Carl Sagan 1 "No one has ever succeeded in conveying the wonder and joy of science as widely and few as wells." That praise was given on Carl Sagan when he was honored with the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award given by the National Academy of Science. On 20 December 1996, Carl Sagan died at age 62 of pneumonia. In my experience, he was much more than a prominent popularizer. He was a brilliant scientist with solid achievements. 2 I first met Sawn at a meeting of the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, were he took part in a session on the Viking Mars Project. When Viking landed on Mars in 1976, it was at a site he had helped select. Then I interviewed him in Washington, D.C., after Mariner had sent back spectacular pictures of the Martian surface. Sagan had acted as a head of one of Mariner’s imaging teams. The interview, "Close-up Photos Reveal a Turbulent Mars," appeared in Popular Sciences in September 1976. 3 I had originally headlined the story "The Red Planet Isn’t Dead," but Sagan asked me to change it. "I’m in enough hot waters with some of my colleagues as it is," he said, referring to the anger felt by some scientists over his growing fame as a popularizer. That fame reached a zenith during his 1980 television series "Cosmos," with an audience of 400 million people in 60 countries. Along the way, he captured Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dragons of Eden. 4 He was noted for the vigor of his logic style, especially when criticizing some piece of pseudoscience. I remembered a 1973 AAAS meeting at which he destroyed the theories of Immanual Velikovsky, who was maintaining that only a few thousands of years ago, Venus had repeatedly collided with Earth and Mars; events well noted, Velikovsky said, in the bible. 5 Sagan was often heard observing that drawings of flying saucers never included a door. "How did those creatures of outer space get in and out" he once asked. Once he said that pseudoscience is embraced in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. A Satan as a Science Popularizer B Honor Sagan Enjoyed C Sagan’s Publications D Description of tie First Meeting with Sagan E Sagan’s Criticism on Pscudoscience F Sagan in Trouble with Other Scientists Paragraph 1 ______