The electronic Peace Corps.

THE ELECTRONIC PEACE CORPS

A CHILEAN MAN lay dying of cancer;his doctors wanted to know if a drug might help.

Once they would have Telexed thePan American Health Organization's offices in Washington. Then the PAHO would have mailed abstracts. The reply might have taken weeks to reach Chile --while the man twisted in pain. The delay might even have killed him.

But now the doctors had a newtool, a personal-computer network. Within hours, the Chileans had electronically received thousands of words of abstracts and decided they could safely prescribe the drug.

At long last the personal computer,the favorite machine of American yuppies, is beginning to help the people who need it most: those in poorer countries. Even now, small computers are catching on in the Third World, helping in such fields as medicine, disaster and famine relief, education, agriculture, general economic development, and government.

Computers offer a number of benefitsto poorer countries. Personal computers can be operated at a fraction of the cost of Telexes and can avoid the months-long delays that international mail service at its worst can bring. Personal computers permit poorer countries to tap into electronic libraries --databases crammed with arcana on topics ranging from wheelchairs to evolutionary chemistry. Electronic spreadsheets and record keepers can help financial planners juggle scarce resources. Delegates from more than twenty underdeveloped nations are expected to attend a conference on micro communications this month at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. Not surprisingly, various foreign-aid agencies are experimenting with computer networking--not all of them American.

My own interest in using microcomputersin poorer countries arose out of my efforts to reach Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer, via a microcomputer over the phone lines between Alexandria, Virginia, and Sri Lanka during the writing of my book Silicon Jungle. What a struggle! We faced every conceivable problem from ethnic rioting and a national emergency --delaying the delivery of Clarke's Kaypro II--to overloaded phone circuits. I finally succeeded. So did Peter Hyams, the MGM/UA director, who needed Clarke's advice during the scriptwriting of the movie 2010 (based on a Clarke novel). Intrigued by this success, I have since served as an unpaid consultant to a project aimed at bringing scientific libraries to Sri Lanka --electronically.

It is personal computers that aremaking the difference. If nothing else, they are cheaper and easier to maintain than larger machines. A white-tiled room and an army of technicians are not necessary to operate a Kaypro II in the middle of the Sudan; the computer revolution puts local people more in charge of their technical destinies. There are already tens of thousands of personal computers--otherwise known as microcomputers or micros-- in poorer countries.

Personal computers recently enabledKenya to bring out its national budget on schedule for the first time in years. Kenyan officials worked with the figures on several IBM microcomputers with big built-in memories, or hard disks. Liz Shay, a microcomputer specialist with Thunder and Associates, an AID (U.S. Agency for International Development) contractor in Alexandria, Virginia, told me: "It's much larger than dropping a few micros here and there. They've computerized their entire budget process.' In fact, the Kenyan government has succeeded so well in training programmers that it suffers the same woes that states and municipalities do in the U.S.--that is, private employers are luring away good people with higher salaries.

A leading U.S. pioneer in computercommunications in poorer countries is Jerome Glenn. In 1982 Glenn was working for a private foreign-aid group, helping to put together a plan to assist the economies of Caribbean nations. A consultant for the group was on assignment in Haiti and Barbados, and Glenn wondered how the group could finish the plan quickly without the consultant's flying back to Washington. Mails were slow; Telex was too expensive; telephones did not pass on facts as precisely as written messages would.

SO GLENN'S consultant hooked upfrom Barbados via a suitcase-sized computer terminal. The success of the endeavor inspired Glenn. He helped Control Data Corporation set up a computer net for people in poorer countries. It failed. "They talked to the South Americans in computer jargon,' Glenn says, "and they had year-old information in their computerized database.' So he established a network of his own, Carinet. Glenn flew from country to country, persuading seven underdeveloped nations to tap into American computer nets that use packet-switching technology, which lets dozens of computers talk over a single line. Theoretically someone in the U.S. can send a thousand-word computer message anywhere in the world for less than a dollar, if the right equipment is in the destination country. The next time a Manhattan banker taps a few keys on his PC and sees daily updated figures from Africa, he might thank Glenn. Packet switching has now reached about seventy countries, through government expenditures, AID grants, or private local capital. Systems can cost as little as $30,000 in a small country, and can speed messages over the wires at one-tenth the cost of Telex.

As useful as this new technology isfor American bankers, it's even more useful to entrepreneurs in poor countries. Consider a potter in rural Malawi, who wanted to know if he could change the shape of his ceramic pots slightly so they could be used as electric insulators. The reply came back in a day, and a factory in Malawi is now churning out insulators. Microcomputer networks can also keep producers in Third World countries up to date on market conditions. Farmers in Jamaica, for example, have used computer-sent information to avoid burdening the American market with the pumpkins they were planning to grow. A privately funded Miami-based foundation for Third World development warned: Plant peppers, not pumpkins. The farmers listened and turned a profit.

HIGH TECH turns out to have humanitarianuses as well. Electronic libraries can take some of the burden off men like Greg Dixon. "In Latin America most people have a problem finding anything in print on which to rely. I've seen a medical school in Ecuador with fewer than two hundred textbooks,' says Dixon, a staffer at Partners of the Americas, a group that provides technical help and cultural and athletic exchanges. Dixon, who works with the handicapped, spends a great deal of time answering phone calls and letters from the information-starved. "A lot of requests we get,' he says, "are like, "I've got a kid who has cerebral palsy and he loves to read, and we need something to help him flip the pages.' We want Latin American resource centers to get this information directly. People like me are gatekeepers. We're overloaded and can't handle the volume.'

But the single most important applicationof micro networks may be in the field of medical research. A six-nation medical-research network started by Baylor University Medical Center, with funding from the National Cancer Institute and Apple Computer, has started a computer net to speed up cancer research. Scientists with more patients in more locations to work with will be better able to compare unusual cases. Hence microcomputer networks can become doctors' tools just like microscopes and stethoscopes.

The Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Riode Janeiro is among the world's leading organizations studying infectious diseases. One target of international research, inevitably, will be AIDS. But even more important to the Cruz Institute right now is Chagas, a disease afflicting eight million Latin Americans. Named after the Brazilian doctor who described it, the parasite, spread by a beetle-like insect, attacks the heart and central nervous system causing heart failure, sometimes before the doctors even identify the true cause. Some fear Chagas may spread to the United States--just as AIDS reached us from Haiti and Africa; among other things, recent arrivals in the U.S. might sell Chagas-sullied blood. The beetle-like carriers, albeit uncontaminated, have even shown up in Maryland and in the Dallas area. In Brazil, thanks to a grant from Apple Computer, researchers hope to fight Chagas partly through microcomputers. They will laser-scan the gelled speciments from Chagas patients, and, as bits and bytes, the facts about the genetic material will enter an Apple computer. Then the information will travel over a computer network to the United States and other countries for analysis. No longer will the Latin Americans have to wait days and days for their northern colleagues' latters. Almost instantly a researcher in Brazil will be able to send a message to counterparts from Venezuela to Texas.

There are some risks involved in theworldwide spread of microcomputer technology. Silicon chips, of course, cannot automatically impart morality or democracy, and the new technology can make oppressive regimes more efficient and deadly. But the benefits-- both political and economic--far outweigh the risks. Oppressive regimes everywhere fear the openness of micro communications; the Soviet Union's computer backwardness, for instance, is partly due to the totalitarianism there. It has quickly become a truism that a micro network is like a printing press: a way to spread information fast. Microcomputers need not even be connected electronically to do speed communications. The fanciest computer printers--the equivalents of which will find their way even into poorer countries over the next two decades--can spew out copy as fast as many Xerox machines.

A lot has already been done topromote the international use of microcomputers, both by private groups and by various governments. The U.S., however, has been slow to catch on. When asked how microcomputers are faring at the hands of budget planners at the Agency for International Development and elsewhere, Roger Nicholson, former worldwide training director of the Peace Corps, told me: "Funds have been cut back dramatically.'

What we need is an electronic peacecorps, to call attention to the benefits of microcomputers. An electronic peace corps could help people in poorer countries use our databases and also set up their own. Also, it could match up foreigners needing help with Americans willing to give it via computer networks and otherwise. An electronic peace corps could emphasize medical research and other work that would have the most effect on the lives of ordinary people. It would be a logical way to help fund networks such as the one that the Chagas researchers are using. Above all, the EPC would closely monitor the spending and effectiveness of U.S. and foreign groups it funded. "Without training and spare parts,' warns Roger Nicholson, "microcomputers will be like the bulldozers that we send overseas, only to see them rust.'

The joy of personal computers isthat a little money goes a long way. Thousand-dollar microcomputers today can do what mainframes did just a decade or two ago, and an electronic peace corps could contract with existing international computer networks to reduce investments in large machines. Properly supervised, an electronic peace corps could use technology to stretch our foreign-aid resources, not tax them.