Letter: Nuclear capability
I read your editorial ‘Nobody’s fuel’ (18 November) with interest. I
found the absence of comment about nuclear power generation in France, Belgium,
Japan – and even Scotland – rather surprising. Are the generating authorities
in those countries an exception to the nobodies? Are you making the point
that nuclear power is unacceptable everywhere on Earth or only in those
countries with plenty of fossil fuels to burn such as Britain and the US?
Perhaps the point really is that the Anglo Saxon countries are no good at
nuclear power generation, whereas the French are good at it.
Frank Roberts Norwich
Letter: Travelling 'hogs
One has to have some doubts about the Russian hedgehog story (Feedback,
9 December). I took part in a hedgehog survey for the Department of Zoology,
Royal Holloway College, London, which involved colour-coding visiting hedgehogs.
The friendly hedgehog coming to me every night for his evening meal turned
out to be 17 different hedgehogs.
Anne Ursell Harpenden, Hertfordshire
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Letter: Girls will be girls
Barbara Lloyd quotes with approval John Stuart Mill’s statement: ‘I
deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long
as they have only been seen in the present relation to one another’ (‘Rules
of the gender game’, 2 December). She also quotes approvingly of Serge Moscovici’s
‘theory of social representations to describe the unique rules or codes
that society constructs to regulate and communicate knowledge about gender
and the relations between members of gender groups’. Yet this theory, and
her own work, cannot properly be tested unless we can see the relation between
the two factors under conditions where the unique rules or codes that society
constructs to regulate and communicate knowledge about gender and the relations
between members of gender groups are different to those current in our society.
An intriguing experiment in this direction has been done in Israel,
where Kibbutz women were brought up in a society that defines the relations
between boys and girls, and men and women, very differently to the way they
are defined here. Absolute equality is asserted, attempts are made to break
down the family, and an extreme form of sexual egalitarianism is not only
preached but also practised. Yet, as M. E. Spiro has shown so clearly in
his book Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Woman Re-visited, the result has been
that the Sabras (that is, a generation grown up under this regime) has more
than reverted to the modes of conduct suitable for boys and girls, males
and females, according to the older standards against which their parents
rebelled; they even exaggerated these standards, and imitated in their behaviour
those features we consider typical of the two sexes.
Clearly John Stuart Mill was right, and now that we are in a position
to compare cultures differing greatly in the rules or codes these societies
have constructed to regulate and communicate knowledge about gender and
the relations between members of gender groups, the outcome of such a comparison
suggests very strongly the supremacy of biological factors, and the relative
impotence of social factors to counteract biology. This is not the conclusion
one would have derived from Lloyd’s article.
H. J. Eysenck Professor Emeritus of Psychology University of London
Letter: Girls will be girls
Although Barbara Lloyd’s findings on the differences between girls’
and boys’ play provide a useful description of the phenomenon, they do not
come as a surprise.
Girls and women have long been allowed to participate in a wider range
of activities than boys and men. Most parents recognise the benefits of
encouraging girls to play with trains and blocks but quail from encouraging
boys to play with dolls and prams. This extends (and probably has for a
long time) into many aspects of culture.
Men in traditional societies have been viewed as the providers of food,
yet many an analysis has now shown women to be more productive, supplying
vegetables and small prey. Men may be viewed as the providers because of
the restricted nature of their roles; women also bear and raise children.
Our perverse society seems to value those who manage to do less as more
important, with the corollary that men’s roles are rated as more important
than women’s. In striving for equal rights, women have thus asked for more
access to men’s activities. This further devalues those activities deemed
to be a woman’s preserve.
Encouraging males to be more involved in nurturing would be a surer
route to equality. Similarly, the teachers Lloyd cites would be better to
encourage boys to spend more time in creative, directed and role play than
to tell the boys to let the girls have equal access to constructional toys.
Finally, the study of four- to five-year-olds does not give Lloyd the
ability to conclude that gender roles and sex are inextricable. By this
age they have already experienced many years of parental direction and expectations.
Gabriel Crowley Blackwood, Australia
Letter: Laboratory aid?
I read with interest Omar Sattaur’s article ‘World Bank calls for action
to halt Africa’s brain drain’ (This Week, 25 November).
Recently, I returned from a trip to visit friends and colleagues in
Nigeria. Many are frustrated by the lack of equipment in some universities.
They have no chance to undertake research, due to lack of scientific analytical
instruments classed as routine in European universities, polytechnics and
other higher educational institutions.
It is good news that the World Bank is trying to create regional programmes
or centres of excellence for postgraduate research. However, several expensive
show centres for the whole of Africa will not solve quickly the many problems
outlined in the article. In Britain, many companies update scientific instruments
at regular intervals, giving away good instruments at knock-down prices
or scrapping them. Indeed, this is how we acquired many of our own instruments,
developing a very good instrument laboratory for a College of Further Education.
Scientific instrument laboratories could be set up in many of Africa’s
universities using instruments that have been discarded by European and
American industry, thus providing much needed facilities to boost research
in these institutions and training many in the use of sophisticated equipment.
I can think of many good homes for second-hand equipment in Nigeria
let alone the whole of Africa. I hope that the next time Fisons, ICI, 3M
and so on are updating equipment they think of Africa as a home for their
old instruments.
J. C. Bolger Loughborough College Loughborough, Leicestershire
Letter: Sugar and health
The letter by P. Wolff and V. Hunt (2 December) raises several interesting
questions and reiterates the hypothesis that it is the underlying cause
of diabetes that in turn causes the complications and that glucose is irrelevant.
In doing so they make erroneous statements that should be answered.
They question whether high blood glucose causes tissue damage in diabetes.
In biochemical, clinical and epidemiological studies it is always important
to consider whether associations are causal. Epidemiologists do it all the
time; biochemists less frequently and less formally. There are, however,
at least three major reasons for accepting the idea that glucose causes
diabetic complications at least until powerful contrary evidence is produced.
First, there are various forms of diabetes with different causes but
with a similar array of complications: type I and II diabetes in man, streptozotocin-induced
diabetes and alloxan diabetes in rats, and diabetes induced by pancreatectomy
in dogs. The causes of the diabetes have little in common, but the common
result is elevated glucose and subsequent damage to lens, retina, kidney,
nerve and blood vessels generally. Admittedly not all complications occur
in all forms of diabetes but that is not surprising when the experimental
animals have short life spans and complications take years to develop in
man. Secondly, similar complications can occur in other sugar disorders
such as galactosaemia and on feeding galactose. Thirdly, severity of several
complications in man parallels measures of glycation (two methods).
The claim that glycation affects only a tiny proportion of protein is
untrue even for haemoglobin, and the claim that glycation is slower than
the turnover of most proteins involved in diabetic tissue damage is confusing.
Glycation of most proteins studied is approximately doubled in diabetes
so clearly they did not turn over quickly enough, and important proteins
in tissue damage include myelin, basement membrane collagen and lens crystallins
with half-lives of years to decades. Half-lives of other proteins may be
increased by glycation.
The balance of evidence would still seem to suggest that excess glucose
is to be avoided, by diabetics and non-diabetics.
John J. Harding Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology University of Oxford
Anna Furth Open University Research Unit Oxford