Leo Kinlen, a statistician at the Cancer Research Campaign’s Cancer
Epidemiology Research Group in Oxford, claims the error caused the Committee on
Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) to wrongly dismiss his
explanation for the cluster: the triggering of cancers by infections brought
into the area by an influx of construction workers.

In a report last year, COMARE could find no good explanation for the cluster,
noting that Kinlen’s theory “would at best seem to offer only a partial
explanation”. The committee centred its investigation on the town of Seascale,
near Sellafield, where the rate of childhood cancers is 11 times the national
average.

In the latest issue of the Journal of Radiological Protection (vol
17, p 63), Kinlen argues that this focus was wrong. “The mistake can be likened
to a sharpshooter who first fires a gun, then draws the target around the bullet
hole,” he says. “COMARE should have looked at the whole vicinity around
ł§±đ±ô±ôČčŽÚŸ±±đ±ô»ć.”

Eleven studies which have taken the approach Kinlen suggests, many from his
own group, have backed the theory that influxes of people into isolated areas
bring a range of new infections, some of which can trigger cancers. Thousands of
construction workers have converged on Sellafield.

Bryn Bridges of the Medical Research Council’s Cell Mutation Unit at the
University of Sussex, who chairs COMARE, defends the decision to concentrate on
Seascale. A wider study, he says, was beyond the committee’s remit.

However, Richard Doll of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund’s Epidemiology
Unit in Oxford, one of the world’s leading cancer epidemiologists, says: “I
think it’s extraordinary that COMARE just concentrates on Seascale.”

Intourist, the state tourist organisation in the USSR, promised that
the first commercial tour of the town, which is heavily guarded against
uninvited guests, would be a ‘unique opportunity’. A chance to visit the
town where Britain’s first astronaut will be trained seemed too good to
miss, although the price of a couple of tickets, Pounds sterling 105, made
me wince. Never mind, Intourist now takes credit cards.

The price was probably the reason why there were not many takers for
the day trip. There were four in our English-speaking group, and about half-a-dozen
space fanatics in a German group, an ironic twist given that the Soviet
space programme owes so much to German scientists captured at the end of
the Second World War.

We set off by bus in the bright sunshine of the early morning and were
introduced to Luba, our Intourist guide. About 10 kilometres from Star City,
our driver stopped to give his papers to a police checkpoint. A few minutes
later we were passing through more checkpoints.

After waiting a few minutes while Luba remonstrated with officials on
our arrival (they were not apparently all that sure who we were), we finally
passed the last checkpoint before entering the city itself. City is perhaps
a misnomer. It is in fact a town covering an area of about 300 hectares,
with about 4000 residents, and about another 2000 commuting each day from
Moscow.

We all walked to the first port of call, a huge statue of Yuri Gagarin,
the first man in space and definitely the greatest hero of Star City, if
not the USSR, next to Lenin. Gagarin, Luba said, had lived in a flat on
the sixth floor of the block in front of us.

From the statue of a late Hero of the Soviet Union, we went to meet
a live one, in the shape of Colonel Vyatcheslav Zudov, who had the medals
to prove it. He stepped out of his car to be immediately mobbed by an admiring
group of Germans, who appeared to know every detail of his last trip into
space. This was in 1975 when he had to come back to Earth prematurely as
a result of a failure to dock with his rendezvous. Zudov handled the adulation
well. He kept his dignity as he posed for a continual series of photographs,
shaking hands with Hans from Munich and Klaus from Baden-Baden.

We stepped inside the Space Centre, a large building that houses a number
of exhibits of the USSR’s achievements in space. We saw a Vostok capsule,
in which the first men in space spent a cramped few hours circling the globe.
‘They saw the sun rise and fall 17 times a day,’ Luba said. As if that was
not disorientating enough, the cosmonauts had to cope with extraordinary
hardships and the constant fear of sudden, or even lingering death. No wonder
they had to be athletes as well as extremely brave.

One exhibition at the Space Centre is devoted solely to Gagarin. He
was the first man to orbit the Earth, in 1961 at the age of 27. Just seven
years later he died tragically in a plane crash. If he had had just two
more seconds to correct his aircraft, he could have survived, Luba explained.
The exhibition includes the wristwatch and wallet he was carrying when he
died, and a picture of him meeting Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

During the walk from the Space Centre to the part of the city where
cosmonauts are trained, I asked Luba why the Soviet authorities had now
decided to allow foreign tourists into Star City. ‘Glasnost, openness,’
she said, perhaps a little wary of my questioning. ‘We’ve got to get rid
of the bureaucracy and red tape.’ Of course, the other reason is the Soviet
Union’s need to earn foreign ‘hard’ currency. At Pounds sterling 52.50 a
ticket, a guided tour of Star City could be a nice little earner for Intourist.

To get into the training area, we had to pass through another guarded
gate. Once inside, we could see a huge circular building where the cosmonauts
are spun in a centrifuge at high speeds to simulate the very high g forces
they experience at lift-off.

In another building, which we entered, there is a full-scale model of
the Mir space station. Zudov was on hand to explain how the model is used
in training as he posed for photographs next to a suit used for walking
in space. He had a gripping story about how one cosmonaut had inadvertently
knocked a handle on his suit only to find that he was slowly losing pressure.
Zudov told the tale with the aplomb of a veteran.

After a closer look at the Mir, and another round of photographs, we
were off to see the last building on the tour. This was where the cosmonauts
train in a large tank of water to simulate weightlessness. We peered through
the portholes to see a Soviet space capsule immersed in the watery blue
light of the tank.

All training sessions in the tank start with a medical check-up. Then
the cosmonauts put on their heat-exchange suits, which keep them at the
right temperature, followed by the bulky outer suits. To prepare for any
one mission in space, the cosmonauts spend between 7 and 18 sessions training
in the water tank.

The final port of call was the restaurant, where we had coffee and cakes
but somehow missed out on the main course. One of the problems of being
a tourist in the USSR is that you never seem to be able to eat when you
want to. Let’s hope that Britain’s prospective astronauts, who will spend
up to 18 months at Zryozdny, have more luck.

I needed one of those airport trolleys to carry my luggage from the
conveyor belt to the customs desk. Then came the catch. No trolley unless
I paid a rouble to the man with the trolleys, and no rouble until after
I had crossed the customs barrier. (Roubles are restricted currency and
the import or export of them is strictly forbidden, which is why nobody
had roubles this side of the barrier.) So why, one might ask, was someone
asking for roubles in exchange for a trolley? In the Soviet Union, you can
spend quite some time pondering such philosophical conundrums. This time,
I was in no mood to discuss the dilemma with the man in charge of the trolleys.
I just shrugged my shoulders, spoke English as loud as I could and walked
off with the damn trolley. All this bother, I thought, and I had yet really
to pass into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

My arrival coincided with the run-up to the USSR’s first general election
in which there was a genuine pool of politicians to choose from. The taxi
driver from the airport soon gave me the benefit of his vast experience
of the political situation in the Soviet Union; Moscow’s taxi drivers are
just as capable as London’s cabbies of giving the appearance that they are
off-duty advisers to the Cabinet Office.

‘Gorbachov’s gone too far,’ he said. I thought that perhaps I had found
the first Russian prepared to speak out against perestroika. My driver then
launched into an attack on the Soviet government’s drive against alcoholism.
‘They blame the shortage of sugar on people brewing their own,’ he said.
‘Perhaps they will blame a shortage of bread on people trying to brew beer
with flour.’

Shortages are still unfortunately a daily fact of life for most Russians,
unless you happen to be one of the privileged few who can buy goods in the
shops set aside for members of the Communist Party. By all accounts, the
shortages are worse now than for many years. Some older people even talk
nostalgically of the Stalin era. ‘At least we had food in the shops then,’
is a familiar tone taken by many Russians of pensionable age.

It is, in fact, possible to buy good quality food in the Moscow markets.
But, unlike markets in London which are cheaper than the shops, the markets
in Moscow are incredibly expensive. Food in the shops is always sold at
state prices, which have not changed for years. The markets, however, are
free to choose their own prices. As a result, two carrier bags of fresh
vegetables and meat will cost about 80 roubles (about Pounds sterling 80)
which is the average weekly wage.

The prices at the markets could explain why few Muscovites go there
to buy food. The one good thing to be said about Moscow markets is that
there is no shortage of people behind the stalls waiting to serve you. In
fact, there are often more people selling things than there are shoppers
willing to buy.

Overmanning is probably one of the USSR’s greatest problems at present.
I recommend to anyone doing research into this that they should go to the
Intourist main office in Moscow, at number 1 Gorky Street. There you will
see a line of Intourist personnel sitting behind the counter studiously
doing everything but their job. Combing hair, applying lipstick, talking
to friends on the phone, or talking to each other – anything, that is, but
talking to the foreigners on the other side of the desk.

One reason for this is that time has a different value in the Soviet
Union. You can spend hours on the phone trying to get someone, only to be
told to wait, call back tomorrow, call back next week or, worst of all,
call back when you are next in Moscow.

In the month I was there, it was practically impossible to see any scientists,
on the pretext that the USSR Academy of Sciences was deep in elections.
In fact, I did manage to see Roald Sagdeyev, the former director of the
Institute of Space Research, three hours before my plane left for London.
I thought that I had had problems getting things done until I heard that
he was trying to plan a mission to probe Mars in 1994 and had still not
yet received final approval from his political masters.

There is, I learnt, one way of getting things done in Moscow, apart
from joining a queue or joining the party. I can only describe it as the
Moscow handshake.

I first saw it performed between a taxi driver and a policeman. It looked
like an ordinary handshake, but one that worked wonders. But then I noticed,
on a second occasion, that the taxi driver had a 10-rouble note clenched
between his fingers that strangely disappeared after the handshake had taken
place.

This sort of handshake can shift mountains, it seems. My taxi driver
was, for instance, able to perform the most daring feats in dense traffic
without so much as a ticket. A handshake was all that was necessary.

I should perhaps point out that I have never willingly given or received
a Moscow handshake. I say willingly because I once pulled out a 5-rouble
note as a tip for a very obliging waiter only to have him grasp my hand
as if we were long lost friends. The money disappeared without trace.

For someone who is a product of Western-style democracy and capitalism,
life in the Soviet Union is often a confusing and frustrating affair. And
yet I sense that something dramatic is taking place there.

On the positive side, there is certainly a genuine openness. Just before
the general election, I saw many groups of people openly discussing with
each other in the streets and subways the merits of particular politicians.
I had never seen such a spontaneous outbreak of debate in Britain.

On the negative side, the openness is still limited. Soviet newspapers
and television have a very different attitude to news from their counterparts
in the West. It seemed strange to me, for example, that Soviet TV reported
on President Gorbachov’s visit to Britain as if it was an animated version
of his diary for the day. We were not told about the details of his speech
at the Guildhall in London, only that he made one and that it ‘will be published
in full later’.

Another problem is the Soviet economy has got worse over the past few
years. This is certainly the case judging from what is available in the
shops. When Gorbachov tackles price reform next year, perhaps ending the
tradition of stable prices, this could be the real test of perestroika.
Most Russians will put up with a great deal of hardship, but history tells
us that price increases are not one of them.

The problem rests with the political establishment in the USSR, he said
in an interview last week with New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ. Sagdeyev’s political masters
have still not made a decision on whether to approve the Mars 94 mission.
‘Time is running out,’ he said, ‘and so this is why we are using every channel
of communication to our government, to our officials. We are using every
±ô±đ±č±đ°ùČčČ”±đ.’

The fact that Sagdeyev and his scientists have still not received approval
for Mars 94 means, he said, that it could lead to a ‘genetic deficiency’
that could spoil the project. ‘Bad planning and late approval means there
is not enough time to make a good project,’ he said.

Sagdeyev confessed that the same problems hampered the Phobos mission
to Mars. ‘The final approval of Phobos took place only in early 1985, three-and-a-half
years before the launch of the two Phobos spacecraft.’ He now believes that
the Soviet space industry will try to use this short time to develop and
build the spacecraft and its instruments as an excuse for the failures of
both Phobos 1 and Phobos 2.

‘The approval for Phobos was too late for our contractors, who are under
strong attack now for not enough reliable performance of the hardware. They
now have an excuse. They could say that final contracts were signed too
late. I think this is an illustration of why we so desperately need perestroika
because bad performance of the economy starts with poor planning.’

Last week, in celebration of Cosmonauts’ Day in the USSR, Sagdeyev spoke
at a meeting of his colleagues and the Soviet space industry. Instead of
following tradition and speaking in glowing terms of past achievements,
Sagdeyev conducted a postmortem on Phobos 2, which he accepts is lost for
good because of a communications failure a week before it was due to fly
within 50 metres of the Phobos moon.

‘Not everyone was happy to discuss the failure of Phobos 2 on that particular
day. They considered it a violation of the old rule not to talk about the
rope in the house of the hanged man,’ he said. But talk he did, an attitude
that explains why Sagdeyev has now become one of the most respected scientists
in the Soviet Union. This week, he expects, like Andrei Sakharov, to hear
whether he has become one of the 20 academicans to be elected to the new
parliament.

Sagdeyev resigned as director of the Space Research Institute, a post
he held for 15 years, in order to pursue his own research, which is concerned
with plasma physics. ‘I still have ambitions to do science. I hope it is
not too late, and I hope very much that I’m not becoming a professional
±èŽÇ±ôŸ±łÙŸ±łŠŸ±ČčČÔ.’

Sagdeyev feels so strongly that the political system in the USSR needs
restructuring that he seems prepared to sacrifice his dream of becoming
a researcher again. ‘There are financial difficulties everywhere and there
is always a fight between early approval of a project such as Mars 94 and
the early allocation of funds. But we in the USSR have developed a special
kind of bureaucratic system.’

By this week, Sagdeyev should know the results of the official inquiry
into why contact with Phobos 2 was lost at such a critical point in the
mission. ‘The choice is between two options: failure of the transmitter
or failure of the on-board computer which controls the operations of the
spacecraft. The problem is that all that happened with a couple of hours
of operations which were under the control of the on-board computer and
the spacecraft was not in communication with Earth, so this is why only
a reconstruction of the situation can clarify the situation.’

Both items of hardware, the transmitter and computer, were made in the
Soviet Union. Sagdeyev wants to pinpoint what went wrong in order to reassure
the scientists from other countries who participated in the mission, and
who want to collaborate on Mars 94. ‘There is political pressure,’ he admits,
‘to find out what happened and there is a psychological pressure, which
is understandable, from our contractors to say that nothing terribly wrong
happened. So each interest group is defending its own interest. But there
is a question of credibility in terms of international collaboration because
the last part of the mission, which failed, had scientific instrumentation
from four or five nations. And it very important to give them a frank account
of what happened.’

The Soviet scientists lost Phobos 1 because a computer operator sent
the wrong message, which resulted in the spacecraft’s solar panels turning
away from the Sun. The outcome was a permanent loss of power.

The Phobos 2 spacecraft, an exact replica, had problems with its main
transmitter last December and was working on its auxiliary transmitter at
the time when contact was lost on 27 March. The commission that Glavkosmos,
the Soviet space agency, set up to investigate the issue was originally
given a week to find out what happened. This has now been extended and the
results are due ‘any day now’, Sagdeyev said.

Does he think that the failure of Phobos 2 will affect the more ambitious
plan to probe Mars in 1994? ‘I don’t think that this part of the Phobos
mission (the one that failed) will have any impact on the technical scenario
of Mars 94, which is a separate piece of science. I hope very much that
the failure of Phobos 2 at the very last week before encounter with Phobos
would not lead to the cancellation or delay of Mars 94.’ But is this a possibility?
‘I hope not . . . it depends on our internal planning.’

Sagdeyev’s remaining dream is a manned mission to Mars, not necessarily
because of the science but because it should lead to cooperation with the
US. It will also require the diversion of military space funding to peaceful
uses. ‘I support the dream, maybe not from the scientific point of view,
but because it will be an example of conversion from military to peaceful
uses of the space industry.’

Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, shares Sagdeyev’s dream of a combined
Soviet-American mission to put people on Mars. They have both tried to convince
politicians that it is a viable project. If Sagdeyev becomes elected to
the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies this week, then perhaps he can
begin to make their dream come true.

Glavkosmos, the Soviet space agency, said this week that its expert
commission of scientists, set up to investigate why contact was lost, will
report its findings on Sunday (9 April). If there are still no signals from
Phobos 2 by then, the international team of researchers working on the mission
is likely to admit defeat, according to Soviet observers.

This is the only official statement Glavkosmos is prepared to make.
The agency cancelled a briefing for foreign journalists about Phobos, which
was set up before the current problems arose. The head of Glavkosmos, Alexander
Dunayev, told Izvestia, a Soviet daily newspaper, that efforts to restore
links with the spacecraft are continuing around the clock.

The newspaper, the first to report that radio contact with Phobos had
been lost, said that the scientists turned the spacecraft around on 27 March
to take pictures of the Phobos moon. The objective was to specify the parameters
of its orbit around Mars, in order to prepare to fly past the potato-shaped
moon.

The operation was completed and Phobos 2 was due to send the information
back to Earth, but it was then that mission control failed to establish
contact with the spacecraft, despite repeated attempts. Boris Belitsky,
the science correspondent for Radio Moscow, and one of the best science
journalists in Moscow, told New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ that the trouble appeared to be
due to a faulty transmitter rather than a mistaken computer command, which
was responsible for the loss of contact with the Phobos 1 spacecraft, launched
one week before Phobos 2. ‘In December we had trouble with the main transmitter,’
he said, ‘and the auxiliary has also been slightly misbehaving.’

Before losing contact, however, the spacecraft returned some images
of the Martian surface to Earth. Belitsky says that Phobos 2 sent optical
and infrared images of ‘quite remarkable’ features just before mission control
lost contact with it.

The features are either on the Martian surface or in the lower atmosphere.
The features are between 20 and 25 kilometres wide and do not resemble any
known geological formation, he said. ‘They are spindle-shaped and are proving
to be intriguing and puzzling,’ he said. Belitsky is pessimistic about the
possibility of regaining contact with the spacecraft. ‘It would be a miracle,’
he said, ‘but hopes are dimming and dimming all the time.’ Phobos 1 and
its backup, Phobos 2, were launched within a week of each other last July.