But what was striking about this unwholesome debate was the lack of
comparison with the promotion system at British universities. There are
good arguments for suggesting that our system is just as arbitrary. For
example, a friend of mine (who for obvious reasons had better remain anonymous)
working at a university in the south of England tells me that there is no
relationship between the level of appointment and scientific merit for most
members of academic staff at her institution. She works in a department
with forty full-time members of staff of whom five are professors, five
readers, ten senior lecturers and twenty lecturers. About thirty full-time
research staff employed on grants bring the numbers up to some seventy.

As a matter of curiosity, she recently went to the Science Citation
Index to examine the relationship between the level of appointment of each
academic individual in her department and their scientific standing and
output. Using the fancy new computerised CD database, she examined various
key indices. She asked how many papers her colleagues had published over
the past five years. And she asked how often her colleagues had been cited
in other papers in the same time frame. She then compared their rankings
with these indices.

All the correlations she found were weak to the point of nonexistence.
There were individuals who published masses (very weak positive correlation
with rank) but were rarely cited and there were those who published modestly
(zero correlation) but were cited masses. The latter group were clearly
the international authorities in their fields judging by the frequency
of their invitations to international meetings. But being an international
authority seemed to have no bearing on rank. She thought there might be
a correlation with age (which seemed a bit stronger – obviously a case of
‘Buggin’s turn’), and even speculated about a relationship with individual
weight. Certainly, there were more fat cats who were corpulently professorial
than slimline types who were rakishly lecturous but, again, it was no absolute
rule. Thinnies were professors and fatties were also lecturers.

She tried numbers and size of external grants (weak relation), numbers
and size of internal grants (stronger positive association with rank), amount
of teaching (very powerful negative correlation – no surprise there) and,
finally, she hit on the answer: nepotism. The single most important factor
in dictating rank of an individual was the timescale between arrival of
the latest head of department (her place has a notoriously high turnover)
and arrival of the ranked individual in question. Heads of department come,
these days, with a couple of new appointments thrown in. And all of us like
to go to a party with a couple of familiar faces when we are not sure how
many people we are going to know.

And so it is with the British university system. If you want to get
ahead then chat up anybody who you know who is about to get a departmental
headship. You can be the lowliest of the low in your current job. But going
along to press the head’s hand when he is lonely, new and frightened, guarantees
a senior lectureship at least. Of course, my friend might have been kidding.
Italians do have a strange sense of humour.

Simon Wolff is a lecturer in toxicology in the Department of Medicine,
University College and Middlesex School of Medicine, London.

Does radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas, cause cancer and
how much should we spend minimising the risk? These are two of the questions
posed by Stephen Wozniak in his handbook on radon risks and their possible
mitigation. Until recently, Wozniak was chief of the Building Research Establishment’s
radon research section but now he is reappraising the risks associated with
radon.

What concerns him is that dealing with the small levels of radon in
20 million buildings in Britain costs £40 million per life saved,
perhaps preventing 250 of 500 (theoretical) radan-related deaths, when government
agencies are so underfunded, and tens of thousands of elderly die of hypothermia
each winter.

Money, Wozniak speculates, would be more efficiently spent dealing with
the 2000 homes with the highest levels of radon, at a cost of £12
000 for each life so saved (in theory), or perhaps treating 80 000 of the
worst-affected homes at a cost of £70 000 per life.

The Handbook of Radon aims to tackle these issues while advising homeowners,
as well as architects, about practical ways of dealing with high levels
of radon. Wozniak argues for cost-benefit analyses in dealing with environmental
health problems but such analyses are always vexed. How much is a life worth?
How do we calculate how many lives may be lost in relation to environmental
health problems?

The Department of Transport, for example, estimates a life to be worth
£1 million and includes a sum of ‘value of life saved’ in its dubious
cost-benefit equations applied to the building of motorways. Nobody in their
right mind believes that motorways save lives, yet these magic numbers go
into the equation-25 per cent of the benefit side of motorway projects costing
£10 million per mile. By contrast, thousands die as a result of hypothermia
and episodes of air pollution annually without a penny being spent in prevention.

Life is clearly priceless, but the value allotted to safeguarding its
continuation is related to separate political exigencies. This, I feel,
has bearing on Wozniak’s complaint. The prevention of a radon-related death
is becoming very expensive as more and more is spent on diminishing the
effects of radon. Who benefits politically from this market in theoretical
death? Perhaps it is the nuclear power industry, keen to minimise concern
about industrial radiation or the building trade, which is eager to screw
a little more profit out of a gullible and tremulous home-buying public.
Or could it possibly be the huge lobby of road transport interests interested
in distracting attention from the 10 to 15 per cent of lung cancers that
cannot be attributed to smoking?

Of course, nobody has ever been shown to have died as a result of radon
in homes. The National Radiological Protection Board’s estimate of 2500
deaths annually is based on enthusiastic extrapolation from the mortality
seen in much-criticised studies of uranium miners in, for example, North
America and Sweden. And, when examining the risk of lung cancer around Britain
in relation to domestic radon, you find that the higher the level of radon,
the lower the rate of lung cancer. Cornwall, with the highest average level
of domestic radon in Britain, has about the lowest rate of lung cancer.
This is not what you would expect if radon was such a potent lung cancer
risk.

There are good reasons for this, of course. Domestic radon comes from
the ground close to and beneath our homes. Although we know that local geology
largely determines the domestic level of radon, an important determinant
of radon concentration is whether you live in a large detached house (high
catchment area so high level of radon), a more modest terraced cottage (lower
radon) or in a one-room flat on the top floor of a tower block (tiny radon).
In other words, the bigger your home, the more radon you have. But the bigger
your home, the richer you are. And the richer you are, the less likely you
are to die of lung cancer. You are less likely to smoke, to have a poor
diet or live in the polluted inner city.

So the level of domestic radon is a surrogate for wealth. This will
(in my view) make it impossible to determine radon risk through epidemiology.
There are simply too many other factors which need to be taken into account.
By way of contrast, the association between bird-keeping and lung cancer
appears strong and robust even when smoking is accounted for. Yet we have
no National Ornithological Protection Board nor campaigns to stamp out pigeon-fancying.
There is simply nothing in it politically or financially for anybody else.

Wozniak is right to suggest that ‘billion dollar bandwagons seem not
to be fitted with brakes’. He has provided a cheap, comprehensive and comprehensible
account of the details and complexities of environmental radon. It deserves
a wide readership.

Lying on the beach you imagined yourself, no doubt, clutching test tubes
in your tight little fist in the style of a B-movie; ‘Don’t worry Mayor,
we’ll have an antidote to the dread alien toxin toobyornot 2B by morning.’
Or you saw yourself as a Frankenstein figure, at odds with the scientific
community, but (inevitably) brilliant. Or you saw yourself as impossibly
glamorous, with tousled hair, working in bow tie and tails or a little black
number between cocktails and a late show. Or perhaps you saw yourself as
a poor drab little thing, working all the hours the good Lord gives, with
no reward, and no money.

Consider that latter possibility carefully. Because that, my child,
whatever the fantasy, is the reality – as, I trust, you are now learning.
You will also have learnt by now that the British PhD system is a total
nonsense. You are not there to be trained. Your supervisor does not want
to see any intellectual development. You are there to be slave labour.
Your supervisor just needs you to generate results that she or he can pin
to an abstract for that ‘critical’ conference in Hawaii.

It generally takes two months before the average research student, no
matter how profound their personality disorder, realises there is no glamour
and no future in doing a PhD. The pay, which looked modest, but better than
the undergraduate grant, turns out to be completely lousy. The myth that
the sheer honour of doing a PhD is sufficient reward is wearing thin. Chats
with your elders and betters will have told you that you will have to pack
more research into the next three years than you could manage in the following
20. You should also, by now, have realised that you are a despised subspecies
of the laboratory world. Nothing you do will ever be good enough. Worse
yet, you will have heard all the horror stories. If you have a nervous breakdown,
they sack you; if your supervisor has a nervous breakdown, ditto. But there
are ways in which you might just survive. Read on carefully.

First, the PhD student does not only require the ability to turn ‘suspension
of disbelief’ into an art form beyond the illusory skills of our most eminent
Shakespearean actors; he or she must also retain the ability to remain as
cynical and as hard-bitten as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. This ability
to deceive oneself and one’s audience completely, while remaining in touch
with harsh reality is, of course, the reason why most students become barking
mad and continue the pain by applying for postdoctoral positions at universities.
Some extreme cases end up as lecturers.

Secondly, you must bear firmly in mind that you are on the thin end
of a research team’s thin budget. Your project has to be cheap, but must
also look impressive. In short, your project has to be utterly meaningless
but seem to be at the cutting edge of science. You have to kid yourself.
You have to hypnotise yourself. You have to talk yourself into a state of
religious fervour. You have to get yourself into that peculiar state of
mind where you can go to an issue of Nature and read a paper entitled ‘Glucose
is an essential cofactor for function of the glucose porter in vitro’ from
top to bottom and think ‘Wow’ and then aim for similar lofty heights. Never,
ever, for one second, must you allow yourself the luxury of thinking ‘So
·É³ó²¹³Ù?’.

So when your grandmother asks you casually at tea how your studies are
going, it is essential that you tell her in the minutest detail exactly
how you are purifying that membrane protein involved in bacterial killing
and how this is going to produce a cure for cancer any second now. If granny
nods off you are home and dry. You have proved you believe that what you
are doing is important. If, however, grandma asks you pertinent questions
such as, ‘Do you have some interesting hobbies/friends?’ or worse – ‘Do
they pay you for that?’ – then you have failed and you might as well pack
your bags and quietly leave the university. Of course, the really critical
test comes when you can talk to your bank manager and his eyes become that
unique blend of boredom and cash register.

Finally, you have managed to kid yourself into working all hours of
the day and night doing something which, to anybody sane and in touch with
reality, is useless, albeit cheap and reduces the dole queue by one. But,
at the same time, you can only survive the vagaries and pitfalls of PhD
life, and the appalling day-to-day hysterical politics within your research
group/department by keeping a firm grip on reality. You have to convince
yourself that ‘Well, there is more to life than the lab’ while maintaining
the huge lie. Frankly, you need a diverting hobby. Drugs are out. They are
too expensive unless you are a particularly innovative organic chemist and
sex can interfere with the old lab routine. So I recommend to my students
that they take up odd-jobbing, such as painting, decorating, general housework
and gardening, to divert their minds from work. This seems to have been
of immense benefit to most of them although some, I admit, never quite manage
to get my frying pan quite clean.

Simon P. Wolff is a lecturer in toxicology.

The journal Nature called this book dangerous. There is, I suppose,
a slight risk that it might fall off a high bookshelf and give one a nasty
bop on the head. Nature’s fear, I presume, stemmed from a gut instinct
that an anti-science book, lauded by conservative MPs such as George Walden,
could result in less money for science. Is that fear based in reality?

Bryan Appleyard’s basic thesis is that science has led to an erosion
of human values and human dignity. Stephen Hawking removed the need for
God, Charles Darwin reduced man to inferior naked ape, Galilei Galileo stripped
man of his rightful place at the centre of the Universe, Albert Einstein
produced the bomb.

So science needs to be humbled; brought down to size so that humanity
can begin to go to church again, avoid divorce, have children in wedlock,
stop taking drugs, help old ladies across the road, have friendly neighbourhood
street parties and generally do all those things so familiar to us from
the heyday of the Ealing comedies. I picture cheerful Jack down the Leg
of Lamb supping Guiness while ‘her indoors’ hangs the washing and swaps
gossip with the old dear next door. Appleyard, meanwhile, cruises past in
his top-of-the-range BMW smiling contentedly. Paradise regained.

The question that struck me on reading this book was ‘What’s in it for
Bryan?’ Why is he trying to blame things on science that are not science’s
fault? Appleyard begins by claiming to have a scientific background, quoting
an engineer father and some vague dead physicist relations he never knew,
tells us about his angst-ridden arty days at college, before going on to
proclaim: ‘It is, I believe, humanly impossible actually to be a liberal,’
and condemn Bertrand Russell (‘One of the most fabulously stupid men of
our age’) for supporting science as a tool of liberal thought.

Appleyard is suspicious of liberalism. And science is liberal, egalitarian
and value-free; bad news for people who do not like that sort of thing.
But then again, Bryan’s day job is writing for the right-wing press. So
is Appleyard simply trying to find a scapegoat for things that have gone
wrong under our recent political system?

Appleyard’s attack hardly follows a new theme, and I found it irritating
that the book fails to acknowledge its ancestry. Why is there no mention
of Paul Feyerabend who asserted: ‘Science is much closer to myth than a
scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms
of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best’
(Against Method, Verso 1978)? Or of Murray Bookchin saying: ‘I am not questioning
scientific method and insight as such, but rather its pre-emptive, often
metaphysical claims over the entire cosmos of knowledge . . . Speculative
thought – imagination, art, and intuition – is no less a source of knowledge
than are inductive-deductive reasoning, empirical verification and scientific
canons of proof’ (The Ecology of Freedom, Cheshire Books, 1982).

So science may be a little arrogant in always believing it is right,
objective and free of ‘leaps of faith’, but that in itself cannot lead to
a moral decline of the society of which it is a part, or can it?

Science is no more and no less than one way of systematising knowledge.
And modern science is a successful and lasting way of compiling knowledge
because it is evolutionary, flexible and internally consistent. Problems
with the practice and application of science arise, however, for two main
reasons.

First, the assembly of knowledge and classification systems, such as
laws, are intrinsically useless, but have to claim utility for the pursuit
of knowledge to be funded. This leads naturally to the usual lying, cheating,
thieving and wholesale fraud by scientists in pursuit of fame and money.
Secondly, but more importantly, science can be subverted to meet narrow
political ends.

Science generates simple, believable and understandable car-bumper slogans,
such as: E=mc2, the Universe is expanding, DNA is the blueprint of life,
smoking causes cancer and so on. Uttering politically useful slogans that
sound the same, but are not true, is thus all too easy.

Science does not corrode human values. Industrial and political developments
that claim to be based on science do. The road builder, for example, claims
the support of objective science for his case by saying the road is needed
‘for economic development, improved safety and environmental protection’.
None of these reasons stands up to scientific scrutiny but may be needed
to justify political decisions helpful to industrial interests. Yet such
decisions erode democracy and destroy communities.

Appleyard’s thesis is flawed, and his complaint is misdirected. Science
cannot be used as the scapegoat for the decision makers whose policies based
on false claims of scientific support have led to the breakdown of communities
and values. Science, like art and religion is an important part of society.
But, then again, there is no such thing as society anymore, which I feel,
has caused some of the problems about which Appleyard complains so loudly.

Simon Wolff lectures in toxicology at the University of London.

But blame them people certainly did. On a popular early morning TV programme
recently, they were accused of gross disloyalty and lack of dedication.
Dedication is, however, a somewhat movable feast. John Hardy, head of the
emigrant research group observed that university clinicians were loyal and
dedicated but ‘on twice the salary’. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s are expected, in Britain,
to pursue their science with research results as the sole reward.

The idea that we should need money as well appears, to many people,
evidently a peculiar concept. Yet no politician would dare to venture that
the future prosperity of this country is not dependent upon our competitiveness
in science and technology. So where’s the money to keep us sweet and over
here? Where, pray, is the incentive in my pay packet? Why is my take-home
salary more than 25 per cent less than a civil servant of equivalent training,
grade and experience?

Before addressing the extremely interesting question of the ways in
which funding of national strategic interests is organised, think about
how much money would actually be needed to keep people like John Hardy in
Britain. At the last count, there were about 45 000 nonclinical staff (teaching
and researching in all disciplines) working full-time within the British
university system. The average salary of these people is, across the board,
about £20 000.

So to bring them up to the salary level of their civil servant colleagues
would require additional annual funding of about £250 million. This
is one hell of a lot of money. It is hardly surprising that successive education
secretaries appear confident in their categorical statements that it can’t
be afforded.

The real problem here, of course, is that nobody understands very large
amounts of money. What is £250 million worth? What does it represent?
Is it really a lot, or is it very little? And given that this money would
be coming directly or indirectly from government coffers is there anything
on which our tax monies are currently spent which could be diverted, even
in part, to keep our universities staffed?

Putting the question in this way is interesting. For example, not many
people know that the tax handout in the form of direct and indirect subsidies
to company car drivers has been calculated at £3 billion per annum?
Could we have 8 per cent of that please, or a month’s worth, if you prefer?
After all, there’s not much sign that subsidising the congestion of our
towns and cities by foreign cars is doing our prosperity much good.

In the same vein, how about a bit of the road-building budget: £4
billions a year. Let’s have 3 weeks’ worth of that. It only means scrapping
the building of another 2 miles’ worth of urban motorway somewhere. I doubt
this little loss would cause the country to come grinding to a halt. Or
let’s have a week’s worth of the agricultural subsidy, still running at
£12 billion a year: 2 per cent of that wouldn’t bring mass starvation
to the country. Even 4 days’ worth of the national defence budget would
hardly lead to invasion by communist hardliners, if there were any left.

See what I mean? When you start to look closely at what we get for £250
million it’s not really very much. And this game is fun for all the family.
So try it yourself at home. Look at areas of public expenditure which you
find excessive. Calculate the percentage or time-equivalent you get for
£250 million. What percentage of the pharmaceuticals industry’s excessive
profits from sales to the NHS? The advertising and administration budget
for how many privatisations? An advanced version of the game involves calculating
how many top-grade civil servants or over-paid directors of newly privatised
companies could be sacked without damage to the economy.

So the problem is not that the money is not available for the universities.
The tax monies are clearly there. The problem is that these monies are spent
on things of somewhat dubious merit, and in copious amounts. The result,
of course, is that we spend a smaller proportion of our national wealth
on the universities than any other member of the OECD countries with the
exception, I believe, of Turkey. But we spend a greater proportion of our
wealth keeping our wealthy company car drivers in traffic jams and our farmers
in unsaleable produce than any other OECD country. Why, one wonders, should
this be?

The simple answer is that it is a measure of the influence in parliament
(and thus on the Treasury) by various lobby groups. The ‘road lobby’, for
example, has been well documented by New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s Mick Hamer in his excellent
book Wheels within Wheels. This group of motor, road and oil industry interests
is very rich and very powerful. It has its own tame group of MPs within
parliament to influence public spending on company cars and roads – and
even has the money to entertain civil servants in a way which the rail lobby,
if it exists, does not. The farmers, still largely composed of rich landowners,
have similar influence within government. Indeed, many MPs are farmers and
are thus naturally inclined to support national spending which benefits
themselves and their colleagues.

A general rule in Britain is that one can obtain a handy measure of
the political influence of any group by analysing the amount of television
time devoted to advertising its products. The pet food manufacturers are,
by this calculation, very powerful. The reason we do not have a sensible
dog-licensing scheme in this country is because dog licensing = fewer dogs
= less pet food sales. The makers of detergents are also incredibly powerful
by this calculation and are the reason why water pollution standards are
lax here. Tighter standards = lower sales of high-profit washing powders.
Simple. So nonclinical university researchers and teachers are poorly paid
because we lack the resources to manipulate discussions, which affect our
pay in Westminster and Whitehall. Clinical university staff, on the other
hand, are paid much better simply because many MPs are doctors and are likely
to move in social circles in which their ear is effectively bent by their
colleagues.

Reforming our mechanism of government seems too large a subject to be
treated properly within the august pages of Forum and is, of course, unlikely
to be something which can happen rapidly. So I suggest that the most effective
way for the universities to obtain their just deserts is to play aggressively
within the existing system. There’s no point in just lobbying individual
MPs to press for more funds for the universities when, in half-an-hour’s
time, they are due at a huge lunch hosted by the National Farmers’ Union
or at a cocktail party given by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Futile.

So universities and concerned organisations have to start doing something
they may previously have viewed as anathema. They have to start paying MPs.
It doesn’t matter what political colour these individuals are so long as
they have a chance of election. And if and when elected the bought MPs continue
to be paid a healthy whack (as ‘consultant’ or ‘adviser’) only so long as
they exert suitable pressure within the corridors of power. Many unions
‘sponsor’ MPs. Many companies appoint MPs ‘Directors’ – not because of the
individual’s expertise in the business of that union or company, but because
of influence exerted on behalf of that union or company.

It is a mistake to believe that logical pleading to pay academics adequately
will improve our pay. The only way in which we can or will be paid the money
we deserve is if we first spend a little money buying our way into power.
In other words, keeping John Hardy’s hands dirty in a British lab means
getting our hands a little dirty too.

Simon Wolff is lecturer in toxicology in the Department of Medicine,
University College and Middlesex School of Medicine, London.

More than 25 million people around the world are blind because of cataracts,
opacity of the lens of the eye. It is most common in developing countries
but is, however, increasing in incidence in the developed nations whose
populations now contain a higher proportion of elderly people and where
it is going to be a substantial health and economic burden. Canny eye researchers
in the US spotted this rise years ago. They successfully lobbied Ronald
Reagan to slash funding for cancer research and give it to lens research.
They used a particularly sharp argument: cancer kills people whereas cataracts
makes them a cost to the nation. Reagan bought it.

There is no cure for cataracts although many folk remedies have been
flogged from antiquity to the present day. Surgical removal of the opaque
lens is relatively simple and is arguably the most ancient surgical technique;
popping the diseased lens through a small nick in the side of the eye takes
seconds and might account for the miraculous ability of Jesus to restore
sight. Gustave Flaubert writes that the operation was performed by the village
blacksmith in the 19th century. But modern cataract surgery is expensive
and the waiting lists are longer than ever. Blindness after the operation
is a common complication of a surgical procedure designed to improve sight.
In any case, new cases of cataracts far outstrip – at least in developing
countries – the ability of eye surgeons to remove the diseased lens. Prevention,
as with all disease, is clearly better than cure.

Harding’s book is a nicely judged and readable living history that begins
by taking us on a whistle-stop tour through the basic biology of the lens.
The author casually and succinctly describes its detailed metabolism, protein
structure, cytoskeletal organisation, genetics, biophysical arrangement,
multifunctional proteins and growth. He reminds us that a wealth of biological
knowledge first came from the lens. Harding then discusses the worldwide
problem of cataracts, its increasing importance, the risk factors that have
been identified and the various approaches used to control it. He ruthlessly
savages various theories of cataractogenesis and happily snipes away at
views he can’t quite kill, but doesn’t like. Harding clearly cares deeply
about the problem of cataracts and gives short, entertaining shrift to some
of the sillier notions that might impede progress, be they biochemical or
epidemiological.

For instance, Harding asks why cataracts are far more prevalent in developing
than developed countries. He takes us through the epidemiological evidence
purporting to show a role for sunlight in the development of cataracts and
finds it wanting. He pours scorn on proposals to attach lightmeters to the
foreheads of individuals – for a decade or so – and refers us to studies
showing that sunlight-related diseases do not correlate with the occurrence
of cataracts. He then develops the biochemical reasoning which makes it
unlikely that changes in lenses with cataracts are related to ultraviolet
light.

But if not sunlight, then what? The sunniest countries in the developing
world are also the poorest: malnutrition is rife and they tend to have poor
sanitation. In particular, life-threatening and severe diarrhoea are endemic.
So Harding proposed and showed that diarrhoea is a major risk factor for
cataracts in India. As an encore he reveals that bouts of diarrhoea are
a risk factor for cataracts even in that bastion of civilisation, Oxfordshire.

Since cataracts are an important predictor of mortality and share risk
factors with heart, nerve and kidney disease, it is likely that diarrhoea
will receive far closer attention in future. Other researchers have suggested
that cataracts could be caused by nutritional factors. Limiting the diet,
for example, slows down cataracts in experimental animals. But Harding notes
drily: ‘Malnutrition does not seem to have lowered the prevalence of cataract
in the Third World.’

The author also takes a look at the development of drugs to combat cataracts.
He identifies the flawed thinking that led to the abject failure of a multimillion
pound drug development programme aimed at the prevention of cataracts in
people with diabetes. He documents the simple (and cheap) observations which
helped to show that aspirin, and similar analgesics, are powerful protective
agents against cataracts. The lens and the heart (both protected by aspirin)
have a lot in common.

It is also an object lesson to observe that Harding is justifiably sceptical
about a ‘genetic causation’ of this disease. He notes there is only one
documented family with inherited cataracts out of a total of 150 000 sufferers
in Britain. This familial frequency is as great as in other common disorders.
So my advice to Harding is that he should apply for a million-pound grant
to study that one family. He’d no doubt be given it in our silly ‘blame
the genes’ scientific climate and could use the loot for something useful
such as following up the ideas presented in this well-written book.

Simon P. Wolff is lecturer in toxicology at Univesity College and Middlesex
School of Medicine.

Here’s how I got the idea. I went to a very boring conference recently.
Didn’t know anybody, the entertainments were lousy, the science was banal.
But I did get chatting with a couple of nice guys, one of whom, it seemed
to me, was in a field not unlike one I had recently become interested in.
Indeed, I’d actually done some research in the field and had been trying,
for some time, to publish the fruits of that research. As it happens the
referees (as is their wont) wrote back with such illuminating statements
as ‘S. Wolff doesn’t do his controls’, ‘S. Wolff doesn’t know the literature’,
or, ‘Sure we all know about that but it’s so intuitively obvious nobody
ever thought of checking it out.’

The paper was rejected by everybody. So I walked around nursing my little
discovery (and my wounded pride) until I met this guy, Jim, at the conference.
I liked him. He liked me. We talked science. And when I got back I sent
him my dusty and much rejected paper. He wrote back saying he liked it,
what was the problem, why was it rejected and here’s a bunch of his own
papers. I liked the papers but they were too clever and technical so I put
them at the bottom of the big thick stack of papers I have for things ‘I
have to do, urgently’.

A month later I got them out in case there were any ideas I could steal
without due acknowledgment. It was a hot day so I sat on the veranda. I
was bored so I read them cover to cover. And that’s when I read in the acknowledgment
section of a paper written by the guy – a full two years before I had met
him the statement: ‘I acknowledge S. Wolff, with grateful thanks, for critical
reading of the manuscript.’ I hadn’t known him, I didn’t know the subject,
I didn’t know the manuscript, but he was thanking me!

So, I thought, perhaps he’s just using the trick of acknowledging potentially
hostile referees so the manuscript doesn’t get sent out to them. But no;
I didn’t know the subject (still don’t) so it was impossible anybody would
have thought of me as a referee. Perhaps, I worried, I blacked out for few
years back there and did leading research in the field without knowing it.

And then it came to me in a flash of blinding revelation: there is more
than one S. Wolff. So I hyperventilated for five minutes and then tried
to think. Yes, I had known another S. Wolff at school but he played the
horn, was sensitive, studied languages and, in any case he was spelt with
an E. I also recalled a correspondence with a retired schoolteacher who
wrote to me assuming I was the same S. Wolff he’d once taught. But now I
knew there was another S. Wolff in science. Worse still, this S. Wolff works
in a related field.

So I went to that unimpeachable source of scientific literary reference,
the Science Citation Index, and looked myself up. Now, this is a dangerous,
solitary exercise I normally avoid. I remember being warned years ago that
I would go blind, get hairy palms and so on. But ‘desperation is the mother
of necessity’ as they don’t say. I reeled with the shock. There, before
my eyes, was certain evidence of another seven S. Wolffs. I felt like the
Catholic Church must have felt when Galileo told them the Earth went round
the Sun, and not vice versa. Why hadn’t my mother told me? ‘Darling, I love
you, but I have to tell you you’re not unique.’ I felt totally gutted, but
then something crept into my unpleasant and feverish little mind: ‘What
do my namesakes study?’

And so I come back to lying on your CV. Nip into the library, check
out the Science Citation Source Index, flip through to your name. If your
name is A. Smith you’re in clover. If your name is X. Gytraspoi you’re in
trouble. But S. Wolff has published over 300 papers since 1985 and, believe
me, they’re all on my CV. Some look a little esoteric in the general context
of my field, I admit, like ‘Kinetics of hydrogen absorption onto doped platinum
alloy surfaces at 15 K’ but some are likely to make any selection committee
look closely. For example, most of you won’t know that, (as, indeed, I didn’t)
that I have recently written a paper on ‘Female sexual offenders’. Now here
is a subject which, with a judiciously directed CV, could no doubt become
the subject of my future, fascinating and undoubtedly rewarding research
career.

Simon Wolff lectures in toxicology at University College and Middlesex
School of Medicine, London.

Experienced, Worldly-Wise ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´: ‘No, I’m sure you haven’t’

YCS: ‘I mean, some of my best friends are molecular biologists but,
you know, I’m not actually one myself.’

E,W-WS: ‘Yes, that’s right.’

YCS: ‘I mean, there’s so much stigma, isn’t there? With the risk of
contracting HGP and all that.’

E, W-WS: ‘Contracting HGP?’

YCS: ‘Yes, only being able to get a contract on the Human Gnome Project.’

E,W-WS. ‘Don’t you mean the Human Genome Project? That’s gEnome, with
an E’

This was a genuine conversation I recently had with a very young and
very frightened PhD student. Young Concerned ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ (not his real name)
is typical of the many inexperienced, totally ignorant and deeply impressionable
biologists and biochemists who are deeply sensitive to the prejudice and
overt stigma surrounding molecular biology. There is, of course, also the
very real fear of contracting HGP with all its risks of a boring job making
sure the automated sequencer’s bottles are filled up with the right chemicals.
Some of them even think the project is mainly concerned with the genetic
basis of restricted growth. It is young people like YCS, who have a crying
need to conform and ‘get into some sequencing’, whom we try to help at the
HUGONE (Help in Understanding Genome Nonsense) Clinic .

So what do we say to them? Here are some of the questions we are asked,
and some of our answers.

YCS: ‘But it must be a good thing to be in on. I mean the HGP was thought
up by brilliant scientists, Nobel laureates, Mrs Thatcher and so on.’

HUGONE Therapist: ‘Not quite. It was actually thought up by a few drunks
from the US Department of Energy (DOE) one evening over one too many beers.
They had an embarrassing budget underspend and thought it would be a swell
idea to spend the dosh sequencing the entire human genome. This was, apparently,
in the mistaken belief that this would help them to spot point mutations
caused by ionising radiation.

‘By the time they had sobered up enough to realise that the sequencing
error of 1 per cent made their idea a fantasy of Quixotic proportions it
was too late to pull back the monies they’d allocated. Canny molecular biologists
seized the cash and told everybody what a great, pro-science project it
was. The DOE, embarrassed about its foolish-ness stumped up some more, biotechnology
companies pushed for yet more federal spending to push their share prices
up and the rest, as they say, is hysteria. The original guys in the bar
are now supervising coal production in Alaska.’

YCS: ‘Well, perhaps. But it’s axiomatic that 4000 diseases are caused
by faulty genes. If we can pinpoint them we’ll eradicate disease.’

HT: ‘Well, we all have our axioms to grind. It’s true that most diseases
have a bit of genetic susceptibility to them, but very few diseases are
caused by faulty genes themselves. Most are caused by environmental factors.
Take, for example, the common cold. People vary enormously in their ability
to catch colds, and that is caused in part by differences in genetic susceptibility,
but we all know that the common cold is caused by a wide variety of viruses
and bacteria. Nobody thinks that genes cause colds.

‘At the other extreme, of course, understanding the genetic basis of
the common inherited blood disorders has made little difference to their
treatment. Genetic manipulation of blood stem cells is a long way off and
very unlikely to become the norm in the poor regions where these diseases
are endemic.

‘And just look at the projects intended to reduce the incidence of such
blood disorders. They screened individuals with the intent of encouraging
carriers only to have chil-dren with non-carriers. Carriers ended up ostracised
and able to marry only other carriers. Result, increased disease and red-faced
technocrats. HGP will make genetic counselling a nightmarish nonsense.

‘In any case, look at trends in disease in different countries over
the course of this century. Tuberculosis and cholera disappear with development.
But then heart disease, leukaemia and lung cancer appear. These diseases
clearly aren’t caused by rapid alterations in genes but by changes in the
environment.

‘Now that we know what causes lung cancer, and have educated people,
it is on the wane. We may never know what has caused the current epidemic
of heart disease in developed countries (diseases have an irritating habit
of disappearing of their own accord), but understanding genetic susceptibility
will be useless unless we know the specific environmental risk factors.
That’s what we should spend our scarce resources on.’

YCS: ‘But the HGP is an enormous pro-science, pro-progress project.
If you are anti-HGP (or do I mean HGP-negative?) then aren’t you anti-science
and anti-progress?’

HT: (Patronisingly) ‘A common misconception. Big projects are notoriously
anti-science and anti-progress themselves. Take, for example, the Moon Shot
programme. No spin-offs and consumed vast resources in people and money.
Set the more scientific, but unmanned, space programme back years and years.
It’s said we would never have had Teflon nor calculators if it hadn’t been
for Apollo but these had nothing to do with geezers trotting round the lunar
landscape.

‘In fact, megaprojects have their own technological inertia. The money,
the bureaucracy and manpower is so great that things can only proceed slowly
on the basis of no risk using only tried-and-tested technology. But at least
the Moon shot entertained. Great TV: ‘This is a small step for a man etc
etc.’ Moon walking is in a totally different televisual ballpark to ‘chromosome
walking’ as they call it in the ‘genebiz’.’

YCS: ‘So what should I do?’

HT ‘There’s nothing wrong with molecular biology. It can be pretty and
entertaining science. But look at it reasonably. Don’t believe propaganda.
You don’t have to justify your existence in biological science by claiming
that you’ll cure disease, save the environment or whatever. Molecular biology,
like all science, is fun and produces it’s most useful results when it’s
not applied.’

YCS, greatly relieved, takes his free T-shirt (HGP: DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE),
writes his huge cheque to HUGONE and leaves, a faint and vacuous smile playing
around his young and acned face.

Simon Wolff lectures in toxicology at University College and Middlesex
School of Medicine, London.

The first thing to realise, in this modern cutthroat world, is that
your achievement is somebody else’s failure. The somebody else is, of course,
the referees who resent anybody breaking onto their patch. They’ll hate
you if you’re clever. So, if you have something interesting to say, here
are some handy tips to help you get into print.

Use good English: I don’t mean clear English, of course, I mean the
sort of English, like Hemingway’s, which acknowledges that the language
is so rich in verbs that you don’t need adverbs. My friend George Stern,
who writes for the Literary Review, reckons that you can even do without
adjectives. After a few fumblings with the Concise Oxford, any reviewer
will treat you with respect.

On the other hand, you inevitably come to grief if you write simply.
I swear to God I once got a referee’s report which read: ‘The manuscript
is written in a relaxed, conversational style that leads the reader to feel
uncertain concerning the rigour with which the experiments were performed’.
Clear lesson there.

Legends to Figures: As a general rule write: ‘for further details see
Methods and Materials’. In Materials and Methods write: ‘for further details
see Legends to Figures’.

Statistics: These are nasty but necessary. Cite five textbooks (to be
on the safe side). But most referees seem happy with: ‘Statistical analyses
were performed with the GLUM program for Spearman’s chi polyvariate distribution
correlation pooled variance analysis of variance Pearson’s T-test employing
the Bonferroni correction (and now the clincher), where appropriate.’ Don’t
use Student’s T-test, as the name makes you look amateur.

Coauthors: Everybody you can think of. A manuscript should have more
coauthors than figures. Invent people with obscure-sounding Italian, German
and Hungarian names who sound vaguely famous. Federico Fermi, Hans Kreps,
Albert Syzent-Gorgyzii are fine. Don’t put your own name on the original
manuscript.

This can easily be inserted at proof stage (see below). It is, of course,
essential to have as the first author: John Jones* (and the footnote: *deceased)
to attract the all-important sympathy vote in case the manuscript should
fall into enemy hands. Invent someone at your address ‘to whom all correspondence
should be addressed’.

Acknowledgements: These are critical and must go on the front page.
You must thank all the main players in the field for ‘invaluable advice
in experimental design and critical appraisal of the manuscript in draft
stages’. It matters not a jot that these people have never heard of you.
The editor of the journal (being an upright citizen) will refuse to send
the paper to people who appear to have contributed.

References: The first and the last reference must be to an unpublished
(and fictitious) report, in your name, giving an address and, preferably,
telephone number:

Ref 1. Wolff S P: Chairman of First World Consensual Report on Importance
of (insert title of research here) in the Strategic Plan for TransDisciplinary
Research Targets. EC, WHO, UN & WDBM Commissioners’ Convention July
1991 (Department of Clinical Pharmacology; University College London, 5
University Street, LONDON WC₁ 6JJ. Tel: 071 380 9678). WDBM,
of course, stands for We Do Bar Mitzvahs.

Ref 69. Wolff S P: Chairman of Second Ditto.

The editor, being lazy, will inevitably send your manuscript straight
back for you to review as you appear to be the only expert who hasn’t contributed.
Write glowing praise. Wait for the proofs. Cross off the Jones (deceased),
the acknowledgements and all the other fictions. Insert your own name. Sit
back, relax, then start writing the grant.

Simon Wolff is the name to look for among the references. He lectures
in toxicology at University College, London.

The two main problems, as I see it (mind you, I can never see any more
than two main problems), are one (a) the lack of elitism in the universities
and two (b) the total elitism of the universities. Both of these have got
to go. Things must get both (a) more egalitarian and (b) less ditto. We
have to relaunch the whole package so that everybody appears to have an
equal opportunity of success (at the level of students as well as staff)
while paying through the teeth for the privilege of looking successful.
Just like British Rail.

The first thing to go will be the elitist system of degree classes earned
by honest intellectual endeavour. This is totally cost-ineffective from
the point of view of staff and administration time, and is increasingly
irrelevant to the needs of modern Britain. Class of degree bears no relation
to financial success in later life.

I propose, instead, that we bring in the BR system. From now on we will
have the following degrees: First Class, Standard Class and Supersaver (with
the possibility of a Blue Supersaver to be introduced for those willing
to take finals on Christmas Day at 3 am depending on staff availability).

Of course, the standard of teaching will be the same for all classes
(it’ll be the same old teach yourself or wait-for-your-lecturer-to-turn-up
variety) but the standard of service will be different. Those who pay thick
wads up front will get wider and more comfortable seats in the lecture theatre
and more service treatment in tutorials (with complementary champagne).

Standard Class will get wooden seats in lecture halls, cramped tutorials
and a glass of British sherry every second week. For those studying ‘steerage’
it’ll be standing room only at the back of the hall and tutorials will be
cancelled at short notice, without apology.

To introduce some sort of merit into the system, students who collect
enough ‘Lecture Hours’ (a simple voucher system) will be able to upgrade
to a more comfortable class of degree. Examinations will be a little like
ticket inspections: cursory, but gratifyingly officious. At this stage there
will still be the possibility of upgrading, but excess ‘fares’ are likely
to be punitive.

At the other end of the spectrum we have to reform the unfair and wasteful
research funding system. The whole system depends, in any case, increasingly
upon patronage, freemasonry and so on. The biggest research funding clients
get the biggest slice of the pie and everybody else wastes enormous amounts
of time destroying precious forestland in order to have their application
dropped in the bath water by some indolent drunk. Nobody believes any more
that awards are made on merit, so the time-and wood-wasting have to stop.

My system is simple, fair and precisely as random as the current system.
I am campaigning for Scratch ‘n’ Grant cards. Instead of preparing detailed,
considered and carefully costed grant applications, you simply pop round
to the Medical Research Council, the British Heart Foundation and so on
and buy a card in your research interest category (choice of molecular biology
or molecular biology). You look at the question of the top of the card,
scratch off the gold leaf over the box which you think matches the correct
answer and if correct, you complete the process by scratching off the gold
on the prize box.

You could win anything from a new box of envelopes from central stores,
to a travel grant to a conference of your choice in Dundee, to a massive
research grant of £750 000 spread over 5 years with nuclear magnetic
resonance machine thrown in! The cost of the card would be deducted directly
from salary with a slice of the action going to the university as ‘overhead’.

Richer members of the university would be able to buy more cards than
the poorer but would only slightly increase their chance of winning a bog
grant which, as now, would be as statistically likely as winning a huge
win on the pools. Of course, many of the more ambitious staff would effectively
end up paying the university for the privilege of working there; so the
new system wouldn’t really change much there either.

Would these proposed changes make any difference to our universities?
It’s just the right mix of egalitarianism and elitism and would do no more
damage than is being done to the universities, under a slightly different
funding system, right now. And if that doesn’t make the whole boiling profitable
we could always privatise it!

Simon Wolff lectures in toxicology in the department of clinical pharmacology
at University College and Middlesex School of Medicine, London.