The public seems to sense this significance, not only because COMPTEL presented an ‘image’ of the disk at 1.809 MeV but also because of a vague
perception that this patchy image somehow reveals the infection of the galaxy with new nuclei. A television event just this month illustrates this very well. I was interviewed for hours by Japan Public Television for their forthcoming 50-min special on nucleosynthesis, and my task as pundit was to help the public understand how gamma-ray-line astronomy adds new and decisive knowledge of nucleosynthesis.