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where the new Community College of Micronesia will be built. It is a well 
chosen site, and the road out to it, still under construction, promises 
to be a fine job of road building. Ponape looks like a shanty town and 
gives little sign of the neatness and planning that British and French 
Colonial towns display, but there are many healthy signs of Ponapeans 
developing their own businesses and of large scale economic advance just 
in sight. With huge new wharf facilities under construction, large cargo 
ships arriving that so dwarf the Alpha Helix they look as though they could 
lift it onto their upper deck with their cranes, and with sewage going in 
and piped water already in, I suspect that within a decade the town will 
be transformed and show great economic advance. 
The blue-ring surrounding the whole optic disc in many Anutans, which 
we discovered there, certainly warrants reporting. It was really blue, and 
although many more had a medial and lateral crescent, almost enclosing the 
disc, a few persons had a full ring totally encircling the disc. The bluish 
pigment mottling of the entire retina which often went with this is also 
interesting. It is a shame that we were unable to photograph it. 
Ponape to Pingalap — departing Ponape November 22, 1972 
Raymond Roos left a very worried young man. The 11 insulated, aluminum 
foil-covered boxes containing all the remaining 200 blood clots and 1500 
frozen sera and all virus isolation specimens over the packing of which we 
have slaved for the past week are off with him on a collect GBL shipment 
to Rosen in Honolulu. The tremendous imposition this means upon Leon is my 
major concern now, and whether he can manage to clear release of the ship- 
ment tonight at midnight in Honolulu is a further problem. But, at any rate, 
they are off to where there is a good possibility of preserving them. 
It is recorded here that the sera are all in fine shape, never having 
been thawed since they were first frozen immediately after separation from 
the clots, usually in well under 24 hours from drawing, and clot retraction 
was permitted for from two hours to ten hours after venepuncture, the short- 
er times being rather inadequate, at room temperature. 
The clots were all stored at low Revco temperatures of below -70°C — 
because of an unrecognized faulty temperature gauge we did not realize that 
the Revco was still colder than -38°C. They remained at this temperature 
from immediately after separation of serum until the "thaw" during which 
they slowly warmed up as the Revco broke down unknown to us, to reach a 
"cool" temperature, considerably below ambient temperature but completely 
thawed, for a period of one or more days... we do not know whether it 
could have been longer, but circumstantial evidence indicates that it 
probably was not over 2-3 days, and it may have been under one day. They 
were then promptly frozen again in the -15°C walk in freezer, and for only 
the period of packaging for a few hours did they raise in temperature, but 
most did not thaw at all. They were for only eight days or so at -15 C 
and then packed in dry ice here at Ponape. . .and so they are going off. 
