on courses passed, but on ability to pass comprehensive, but relatively elementary, oral and written examinations across the board of Biophysical Science but specialized in the area of expertise of the student, especially for the Ph.D. student. Some students had ample qualifications derived from research, alternative training as in medical school or teaching experience to enable them to pass portions of these examinations without formal course attendence.

Membership in the Graduate Biophysics Faculty was always made to include expertise in the constituent parent disciplines and their major branches, but several of the members never used the program for their advisees, possibly because of less demanding alternative programs available. An effort to establish within CBS at Minnesota an integrated undergraduategraduate training program was unenthusiastically received. This tentative program was related to the effort within the Biophysical Society to create a national modular training program with NIH training support. Perhaps the effort was before its proper time and politically inadequate as it did not adequately provide for the suitable preservation of the autonomy of several academic empires already building within the multi-interdiscipline academically.

The Ph.D. was conceived as requiring proof of basic competence at about the Master's level in the basic Biological, Physical and Mathematical or Computational fields. No fixed schedule of courses or credits was to be required beyond the mininum required of all by the graduate School.

The Biophysics Group carefully avoided formation of a Biophysics Department as this entity would have to reside in one or another school or college and would thus lose the symmetrical multidisciplinary aspect of the program. As every professor with membership in the Graduate Biophysics Faculty maintains at least one other professorial appointment through which his fiscal arrangements are allocated, the existence of a 'group' nowhere identified administratively presents no special problems except that it possibly becomes no one Dean's or Department Head's concern. Several members hold multiple faculty appointments. I, for example, retain the full professorial status in Zoology and Physics granted in 1949 even though the Department of Zoology has been dismantled through quite unusual administrative shifts. Appointments as professor of Electrical Engineering and in Bioengineering permit participation in departmental affairs and advice to students in those cases who do not want to be "regular" Biophysical Science students but wish to work in a parent department under its rules.

Returning to the Biophysics group and its history; soon after our return to Minnesota, a major SVEC (stereovectorelectrocardiology) program was begun, hoping to apply the computer reresolution and spatial display techniques developed for the Military at AIL to Vector Cardiology. This development soon yielded an analog stereoscopic CRC display that was on-line real-time instrumented and was organized around the new Transfer Impedance Vector Point Function representation of biological current-moment distributions and the development of orthogonalized and normalized lead systems. This development and its ramifications into computer diamostic vector and scaiar cardiology were to continue for over a quarter century featuring strong cooperation with Dr. Ernst Simonson in the Minnesota department of Physiological Hygiene and with Nagoya University through a long series of excellent post-doctoral research scholars. This work introduced computerized utilization of anticipatory fiducial mark averaging, bucket Brigade smoothing, deconvolutional signal "undistortion" and several other innovations.

In 1948 we introduced the concept of a human-participating analog computer for on-line real-time characterization of the nerve axon. Two individuals in this case recognize and track a best fit Lissajous pattern in amplitude and phase, thus furnishing information which the computer converts to a complex domain phase velocity spectrum.

Largely on the basis of this introduction of biomimetic mathematics and its dedicated computer counterpoint usefully into basic nerve research with good results, ONR undertook to support for a decade with very permissive interpretation of "Nature of the Excitation Process in Biology" this line of Biomimetic Biophysical research and invited me to serve as chairman of the ONR Biology Advisory committee for about four years. This line of endeavor led to the establishment with AIBS - the American Institute of Biological Sciences of the BIAC committee, a committee to introduce and facilitate use of biophysical type instrumentation and its mathematical theory counterpart in basic Biological Science.

Perhaps on the basis of these efforts and my participation in the satellite design and mission selective committee of the NAS IGY (International Geophysical Year) committee, I was asked by NAS to assume chairmanship and to organize the first Bioastronautics conference in Washington immediately after the first Sputnik was successfully launched by the Russians. This competition to devise and implement good biological space experiments was an excellent opportunity to bring the Unified Biophysical Sciences concept into action. Biological Science could now demand the availability of instrumentation and computational equipment heretofore financially out of reach.

For two years I served as chairman of the NAS (National Academy of Sciences) Joint Armed Forces Bioastronautics Council. I was assigned the responsibility, with the other civilian members of this committee and military representatives and aides from each of the services, for visiting by assigned SAM aircraft all of the major research and development establishments in this country that worked in this scientific and technical area. We were to provide communication, guidance and coordination to those efforts to get Biophysical insights usefully instituted in this new field.

Establishment of major categories of R & D and establishment of corresponding projects in many academic and industrial laboratories was a major part of this mission. The advisory function continued on a lower key within NASA after that organization was established.

Serving as chairman of the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) PCME (Professional Group for Medical Electronics), it became evident that this pocket of high quality engineering talent was largely instrument oriented and claimed little authority or responsibility for a broader Biophysical Sciences Technology interpretation of the Institute mission. Two innovations were introduced that changed this attitude considerably, both immediately and in subsequent years after the merging of IRE with AIEE into the new IEEE that persists today. I managed to get the name changed from "Biomedical Electronics" to "Biomedical Engineering" which soon extended its scope appreciably. In addition I introduced the class of associate membership, much in the spirit of the Minnesota Biophysical Sciences Glroup. One no longer had to meet all the professional qualifications of the parent (EE) field to participate, but must be a qualified person in some aspect of the BME related field. This move undoubtedly influenced the eventual emergence of the Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and Biolopy.

We organized and held in Minneapolis in 19__ the first full scale National meeting of the JCEMB in this new image with a thematic meeting focus on introduction of computers into Biomedical research and clinical utilization. This meeting pattern has expanded and is established today but is showing signs of factional splitting as "old guard" discovers that its many affiliative societies with different technical foci can no longer be kept in line with traditional policy.

By the late 50s it became evident within our Biophysical Sciences group and in several other quarters that the new Biophysical Science had to be defined, given national and international scientific representation as well as academic, political and industrial clout.

An orpanizational half-week session of about 60 participants at the University of Michigan organized by F. O. Schmitt served to establish Biophysics as a contender for support within NIH and to develop a tentative cateaorization of the principal subdisciplines within the science. With substantial funding from NIH and its new Biophysics Study Section, a full scale month-long meeting was held under these same auspices on the campus at Boulder, Colorado, to provide a guide to Biophysical Science as conceived at that time by a concensus of established participants. Each primary participant made an extended presentation in the meeting and provided a chapter for the resultant monograph published both in the Reviews of Modern Physics and as a subsidized book deliberately underpriced by Wiley Press. The title of this publication - Biophysical Science -was adopted subsequently by several departments and publications.

By 1956 the need for a professional society to represent Biophysical Science became evident and a peer group nominated four of us - Samuel Talbot of Johns Hopkins, Ernest Pollard of Yale, Kenneth Cole of NNRI and me to undertake this task. Each of us nominated two additional members to the committee to fill perceived gaps in coverage and we then, with some financial assistance from the AFOSR and help from volunteer members, notably Ralph Stacy who became secretary of the society, put together the first meeting of the Society at Columbus, Ohio. The Society was duly organized with Robley Williams as president under strong NIH support as a member of the Biophysics Study Section and I had the opportunity to serve as its organizing vice-president and as council member for several years. Yale Press published a substantial monograph embodying prime portions of the material from this meeting. This year the society celebrated its 25th anniversary.

It was the strong drift of the Biophysical Society toward Molecular Biology and away from Bioengineering and Mathematical Biophysics during its first years that urged the strengthening of the ACEMB to maintain balance. It was hoped that the Alliance ACEMB would form an umbrella for these several organizations much as AIBS and AlP do for Biology and Physics, but this has not yet been fully achieved.

In 1957 several of the senior members of the JCEMB began to feel a lack of professional quality in the membership and management of the Joint Committee and proposed the formation of a somewhat elite membership society, the Biomedical Engineering Society, with its own journal for this group. Qualifications analogous to those for senior membership or even Fellowship in the Physiological Society, The American Physical Society or IEEE were proposed.

I publically opposed the formation of this society on the basis that it might become a splintering force within the already scattered ACEMB -Biophysical Society. The society was formed, however, and for lack of a better candidate who could more or less equitably represent the many different factions without strong prejudice, I was asked to be their founding president.

During these days when Biophysics and Bioengineering were finding themselves, we were able to contribute one design that has proved quite successful. IEEE headquarters felt that its Biomedical Engineering Group was not assuming the leadership that it might and so organized a review committee to examine its policies and suggest avenues of improvement. I introduced, and got passed, a recommendation that the CEMB group be allowed to become a semi-autonomous society within the umbrella of IEEE but not directed specifically in sponsorship or financing and that it be allowed to affiliate with other counterpart societies. This recommendation was rejected by the central management without thanks.

The advisory committee was again established, carefully hand picked to avoid generating wrong recommendation, but again by mischance its new chairman, possibly influenced by recent award of the Norlock prize or because of personal acquaintance, asked me to be a member and so again it recommended the "society" structure which was again rejected. This design was, however, adopted a short time later and now many of the principal groups, notably the "Computer Group", have become "Societies" only recently joined as a "Society" by the Biomedical Engineers. At present the Computer Society has gained enough membership and influence to request - as yet unsuccessfully - a change in the name of the Institute to emphasize its importance. Election as Fellow of the IEEE has possibly provided a little extra leverage toward the Unified Biophysical Sciences view.

Knowing that the Biophysical Sciences group had skills in Biomagnetics and field measurement, the Navy, through its Bureau of Radiological Health, asked me to organize and chair in 1971 an ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) committee under AIBS to determine objectively whether the fields of the "Sanguine" ELF installation proposed for northern Wisconsin would have deleterious effects on humans, domestic animals, agricultural products or wild life. Our committee found no evidence that the Sanguine fields constituted any demonstrabile or even very plausible detrimental effects. There were marginal suggestions that the fields might interact with orientation mechanisms, e.g. in fishes and earth microorganisms. Shock and interference risks would be comparahle with those of a rather low power "grid" transmission line.

At Minnesota we did a very carefully controlled study to determine whether fields can be perceived by humans irrespective of any possible beneficial or detrimental effects. This work, much of which was reported in a Biophysics Ph.D. thesis by Dr. Tucker, demonstrated dramatically how tiny artifacts could tilt statistical studies severely. In our own studies, presumably quite well controlled, initial experiments showed a P value against chance greater than 10*18 power. This would seem a strongly convincing set of evidence that an effect existed. Further refinements brought the P value into the 0.5 range of complete insignificance. Ability to see the controller's face shifted the P value by a factor >10*6 power.

These results were republished by the National Academy of Sciences in its subsequent massive report on the "Seafarer" system, as Sanguine has been renamed, as convincing evidence that no perception occurs whether there is or is not an unperceived effect. Biophysical Science must learn that scientific "proof" of the safety or hazard of a particular project is poorly organized to gain public acceptance.

The Biophysical Science group, as an opening gun toward marketing and popularizing its wares, has undertaken to develop useful measures of "Quality of Life" that are dimensionally appropriate and parametrically adjustable for individual personalities. The "Santosha index" (from Euphoria in Sanskrit) is named for this quantitative pursuit of optimal life and represents a biomathematical area we, as Biophysical Health Scientists, have neglected in our effort to do convenient epidemiology. Introduction of the dimensioned and scaled inequality into Biophysically related decision and policy making has opened up a new approach to this family of problems usually resolved by adversary policy procedures and judicial eloquence. Prime targets for our efforts in this direction are the regulatory agencies and their need for implementable algorithms for cost-benefit computation in the context of individual and community acceptable risk. Our group is working hard at developing means for valid epidemiological studies of acceptable risk coefficients for quantitative cooptimization. Only quite sketchy theory exists for such processes.

During the early 70s our group became involved in examination of health care delivery and the possibility of improving it significantly, both economically and medically, via algorithmic Biophysical Science insight and research. A round-the-world trip permitting examination of such procedures in over a dozen countries with widely differing cultures and economics allowed strikingly workable new approaches, especially the introduction of systems invention concepts and feasibility tests.

Moving the patient's complete medical record out of scattered doctors' offices and hospital record rooms and into the patient's handbag or wallet offers an enormous systems benefit and financial savings running into the annual billion dollar class with improved safety and quality of care. This appears far superior and more secure than an alternative plan for storage of all records in a huge central repository. This personally portable whole life medical history is slowly gaining momentum. Emerging as it did just after I had been serving as the bioengineering, electronics and computer member of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation's Scientific Board of Directors, it was only reasonable that this corporation's expertise in large scale systems engineering and marketing be brought to bear on our Bioengineering systems problems. The very powerful systems engineering capabilities of the Kwajalein Radar and Missile base in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific were intrigued by this problem when I visited with them and willingly provided valuable assistance.

Introduction of the medical concept of Biodynamic as against Homeostatic diagnosis, monitoring and therapy constitutes a Biophysical Science challenge of enormous potential that we are roughing out and providing with Biomimetic computers and theory. Essentially it involves incorporating the dynamic responses of the person within his environment as useful symptomatic and regulatory data to be utilized rather than inconvenient noise to be ignored to permit assumptions of constancy. A little work has been done under the flag of Chronobiology toward this end, but the difficult development of biomimetic episodal mathematics remains.

It will be a long haul but a rewarding one to rewrite health care in these new algorithmic forms. We have a very fruitful beginning in the VCRS technique of phase-locking human physiological and CNS functions with the aid of simple computers. This technique, originally conceived of as a way of "cleaning up" the spatial vector electrocardiogram to yield an Epitome Vector Cardiogram, does that job well, but it also opens up a wide range of non-invasive access to biological feed-back and feed-forward loops without dangerous loop opening.

Years ago we discovered that similar electrodes placed on human skin of a group of individuals and in a variety of anatomical locations exhibited an enormous range of impedance and offset potential; a serious matter with increased reliance on electrographic medical testing and monitoring. A factor of nearly a thousand separates the extremes of the distributions which are basically log-gaussian so that ordinary mean and standard deviation measures are nearly useless. Women approach twice the impedance of men over a large sample but have individual variations of similar relative range. This old work and new refined efforts have led to the electronically active electrode and may promise very inexpensive low noise electrodes in the near future. This is especially important if electronic monitoring is to become widespread and often carried out in the home or in the work place out of the care of professionals.

Rewriting of the conventional equations of circuit theory in a form suitable for dealing with distributed tissues and surrounding media has opened up a major new biomathematical and biomedical research area. The transfer impedance theory of the l950s, rewritten into a form suggested by the classical Maxwell-Helmholtz reciprocity theorem, leads to a volume integral of the scalar products of two of these transfer impedance vector point functions normalized by local impedivity. This body of theory leads into the new and rapidly developing Mutual Impedivity Spectrometry of tissue as a diagnostic technique with a deconvolutional form in the foreseeable future. This forms the basis for an "Atlas of Tissue Impedivity" now slowly accumulating. The computer scanning of a phasor frequency spectrum on the living tissue noninvasively is not achievable without effort.

Perhaps election to the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame was a causal influence, but a relatively small investigation into the Biophysical formulation of a theory of invention has become extremely productive in suggesting routes to systems innovations in which device invention is done largely to order rather than by strokes of genius. Some of the inventive process can even be computer automated. Attention is now being given to courses deliberately teaching invention and innovat-ion. New forms of higher education are also evident in this examination of invention, some of them reasonably easy to implement. We discover a distinct hole where what we call level 3 education should prevail. It should be possible to develop tutorial means bearing on this problem area, but level 4 remains essentially a problem with none but intuitive solutions.

A technical area of innovation stimulated by this investigation of invention is that of microcomputer-assisted electro surgery. Ordinarily electrosurgery depends heavily on the hard-wired circuits that produce cutting, coagulation or fulguration currents of patterns and intensities that have been empirically found to be effective. By introducing the techniques of EPROM-guided microcomputer control, we can have the best characteristics of many machines or those of personal surgeon's choice at the touch of a button. These devices require only good hard engineering effort to realize, but the possibility of discovering fundamental principles of the plasma arc and exploding local tissue involved in electrosurgery remains to be examined. This is now feasible with fast computer access and data logging. It is even feasible to introduce heuristic designs into this usually fixed format instrumentation.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering a few years ago opened up direct access to glaring evidence of our deplorable state of technological and social misuse of resources, both technical and environmental, but even more important, of human resources in our competitive battle to keep ahead of internal and external competition.

This system of rational technology utilization and transfer can be examined in the Biophysical tradition with rugged models that approximate reality and are manipulable. We must remember, however, that intellectual understanding and conviction is only the opening gun in a large campaign of marketing and politics to sell a new idea.

Out of this examination has emerged the skeleton of a design for a local microcosmic test of theory applied to this area of social science, health science, technology, law and public opinion. It is more than a little related to marketing and regulation as well.

Minnesota happens to be an ideal local region in which to test the feasibility of a Biophysical Science devised approach to this problem. We have high technology and computer industry but also agriculture and manufacture. We have a locally accessible state and local government as well as a large and diversified University representing academia as well as R & D.

Based somewhat on this theory and the invention theory, and taking large pieces out of the success patterns of rapidly progressive foreign nations - European and Asiatic - a compendium of design for a CITU or Center for Innovation and Technology Utilization has been evolved. This design emphasizes strong and transponsive cooperative interaction between the University, local industry and commerce along with direct participation by government and regulatory agency representatives.

This class of interactive center requires development of strongly catalytic procedures that retain autonomy while encouraging exchange. A first order approximation to this system design is now being marketed to the local participants with the hope that its excellence will be discovered and its inevitable deficiencies remedied. A massive compendium describing and documenting this design has been prepared. The introduction to this compendium serves as a readily available epitome of the design. This CITU proposal can be thought of as a massive popularized attempt to initiate a national program based on several decades of development of the Unified Biophysical Sciences concept.

This present report attempts to illustrate in broad brush form an attempt to utilize a Biophysical Sciences group in a large University as a long-term facility, not primarily as an empire building process or as a simply tutorial or technical research group but as a means for furthering as rapidly as possible the creation of a new scientific entity, Biophysical Science with theoretical, basic research and applied or engineering aspects of enormous social value to the individual, the nation and to the advance of science.