For example, the British zoologist Richard Dawkins has written that: “Gullibility of the kind exploited by astrologers, evangelists, and other charlatans may be normal and healthy in a child, but it is unhealthy and reprehensive in an adult” (Skeptical Enquirer, vol 19, no 1, p35). There is also a tendency for scientists to conclude that if there were more scientific education, the pseudosciences would wither and die. For example, the American astronomer Carl Sagan has claimed: “Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think” (Skeptical Enquirer, vol 12, no 1, p46). In short, he is saying that the pseudosciences flourish in space that should rightfully belong to science itself. And to quote him again: “If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience.”

Pardon me if I sound heretical, but I would like to suggest that the earnest scientists have missed something important. I’m not saying that debunking should stop. I’m certainly not arguing that fraudsters who make money from the vulnerable and sick should be treated with anything less than contempt (and receive prison sentences where appropriate). But I am saying that the earnest debunkers should not be too distressed if their demonstrations that astrology “doesn’t work” do not lead to a drop in the popularity or numbers of astrologers.

You see, the earnest debunkers assume that people believe that astrology is true and that if they could only convince them it were not, people would immediately cease to pay it any attention. That it what I think has been missed.

Most people who read their horoscope in the morning tabloid know perfectly well it is not true. Because of this, no amount of debunking will make any difference. If anything, debunking will only increase people’s attachment to their horoscopes.

Look at it this way, if horoscopes were real they would be a constant source of anxiety. Life would be ruled by forces that we had no control over and which could destroy us at any time. Well, economics is a force we can’t control and which, even if it can’t physically destroy us, can at least make life easier or harder. Does anyone seriously imagine that horoscopes are read – by the vast majority of their audience – in the same way the financial pages are?

No. Horoscopes are safely fictional and can be read for fun, playing the game of “what if”. Their layout is short and punchy and “entertaining”, there are no in-depth analyses such as those that lurk on the financial pages. “Financial matters will be a worry to you,” says the horoscope. The financial page may start off in the same vein, but soon immerses itself in the details of alleviating that worry. If horoscopes were treated in the same way, they too would contain detailed explanations of how to avoid that minor misfortune which could befall you next Tuesday morning. Indeed, back in the days when astrology was considered to be true, I’m sure that the future had to be read with great care.

Astrologers had to be careful that they did not prophesy anything which might be held to be their fault if it came true. It’s not surprising that all the astrologers predicted that Henry VIII’s second child would be a boy (it turned out to be a girl – Elizabeth I). Astrology was a nervous business for its practitioners in those days. I wonder if the increasingly litigious trends of society will bring the spectacle of astrologers being sued over the outcome of their predictions, as doctors are increasingly sued for medical mischances? Then astrology would once again become a nervous business, which could bring some fascinating changes to the art of soothsaying.

Just like scientists, astrologers themselves appear to have missed this truth – that people don’t really believe their horoscopes. Perhaps they are among the tiny minority of people who are fooled by the stuff, or maybe they simply think their audience is. In any event, horoscopes are so bland in content that they may almost prove a turn-off for the audience. “Financial matters are a worry to you …” Why not something really thrilling? In this respect, the “psychic” who regularly liven up the press in the New Year – at least in the US – with predictions that California will fall into the sea, the president will be abducted by aliens and some film star will give birth at the age of 65, evidently understand their audience better than the astrologers.

Anyway, I think it is one of those age-old features of humanity that we like fictions. They brighten up a drab world, and their very unreality means that we need not worry about them. At other places and other times, the fictions have been ghost stories and fairy stories delivered in penny-dreadfuls and Hollywood films. Horoscopes and extraterrestrials are just a variation on an old theme.

Unfortunately, we humans also have an immense capacity for blurring the distinctions between fiction and reality. Some people do believe that horoscopes work. Some believe what they see on television. Credulity of this sort is what scientists should be fighting, not harmless fun that fools no one. There’s only one problem with this: if we teach people not to be credulous, will they believe the pronouncements of earnest scientists any more?

Whether you admire it or are annoyed by it, soap opera has become an
integral part of British culture. So much so that many people prefer to
gossip about characters in soaps than about their neighbours. Now it may
be that people simply have a low taste threshold, but I believe there is
a biological reason why so many people find soaps more absorbing than any
other type of TV or radio programme.

The difference between soaps and other series is the preoccupation with
the quarrels, love affairs, heartbreaks and other personal goings-on between
the characters. Even a drama series such as Casualty can become a soap
if these aspects of behaviour become the main attraction. Furthermore, there
is an increasing soap element in many current programmes, adding to my suspicion
that there is something going on. But what?

To a biologist, the answer is clear. Behavioural scientists are familiar
with the concept of the supernormal stimulus. Give a seagull a choice between
its own egg and a porcelain one twice the size, and the poor bird will ignore
the real egg and attempt to incubate the fake.

The young cuckoo in the nest takes advantage of another set of supernormal
stimuli to manipulate its host. It uses the same signals as its host’s own
young – a gaping beak decorated with yellow, and a hungry cry – but on a
more generous scale. Indeed, so strong are the stimuli that its hosts continue
to feed it even when it is so large that it has had to move out of the nest
and they have to perch on its back to reach its mouth.

In both these instances, natural selection has chosen a simple response
to a simple cue in order to obtain a desired result. For the gull, a speckled
oval object is an egg to be incubated. Similarly, the songbird is programmed
by natural selection to push food into a gaping yellow beak which is crying
hungrily.

Because the programming is relatively inflexible and not a conscious
choice by the animal performing the action, it has a weakness: a larger
stimulus provokes a greater response. The supernormal stimulus simply shows
that you can carry the response to extremes.

How does this apply to soap operas? Well, human beings are social animals,
and society appears to have been essential in the evolution of our intelligence.
Children cannot grow up properly if they are deprived of normal social interactions.
Solitary confinement is now considered too dehumanising to be allowed in
our prisons as anything but a temporary punishment. It is not too much to
suggest that the need for social interactions, including gossip, is genetically
determined, an essential part of human nature.

In this light, the soap opera plays the part of the gull’s china egg
or the cuckoo’s gape: it is a supernormal stimulus, which humans find more
attractive than the real thing. The supernormal nature of the soap can be
seen in its exaggerated plot lines, which resemble real life writ large.

If soap operas are supernormal stimuli for real life, is there any significance
in their current popularity? I think there is. We live at a time when fewer
people than ever know their own neighbours well enough to gossip about them,
when family sizes are smaller than ever before, and when large numbers of
people are unemployed and denied the traditional opportunities for gossip
at work. Perhaps these social shortcomings have provided a gap for the soap
operas to fill.

So are soaps a good thing? In so far as they fill a fundamental need
that modern society is not meeting, they must be considered worth having.
If, however, they prevent people from seeking real social interactions,
they take on the characteristics of an addiction that is harmful for individuals
and society alike.

Soap opera addiction appears to be a vicious circle, kicked off by an
impoverished gossip-life. At first the soap opera provides a useful remedy
by supplying the missing social factors. As the soap opera addiction grows,
however, the victim ceases to seek out the real thing and comes to rely
entirely on the substitute.

If, as seems likely, social breakdown continues to fragment the old,
natural social ties of gossip, while our genetic needs remain the same,
then the role of the soap opera in all our lives can only grow. Like the
gull incubating a giant egg, or the songbird feeding a giant chick, we may
be unable to turn away from the giant gossip presented to us on TV.

Alison Brooks is a paleontoligt based in Rugby

The commentators’ most recent fears centre on the drug Prozac, which
is reported to make even people who are not clinically depressed happier
and more assertive. Puritanical pundits deplore Prozac’s use for ‘normal’
unhappiness. But why not use it for this? Normal unhappiness probably causes
more misery than all psychiatric conditions put together. The fact that
it is common, and affects everyone, makes it more, not less, important to
alleviate.

Political pundits point out that misery is caused by social conditions,
and that the solution is social reform. Fine, but people ought to be given
relief as soon as possible, not told to wait for the millennium.

Medical advances have always been deplored by self-appointed nay-sayers.
In Victorian times, such individuals even considered anaesthesia during
childbirth to be the end of civilisation as they knew it because of a biblical
injunction that women ought to give birth in pain. Others held suffering
caused by incurable diseases to be justified as ennobling the victim and
setting an example for others.

A descendant of such views is the argument that mild psychiatric problems
such as depression and paranoia must have evolved because they are somehow
good for the individual or the species. I don’t remember it being argued
that haemophilia or Alzheimer’s disease have evolved for the benefit of
their victims. But, provided that the victim of depression is able to function
without clinical intervention, the pundits argue against dispensing relief.
The human body is extremely prone to minor malfunctions; why assume that
the brain is exempt?

The pundits also cite Vincent Van Gogh, Winston Churchill and Gustav
Mahler as people whose psychiatric problems did not prevent their genius.
But how are we to know that they weren’t geniuses despite their problems,
not because of them? Secondly, what right have the pundits to deny help
to someone if they want it, even if it would alter the nature of their artistic
output? Finally, even if unhappiness is necessary for genius, what about
the rest of us who can never aspire to genius?

As yet, Prozac is available only on prescription, and so it remains
under the control of doctors. I suspect it is the prospect of this control
being lost that worries many of the pundits. In some cases, as with antibiotics,
there is a good reason for keeping medicines under the control of doctors.
Misery, however, is not a bacterium. And people like me with normal unhappiness,
which merely blights our lives for short periods, will be kept from its
benefits ‘for our own good’.

What are the alternatives? Legal mind-altering chemicals include alcohol
and nicotine. Alcohol has disadvantages: it destroys the liver and affects
mental processes to the extent that driving, operating machinery and making
important decisions while under its influence are unwise.

Nicotine, at least in the form of cigarettes, kills. Still, as Ian Mundell
reminded us (‘Can smoking do you good?’, New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 9 October 1993),
nicotine may also provide protection against a number of diseases, as well
as providing pleasure. So perhaps there is some hope here.

In fact, the government has made purified nicotine – in the shape of
nicotine patches – available without prescription; indeed they are not available
on prescription. The argument is that anyone using them should make a commitment,
in the form of money, to giving up (it presumably also saves the government
money). At least this means that I have access to one mind-altering drug
stripped (so far as possible) of its lethal side-effects.

Has anyone warned the pundits of this freedom I’ve been allowed? Perhaps
now there will be calls for nicotine to be available only on prescription
for people who, in the experts’ opinions, need it enough. And people who
simply want to alter their mood will be forced back to traditional, legal,
but eventually deadly remedies, or the equally dodgy illegal ones. Meanwhile,
the experts can feel puritanically self-righteous that we’re not getting
pharmacological quick fixes to escape our proper share of life’s misery.

Alison Brooks is a writer from Rugby who would like the world to be
a happier place.

I considered the usual irate feminist letter to the editor pointing
out this blatant sexism, but then I paused. Is it really likely that New
ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ would be promulgating sexist cliches? Surely not! It knows that
even an illustration of a boy in a lab coat without another showing that
girls also do science brings in letters of complaint. No, I reasoned, the
most likely explanation was that in all the photographic libraries it has
access to, New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ could not find a picture to represent a male phobic.

This is sexist, but it is what I call ‘secondary sexism’. Primary sexism
is the straight sort: women are lesser than men, or the equation women=victims.
Secondary sexism is the invisible consequences of this, which we often
don’t even notice, and which – the bitter trick of the title – can actually
oppress men more than women. In this case, the equation women=victims is
a genuine equation. That is, women are victims, and victims are women. The
second of these statements holds the secondary sexist trick. Male victims
are either invisible, or objects of mockery, because they are supposed not
to exist. Much as women may resent the automatic assumption that they are
victims, it has advantages for women, and disadvantages for men.

Police forces have long (well, for about a decade) realised that women
victims of rape need special care and treatment that is as untraumatic as
it is consistent with investigating the crime. By contrast, it is only
within the last year or so that one police force (the Metropolitan) has
introduced special interview rooms and treatment for male victims of a similar
crime. Because the law assumes that men cannot be victimised in the same
way that women can, it doesn’t even acknowledge a crime of rape against
a man, so the lesser crime of ‘indecent assault’ has to be used. Fear of
mockery and unsympathetic treatment makes men who are raped (‘indecently
assaulted’) even less likely to report the crime than women. Male victims
also seem to have more difficulty dealing with the experience than women,
because they find it harder to accept that they have been victims.

On television, in newspapers, and in the other forms of popular culture,
the male victim of anything from a robbery to a violent spouse is fair game
for humorous treatment. Remember all those jokes of the little man rolling
home drunk to an irate wife with a rolling-pin in her hand? Can you imagine
equivalent male abuse of women being treated as jolly fun? You’ll find it
in Shakespeare, but not in this century, except from those who are deliberately
trying to shock by breaking a taboo.

Street violence against women is a subject of endless concern. Some
areas even run special taxi and bus services for women to travel at night
in safety. Endless feminist books discuss how women can reduce their risks
while out; endless pronouncements by senior police officers tell them that
they should stay at home. The feminists and anti-feminists are united in
a belief that women are especially vulnerable and need help to avoid being
victimised.

At the same time, the group most likely to be the actual victims of
violence – young adult males – gets no help at all. Their victimisation
is overlooked. Feminists don’t write survival manuals for young men, and
police officers don’t advise them to stay at home. Male victims are assumed
to be one of two things, neither of which deserve sympathy, respect or help.
They may be participants – thugs who got more than they bargained for –
or pathetic nerds who can’t look after themselves, objects of laughter who
have proved unworthy of the concern of a caring society. Women who might
also be described as pathetic nerds who can’t look after themselves are
objects of concern and protection.

We don’t know how many lone male drivers who, on breaking down, are
subsequently robbed, but a few well-publicised cases of women being raped
when this happens leads to national uproar, and preferential treatment for
lone women from vehicle rescue and recovery organisations.

Could it possibly be that the male lifespan, standing at some five years
less than that of women, is partly responsible for the assumption that men
are not victims? Could it be that doctors are quicker to spot the first
signs of ill-health in women patients than men?

Well-women clinics sprang up like mushrooms in the 1970s and early 1980s
to check for ‘women’s diseases’, and a fewer ‘Well-person’ clinics arrived
in the late 1980s to test men and women alike for the diseases which both
are prone to. This delay occurred despite the mortality from diseases to
which both sexes are prone, like lung and colonic cancer, heart attacks,
strokes, and so forth. But, these were not campaigning issues in the same
way as cancers of the cervix, ovary and breast.

In the mid 1990s, there are still no national screening programmes
for diseases which kill just men: cancers of the testes and prostate. Could
this be something to do with the equation that women=victims? If so, it
is clearly to women’s advantage, or at least to men’s disadvantage.

As for hazardous substances at work, it has long been assumed that women
should automatically be excluded from working with them, or given special
protection if they do so. Protection for men has lagged behind, and only
recently has it become important. This has been due to the recognition that
the father’s exposure to toxins can harm children just as much as can the
mother’s – not to any increasing concern for male health. To take only one
example, it has long been known that certain mineral oils can cause cancers
of the scrotum, yet men have not been banned from working with them. Would
women be allowed to continue working freely with substances known to cause
cancer of the cervix?

Unfortunately, the concerns of the feminist movement, or at least those
which have received most publicity, have not actually questioned the idea
of women as victims. Instead, women are seen as victims of ever more dastardly
and subtle oppressions, whether it be sexual harassment, date rape, or the
low number of women who make it to professorships in the sciences. Feminism,
in some ways, can be seen as promoting the secondary sexism of seeing women
– but not men – as victims.

We should be moving beyond this attitude, to one that assumes there
is nothing more wrong with a man who is a victim than with a woman who is.
It is time that photographs of male victims of phobias were available from
photographic libraries without any smirking camerawork suggesting there
is something wrong with their masculinity for being vulnerable. Until we
break the equation of women=victims and victims=women, both men and women
will be victims of the hidden assumptions of secondary sexism.

Alison Brooks is a palaeontologist based in Rugby.

None of this explains the huge numbers of children wearing glasses these
days. Years ago, short-sightedness was rare among children; the occasional
child with spectacles was an object of pity and derision. This was only
twenty or thirty years ago, so I don’t think there can have been hordes
of children suffering from undiagnosed defects of the eye. Today, spectacle-wearers
seem to make up a substantial minority of children. Further, almost all
the young adults I know wear glasses; and my eyesight is worse than my father’s.

It seems that in the 19th century, fewer people wore glasses, as we
can see from photographs. I suggest, from this evidence, that the population
is getting more and more short-sighted. I think we deserve to know why,
as well as what can be done about it. I wonder why optometrists are so reluctant
to tell us. It couldn’t be that they have a massive interest in our having
bad eyesight, could it? It couldn’t be that they put their profits before
our eyesight?

I think we can join the optometrists in dismissing reading in dim light
as the culprit. Electric lighting has all but done away with this. Oh,
I’m sure children still read forbidden matter under the bedclothes with
the aid of a torch, but this is luxury compared with the candles that our
ancestors were forced to use. About the only times these days that we experience
candlelight is in restaurants that don’t wish us to inquire too deeply into
the food. And as we discover, reading even a menu is a major achievement,
if the light is very dim. Yet people actually lived and worked under such
conditions; the Bob Cratchits of that world wrote and added up columns
of numbers by candlelight. No, if people in the 19th century did not suffer
myopia to the extent that we do today, then dim light can hardly be a hazard.

Among the possible causes of our worsening eyesight, the obvious contenders
are computers and television. Some children spend more time watching TV
at home than they spend at school, and average watching time among children
in Britain is over two hours a day. Many exacerbate the problem by watching
the box from a distance of a few inches, rather than the recommended several
feet. If you can prise computer addicts away from their games, they will
tell you that they spend hours on end zapping and bouncing images across
a screen only inches from their nose. A few optometrists now suggest that
too much of this may well be harmful.

It would be easy to test once and for all whether these factors are
important. Children with normal eyesight could be assigned to four groups.
One group could be encouraged to play with computers; a second, to slump
in front of television for hours on end; a third, to read books; and a fourth,
to go outside and play football or tennis. Although this cannot be a double
blind (ahem) experiment, differences in eyesight which develop later could
be traced with reasonable confidence to their causes, and we would at last
know what causes short-sightedness. This study could even be combined with
an investigation into how these activities affect the children’s long-term
health, intelligence, and level of aggression. An active study of this sort
is preferable to a survey of short-sighted children’s habits; myopic children
will presumably gravitate towards activities like computing, which do not
require good distance vision, so making cause and effect impossible to separate.
Alas, there may be resistance to the idea of experimenting on children in
this way.

Perhaps another look at bad light and eyestrain, from a different angle,
would help. We may actually not be ‘straining’ our eyes enough. After all,
eyestrain is caused by overuse of the eye muscles – exercise, in other words.
Exercise is supposed to be good for the body’s other muscles, so why not
the eyes? Perhaps we don’t exercise our eyes enough. Optometrists decry
theories that exercise can improve eyesight (except in certain restricted
cases, such as double vision), but that doesn’t tell us whether or not exercise
would help prevent deterioration in vision.

The optometrists would perhaps be better advised to follow the medical
profession in concentrating more on preventive medicine, particularly accurate
diagnoses. It might decrease profits from selling spectacles, but only slowly,
over many years. Sales of spectacles to existing customers may decrease
slightly as their eyesight no longer deteriorates regularly, and they no
longer need a new prescription every two years. Fashion could come to the
rescue here, with new designs seducing patients into purchasing new frames
regularly, even though they don’t need them. The main losses would come
in later years from younger people whose eyes do not require the help they
would have otherwise.

The optometrists could recoup this loss by charging for eye exercise
classes. These classes would be outside the domain of the NHS, but I’m sure
that people would be willing to pay if they were convinced that they would
avoid the nuisance of spectacles. On that thought I leave you. I’m off to
my eyerobics class.

Alison Brooks is a palaeontologist who says that her myopia is improving
with age.

Naturally enough, technology comes in for its share. Apart from cars,
the stories usually reflect fears arising from the introduction of new technology.
So there is the hoary old chestnut of the computer billing system sending
out increasingly strongly-worded demands for ÂŁ0.00. Letters are to
no avail, but the recipient is eventually able to satisfy the machine by
sending a cheque for ÂŁ0.00. Computers may be able to print bills
by the thousand, you see, but they will never be as clever as real people,
they will never really replace us.

Then there is the poodle in the microwave. Did anyone really believe
that even a naive little old lady (such stories rely on cliche for their
characters) would dry a pet dog in an oven, let alone in a microwave? The
plots of such legends are often strained at some point. Still, the point
is that this story reflects people’s fears of new technology, which seems
like the old, but has treacherous differences. This particular story may
even have performed a useful service in making users aware that microwaves
can be dangerous.

Even recent advances in medicine have spawned urban legends. There is
one in which a boy disappears at an acid-house party and returns days later.
While he is having a bath, his mother notices that he has a huge scar
on his back, and it turns out that he has had a lung stolen for illicit
transplantation. This one is a heady fusion of concern over the potential
abuse of medical technology, fears about drugs, loud music and the sort
of things that teenagers get up to.

It is perhaps not surprising that technology should fuel such legends;
everyone has experienced the changes it has brought about during the past
few years. Still, I do not suppose that technology is under any kind of
threat from urban legends. I doubt that anyone has failed to buy a microwave
for fear of being plastered with exploding poodle, while the computer story
is superior in an affectionate sort of way.

But what about science? The public’s fears of science, as demonstrated
in hundreds of cheap horror novels and films from Frankenstein onwards,
must have their own stories. Yet the only one I can find concerns pets being
kidnapped and sold to research laboratories. This hardly counts as a legend;
there is no story, just a bald statement. The parallel belief that pets
are kidnapped and cooked in foreign restaurants has given rise to a whole
subgenre of urban legends about hapless diners who take their pet with
them, and communicate by sign language that they would like the pet to be
fed; or who ask for a doggy bag, and get more than they bargained for. The
idea that pets end up in laboratories, although widely believed has not
caught the public imagination in the same way.

What about the rest? What about high-energy particle physics, radio
astronomy and field studies of hedgehog behaviour? There are no urban legends
about them. The public is supremely indifferent to science – we know this
from surveys of attitudes and from the constant struggle of scientists to
get attention and funding. Scientific urban legends, or the lack of them,
confirm this. People will not listen to scientists, whether it be their
warnings of global warming, pleas for more funding, or explanations of the
difference between science and pseudoscience, until they notice them.

Perhaps one way to combat this lack of interest is for scientists to
use the urban legend – thereby raising the profile of science in the process.
At the very least it is worth a try, since it costs nothing, and scientists
who use this tactic cannot even be accused of whining, special pleading,
or failing to understand the hard economics of the real world.

So here are my contributions. Please feel free to substitute better
examples if you can think of any.

There was this researcher who was tracking hedgehogs by night in an
area where an axe murderer had killed several people. When the people in
an isolated farmhouse saw his flashlight, they assumed that he was the axe
murderer. The husband grabbed his shotgun, told his wife to stay put, went
out and, without giving the researcher a chance to explain, shot him. He
ran back to the farmhouse calling to his wife to phone the police, when
he noticed that the door had been smashed down by an axe, and everything
in the house had gone very quiet . . .

There was this wealthy radio astronomer, and no one could figure out
how he got to be so wealthy, because it was not from his salary. It turned
out that he used to use the radio telescope to tune in to the police waveband,
and plot where all the squad cars were on the computer, so that he could
predict big gaps in police cover. He used to go off and do robberies when
there were no police nearby to catch him. Except that one night a student
spotted him sneaking off, and followed him. Figuring out what was going
on, she hacked into the radio astronomer’s computer program; the next place
he tried to rob happened to be a hotel which was hosting a police convention.

Then again, did you hear the one about the high-energy particle physicist?

Alison Brooks is a science writer and palaeontologist.

Not all science is commercial: if it were, there would be no difficulty
obtaining money for it. No, the problem is that a lot of knowledge is of
aesthetic interest only – it may prove valuable in the future, but at present
there is no bottom line. In the world of business, the nearest equivalent
to this sector of science is not technology, which is of obvious financial
value, but rather aesthetic things such as art, scenery, history. And although
these may seem to have no financial value, they are valuable to the tourism
and leisure industries.

Tourism and the holiday business come in different forms. There are
the day trips. A few universities are attractions for day-tripping tourists,
such as Oxford and Cambridge. A few scientific establishments welcome visitors,
such as the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories at Jodrell Bank (as,
oddly, does Sellafield from the world of technology).

Then there are the package holidays. Universities moved into these some
time ago, with adult education courses and summer schools. These are almost
ideal as money-spinners, because they fill the university at times – evenings
and vacations – when the undergraduate students are away and the laboratories
and lecture theatres would be otherwise idle.

There is, however, another highly profitable holiday business that could
be adopted by universities. This is a business that has expanded in leaps
and bounds over the past few years: the time-share holiday. It involves
paying thousands of pounds for the privilege of spending a week or two a
year in a holiday residence. So, why not do the same for science? The equivalent
would allow the purchaser use of a university laboratory for one or two
weeks.

To attract buyers, time-share science would have to be the real thing
and not the live lecture-illustrations that form the basis of most undergraduate
experiments. The deal would also have to include the services of a qualified
tutor who would assist customers in choosing, planning and carrying out
a suitable project, over a period of several years. At the end of the project,
there would be the bonus of seeing their names on the published results.
To speed the process, the background reading and parts of the project could
be done at home.

In short, time-share science would cater for the luxury end of the amateur
science market. It might be bought for the duration of a specific project,
or it might be open-ended, allowing the customer to move on to a new project
once the first is completed.

Is there a market for time-share science? I think there is. Every year,
hundreds, if not thousands, of science graduates are forced to seek alternative
careers because they are unable to make a living from science. There are
lots of people curious about science, but they never get closer than wondering
at the latest hi-tech gadget or David Attenborough extravaganza. Seeing
science from the inside, rather than marvelling at its results in a neat
package, would provide a new appreciation.

In return, universities would get badly needed cash. Time-share holidays
are not cheap, and neither would science time-share. But unlike commercial
holiday time-shares, universities would not need to create specially-built
developments; nearly everything is already there and the rest could be
fitted in around the rest of the campus.

Time-share science need not threaten the rest of the academic world,
or other fund-raisers, such as summer schools. Instead, it would put universities
in the enviable position of being paid by people for the privilege of revitalising
moribund departments and increasing the number of academic publications
emerging from them.

In addition, time-share science would be complementary to other sources
of funding, because it would be most suitable for disciplines with little
potential profitability. The very fields which business and government are
least eager to fund are the ones in which a project can be undertaken over
a number of years without becoming hopelessly outdated. I hesitate to name
any sciences in particular, as I would doubtless be inundated with protests
that the genetics of the common sneezewort is of huge commercial significance,
but I am sure that everyone could name several candidates for time-share
science.

The only problem will be selling the product. The holiday time-share
has earned a bad name through its hard-sell approach, and the mythical prizes
offered for attending presentations. Successful time-share sales people
are paid well for their imaginative efforts. At present, universities will
probably be unable to pay sales people, or to afford to offer prizes or
other incentives to buyers. Initially, the attractions of the science time-share
would probably spread by word of mouth. Alternatively, universities could
take advantage of the many graduates they educate and then cast off each
year. How many of them would jump at the offer of a science time-share as
a reward for selling ten of them?

Alison Brooks is a science writer and palaeontologist.

Once upon a time, doctors left the body to get on with things, until
something went wrong in an obvious way. When they found that some conditions
are best treated as early as possible, doctors began to screen for diseases
before they become obvious. Lives were saved, and jobs were created in the
screening industry, and everyone was happy. Then the government jumped on
the bandwagon, with doctors not merely being required to provide preventive
medicine and screening for patients who request it, but encouraged to sell
the idea by imposing financial penalties on doctors who fail to meet their
quotas for tests and inoculations.

I suppose that, as an average healthy adult, I should welcome the increased
interest in my remaining healthy, but sometimes I wonder whether it is going
too far.

My GPs have introduced a huge range of preventive and screening services,
ranging from psychiatric services and stress management courses to weight-watching
groups and Well Person Clinics. I’m told that this unaesthetic term derives
from the old-fashioned and supposedly sexist Well Women Clinics, but I think
that a more euphonious term could have been devised.

All these services for healthy patients mean that sick people are a
minority in the waiting rooms and, I suspect, in the doctors’ concerns.
Maybe this is an inevitable result of applying business methods – the profit
motive – to medical care. After all, healthy patients make up the majority
of any medical practice, and cost less to treat than sick ones. Thus GPs
stand to make a greater profit from the healthy than from the sick.

Warnings that doctors may be tempted to remove sick, expensive patients
from their lists or accept only new patients who are healthy, and refuse
those with chronic diseases, have been dismissed as scare-mongering by proponents
of government reforms. Still, a few years ago it was possible to obtain
an appointment within a day or two at my GPs, whereas now sick patients
have to wait as much as a week before being granted an audience. This doubtless
saves the practice money, as many patients will have recovered from minor
ailments by then, and the ones who are really sick won’t have got much worse
in a week. Both may have suffered unnecessarily, but avoiding seeing patients
is still good economic sense.

The obvious next step for GPs will be to minimise the number of sick
patients on their lists. I don’t suppose, however, that the government will
allow them to strike off all their sick patients; it would be too politically
unpopular, and the government would not want to take the blame. So what
are poor, enterprising doctors to do?

They may find their answer in adopting another modern trend in medical
matters. There is increasing sympathy for the idea of euthanasia, which
would apply to precisely those chronically ill patients that cost GPs the
most. I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before some clever GP decides
to ride this trend as a way to solve this long-term drain on their independent
budgets.

Unlike screening services, though, euthanasia stands to increase the
profits made by GPs, at the expense of hospitals and other services which
gain funds from treating chronically ill patients. As a result, I anticipate
a conflict between GPs and hospitals over this. Naturally, it will not be
spoken of as a matter of profit, but of GPs’ compassion for suffering and
desire to allow patients their right to die, as against the hospitals’ assurance
that patients do not suffer, and should be allowed to enjoy whatever life
remains to them. Patients who do not wish their lives to become a conflict
of profit will, of course, be able to opt for private care. This will fulfil
the prediction in the old song:

If living were a thing that money could buy/You know the rich would
live, and the poor would die.

Alison Brooks is a patient palaeontologist.

Never one to shirk a difficult task, I decided to increase my job prospects
by fighting fire with fire. If handwriting tells about inner personality,
then the quickest therapy to improve my personality must be by changing
my handwriting. This miracle of modern DIY psychotherapy is called graphotherapy.
Even the most doubting sceptic must surely be stifled by such a scientific
appellation. Graphotherapy promises to change your personality by the simple
process of altering the way you write. Easier than positive thinking, cheaper
than psychotherapy, more certain than astrology . . . how could I resist?

First of all, of course, I had to analyse my own, current handwriting
to track down the most gaping flaws in my personality. A gruelling task
it was, too; my feelings were unspared. My scrawling pen indicates that
I think faster than I write, and also that I am versatile. The pen pressure
shows that I’m an aesthete, have a high energy level, but react sharply
to stress. The shapes of my Ms and Ns show analytical thinking, while other
features show that I balance imagination and practical outlook, that I’m
decisive, persistent, optimistic and have a high self-esteem. On the negative
side, I’m slightly repressed and a bit sensitive to criticism and somewhat
inattentive to detail. All my problems seem to be minor ones, though, and
I am generally a very fine person with many wonderful qualities.

I was surprised by some of the graphological results, although of course
I have always known that I am a fine person, and it was pleasing to get
scientific confirmation. Unfortunately, however, it threw my proposed experiment
with self-help out of the window. Since my handwriting proves that I’m already
self-confident, for instance, I can’t undertake the program given for increasing
self-confidence.

Nothing daunted, I did what every married person does in such a case,
and decided to improve my spouse, instead. After some argument, I obtained
a sample of his writing. After a similar exhaustive examination, I was relieved
to discover that he, too, is a very fine person with many wonderful qualities,
despite his handwriting being quite different from my own. He, too, had
no major flaws that would require graphotherapy to right. This seemed inherently
less likely for him than for myself, but how could I argue with such scientific
results?

Thus frustrated in my experiment, I could only read about how graphotherapy
could cure us of our personal problems, if only we had any. All it requires,
it seems, is to write a simple phrase over and over, every day, emphasising
those personal traits in which one is deficient, and wishes to develop.
Had I any need for extra determination, for instance, all I would have to
do is write some such phrase as ‘Strong determination is very important’,
practising the requisite straight, firm downstrokes.

Would graphotherapy work? My conclusion is that it would. After all,
handwriting can be trained into different styles, so if one teaches oneself
to produce firm downstrokes, they will probably become part of one’s handwriting
style.

But what about changing the personality? In the absence of a trial,
I can’t answer for that. but graphotherapy seems to be very similar to traditional
pop-psychology self-improvement of the ‘Every Day In Every Way, I Am Getting
Better And Better’ type: if you think it is doing you good, it will.

What really interests me is that I now know what the handwriting analysers
will be looking for, and in future I will know how to hide those minor flaws
which show up in my handwriting, and, being perfect, I will be bound to
get the job.

Which is funny, because I thought graphology was supposed to be infallible.

Dr Alison Brooks is a palaeontologist who has always had trouble with
her handwriting.

In this more sophisticated era, it appears that this law has been repealed,
to be replaced by another version which suggests that if demand is limited,
the fault lies with the (non-)buyers, and the commodity needs merely to
be advertised endlessly, until the buying public are so bemused that they
do increase their demand for the product, in which case, the price can be
raised. (It’s strange how the laws of economics, or even of ‘market forces’,
always seem to end up with price rises!) Now, the 1990s have already been
dubbed the ‘Green Decade’, in which members of the public at last wake up
to the mess we have made of the planet. This is supposed to be a decade
in which all politicians are forced to pay at least lip service to environmental
issues. One particularly striking instance of public concern with the environment
is the recycling movement. At our local supermarket, we are fortunate enough
to have a row of bins which take paper for recycling. These bins are usually
full, and it is a common sight to see a couple with a boxful of newspapers
that they are vainly attempting to stuff into the already over flowing bins.

The bins are emptied only irregularly by the relevant authorities because,
it seems, so many other authorities are doing the same thing that the market
is glutted with recycled paper. Of course, the mere price of the stuff ought
not to be a problem for the authorities, because the bins are rent-free,
and filled for free by ordinary, non-extremist citizens keen to do their
little bit for the world. However, I read that paper-recycling plants are
also filled to capacity: no one is buying paper for recycling, and so the
price of recycled paper has dropped.

Yet, when I go along to my local stationers, there are several paper
products prominently labelled ‘Recycled!’ These products are invariably
more expensive than the equivalent unrecycled versions.

How is it that recycled paper is evading the law of supply and demand?
If the market is glutted with paper for recycling, why has the price not
fallen? Either many people are buying recycled products, in which case surely
there would be no glut of them, or few people are buying them, in which
case the price ought to fall. Surely, with all the evidence for public interest
in recycling, it can’t be that stationers still regard recycled paper as
a curiosity rather than a serious product? If so, I suggest they take a
trip to their nearest supermarket, to see the real public interest in recycling.

It seems to me that there is a niche in the market for an entrepreneur
to push recycled paper. It would not need ‘market forces’ to help it sell;
endless advertising would not be necessary. Good old economics should suffice:
make the stuff cheaper than new, and it would sell. The margin between the
recycled product and the new need not be as large as the cost difference
between virtually free recycled paper and whatever it costs to buy fresh
timber, thus allowing a suitable capitalistic reward for the manufacturer
doing the environmentally correct thing.

Alison Brooks is a freelance writer based in Rugby.