Helen Gideon was an Indian, an Indian physician, and 

 she and John Wyon worked together in the Punjab, in the 

 Ludhiana district of the Punjab. Khanna was the market 

 town. She died just about a year ago of cancer. Like many 

 physicians, she was a very humane and loving person. 



They had worked in these villages there, ostensibly 

 trying to introduce modern methods of birth control . But 

 they were handicapped by the Indian Ministry of Public 

 Health, even in their first project, which would only let 

 them introduce foam tablets or some other rather ineffective 

 method, and condoms I guess too, but not the I.U.D.'s and 

 not the pill. Then they wanted to go back and make a 

 resurvey, and they did. 



Sharp: Is that the Medak? 



Revelle: No, that was a re-survey of Khanna. 



Then they wanted to start in this new project in the 

 Medak area of but they were never able to do that. The 

 Indians never would agree to it. 



Unlike John and Helen, there was a man named Taylor — 

 I have forgotten his first name, who had worked in the 

 Punjab for years. He was a member of the Johns Hopkins 

 School of Public Health. He was born in India, he was 

 brought up in India, and was much more able to adapt to the 

 post-independent India than John was . 



Anyhow, the money when I was there for that project 

 came from the NIH, from the population center of the 

 National Institutes of Health. As I remember, we never got 

 much money from NSF or from NIH either in the social science 

 aspects of the center. 



Hilton Sallereck working on human reproduction, had 

 reasonable size grants, and Warren and Gretchen Bergrin, 

 working in Haiti, also got fairly well supported. 



In general, at that time, there were really three or 

 four different attitudes toward the population problem. One 

 was that of the biologists, people who worked with other 

 animals and other critters, exemplified perhaps best by Paul 

 Erhlich. He thought it was terrible, that human beings were 

 going to breed themselves into a catastrophe, and that's 

 sort of a general position of biologists even today. They 

 think of human beings as analogous to other animals, and 

 they aren't, as anybody who has looked at the social 

 sciences knows . 



Sharp: Because they deal with choice and other — . 



Revelle: Well, they have cultural evolution. They can evolve 



culturally within a hundred years or even less, and, of 

 course, they have memory, so the past means something to 

 them and they can think about the future. Other animals 

 don't really think about the future. So because of this 

 memory and this consciousness of time, thinking about the 



