The Last Aggie Joke
Texas A&M is going to save the world. No kidding.
Dr. Gary Smith was clearly concerned. The meeting had begun at 2, and here it was nearly 3:30 with his turn to talk nowhere in sight. A genial man with a shiny bald head, he sat with three of his fellow professors from the Animal Sciences division of Texas A&M, waiting to explain their new discoveries to the visiting reporter. Dr. Smith waited patiently while Dr. Tom Cartwright (this is the kind of place where all PhDs are called “Doctor”) gave his chart-and-lecture presentation on the Herd Dynamics theory of cattle management. He began to fidget when Dr. A. R. “Tony” Sorensen elaborated upon the new frontiers in bovine reproduction. Finally, unable to sit still any longer, he bolted from the room when Dr. William Ellis started in on the nuances of ruminant digestion.
Five minutes later he was back again, but seeing that Ellis was still going strong, he slipped out the door and returned just in time to explain his own “Texas A&M Tenderstretch” system, a new way of suspending freshly killed beef carcasses so as to cut down on the effects of rigor mortis and make tough meat more tender.
“I sure hope you’ll excuse me for running in and out like this,” he said as he began. "Some of my students are working on a project over in the next building, and I like to see how they’re coming along. They’re making a 55-foot frankfurter. It’ll be a world record.”
Yes, there are big doings out in Aggieland. They have world-class hotdogs, and the buns to match. They have hermaphroditic cucumbers, they have two-story onions. They are making highways out of garbage and peanuts into milk. They have the spittlebug on the run. They are counting insects by computer, they have peered into the recesses of the pine-beetle’s antennae. They are growing lettuce in moon soil, so as to be prepared when the first lunar farm gets underway.
Under that farmland sky, amid the gentle zephyrs from the swineyard and the music of the marching Aggie band, there is a miracle underway that has nothing to do with beating the University of Texas in football. If the Family of Man ever has reason to thank our state, it will not be for the Astrodome or the chicken-fried steak, but for oft-ridiculed, much-maligned Texas A&M. The university best known for its shaved-headed, brown-shirted Corps and a massive inferiority complex is producing the innovations that will feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and, not incidentally, enrich the people of Texas. The last shall be first, and the lowly Aggie shall earn the thanks of all.
Some people have no respect for historical cycles. For more than a year now the rest of the nation has been seething about Texas’ prosperity during these officially declared Hard Times. And if Massachusetts and Connecticut, with their brown-out summers and their long unemployment lines, feel a generalized ill will toward the people of the sunny and booming Southwest, imagine the special edge of resentment that Harvard and Yale, now moaning for relief from whatever source they can find, would feel twisting in their entrails if they knew what was happening at Texas A&M. For, in the middle of national academia’s darkest hour, the Aggies are lolling in the sunshine of big funding and fast growth, outstripping even their traditional Southwestern rivals in the bigger-is-better sweepstakes.
The fastest growing university in the nation right now is conveniently located between Houston, Dallas, and Austin; there were 21,463 Aggies last year (a quarter of them women), which is 34 percent more than just two years ago. Not only have the Aggies swollen in number, they have also improved in quality. One hundred and twenty-nine National Merit Scholars enrolled at A&M last fall, more than any other public institution in the state. (Overstepping itself, A&M claimed for a while that it had more of these prize students than any other university in Texas; when Rice got news of this, it asked for, and received, a formal apology from A&M’s president.) While College Board scores have been declining through the nation, at A&M they have been rising (some say they could not fall), to a mean of 1057 for last year’s freshmen.
More germane to our story is the boom in A&M’s research projects. When the 1973 returns for research allocations came in, the Aggies had cracked the National Science Foundation’s Top Twenty chart of universities receiving research and development grants. A&M’s $33.2 million that year was more than any other school in the South or Southwest, and was exceeded in the upper reaches of the chart only by such traditional feeders at the public trough as MIT and the University of Michigan. (Significantly, while A&M was 20th in the overall standings, it was number three in industry-supported research.) The final rankings for 1974 are not yet in, but A&M’s $37 million, an 11 percent increase in one year, is almost sure to move the Aggies even further up the charts.
At a time when the federal government seems to sponsor research projects in direct proportion to their pointlessness and obscurity, the work done at College Station seems admirably concrete. There is an almost infinite variety to the projects underway at A&M, from basic research into the biting habits of the shark, to development of a new typewriter which will supposedly foster linguistic unity among the peoples of the Indian subcontinent. About one-third of the research budget goes to the Texas Engineering Experiment Station and the Texas Transportation Institute, the latter having pioneered many of the most important highway-safety innovations of the last decade, including breakaway sign posts and padded abutments. The TTI, which is now branching out into such alien fields as mass transit and railroad planning, was also behind the experimental garbage highway built near Houston, a project which was working fine until city incinerators were shut down to cut pollution, thereby creating one of the less likely of our modern shortages, a dearth of burned garbage. Ever adaptable, the men of TTI have turned to another raw material sure to be abundant in coming years—the sulphur which smokestack “scrubbers” remove from the factory exhausts. Tests indicate this sulphur could be a cheap and sturdy substitute for asphalt in road construction.
The list goes on and on: the Aggies are deeply involved in medical research, a good deal of it in cooperation with the Baylor College of Medicine. They are working on leukemia drugs, on cyclotron treatment of cancer, and on a variety of bioengineering devices designed to make life easier for the handicapped patient. (These include special cushions that ring a buzzer when a patient has been sitting on one portion of his body too long, reminding him to move and therefore avoid bedsores; and plans for artificial limbs which can be attached directly to the wearer’s skeletal frame.) They are even creating an institute of comparative veterinary and human medicine.
Landlocked A&M is, improbably enough, one of the nation’s first four “sea-grant” colleges; and has one of the strongest oceanography departments anywhere. Its researchers are exploring the sea for minerals and sources of protein. When oil tankers crashed off the Strait of Magellan last year, it was an A&M researcher who flew to the scene to survey the effects.
The Aggies are trying to predict earthquakes and tornadoes; they are plumbing the earth for new sources of geothermal energy. And, in direct response to one of the major worries of modern man, they are working on computers which should take away some of the risk when air traffic controllers guide airplanes into port.
For all of this diversity, the Aggies’ heart—and half of their research money—is in the soil. A&M has the good fortune to be the home and headquarters office of the state Agricultural Experiment Station, part of a federal network set up nearly a century ago. There are 36 “research units” scattered throughout the state in places like Beeville and Weslaco and Chillicothe, but the central ganglion for the system is right in College Station.
Many of the people involved in this work show a somewhat unseemly haste to point out that the people of Texas may be shortchanging their own agricultural future. As one flyer points out, “little Connecticut” invests $12.30 of state funds in agricultural research for every $1000 of its modest farm income, while big Texas invests only $1.30. Nonetheless, 1973 figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that Texas led all other states in federal funds available for agricultural research, its $4.98 billion narrowly edging out North Carolina, while in overall state and federal funds it is second only to California.
For anyone who has ever slaved the summer days away over a pitiful stand of tomatoes and beans, the result of all this research money is a spectacle of never-ending delight. There are also many more projects underway than the few I will discuss (and, strictly speaking, the first of these is not “agricultural” research but “food engineering”). These three however—oilseed research, sorghum improvement, and cotton breeding—illustrate not only the conceptual joys of research, but also some of the more tangible benefits the world may expect from Aggie miracle workers.
The Marvelous Tamunuts
Journalism is a harsh mistress. In her service, men have been known to abandon hearth and home, track down the most elusive quarry, even dine with politicians. But never before, for me at least, had it involved eating tamunuts.
“Tamunuts,” Dr. Karl Mattil said, as he tossed them across the desk at me. The object of his comment was a handful of darkish pellets enclosed in a small polyethylene sack. Several cards were attached to the sack with a lot of home-lettered propaganda explaining just what the contents were. “They’re really toasted glandless cottonseeds, but we couldn’t call them that,” Dr. Mattil went on, quite jauntily. “Try one.”
I live to tell that tamunuts (after Texas A&M University) are not at all bad, though not quite the equal of Dr. Mattil’s cottonseed-chocolate chip cookie. Such a testimonial would be considered faint praise by the men of A&M, for they have set their sights higher than enticing mere journalists to choke down their wares. The tamunuts are part of their plan to feed the world.
Both Dr. Mattil and the tamunuts are affiliated with the Food Protein Research and Development center at A&M, the tamunuts as products and Dr. Mattil as director. He is a lean man in his fifties, and at first glance his thin lips and precisely parted hair give him an air of fastidiousness like that which radiates from photographs of T.S. Eliot. After just a few minutes of listening to his schemes, however, it becomes clear that the more appropriate photographic image is that of Andrew Carnegie beaming in front of a blast furnace, for he and his colleagues are can-do men of the first order.
My Library
