Letter: Women in science
Lesley Currah is right to identify negative and conservative attitudes
among some parts of the male scientific establishment as an obstacle to
women’s advancement (Letters, 24 February). But there is some tangible comfort
to be offered.
My company is a major employer of scientists in Britain. Like many other
companies who depend on technical skills for their commercial success we
are worried about the growing crisis in availability of skilled people and
about the implications of the so-called demographic time-bomb. Quite apart
from the need for equity, there are therefore good business reasons for
employers to make the best use of the female workforce.
Our response has been to try to make ourselves a more attractive and
considerate employer to women. We have been promoting a range of flexibilities
to give women the ‘better deal’ referred to by Currah: part-time working,
job-sharing, home working, flexible hours, a career-break scheme and child-care
facilities. In doing so we have consulted very widely among our female workforce.
It is early days yet for some of our initiatives and we have yet to see
the results, but I am confident that they meet our female employees’ needs
as they currently perceive them.
I recognise that these developments do not by themselves tackle the
question of attitude which, as Currah suggests, lies at the root of many
of the problems. However, an employer’s ability to demonstrate examples
of women who have successfully combined careers with their other commitments
goes some way to combating in-built prejudices.
In AEA Technology we still have fewer women in senior technical jobs
than we would like. But their numbers are growing. We have been going to
considerable lengths to publicise our flexible working successes internally.
This has encouraged more of our female employees to seek opportunities to
combine a career with their domestic responsibilities, but, just as importantly,
it has convinced some ‘doubting Thomases’ that such flexibilities are workable.
What is really needed for women to have an opportunity to succeed as scientists
and engineers, I would suggest, is for the employer to have the imagination
and commitment to provide them with the right framework.
Steve Beackon AEA Technology London SW1
Letter: Tropical grasslands
I am grateful to Jonathan Silvertown for giving me the opportunity to
clear up a number of points concerning my article on the productivity of
grasslands (‘Are we missing the grass for the trees?’, 6 January). He criticises
me for implying that tropical grasslands store as much carbon as tropical
forests (Letters, 10 February). He also states that underestimating the
productivity of grasslands is ‘of little significance . . . unless there
is extra carbon stored somewhere that cannot re-enter the atmosphere’, and
that if this was so, the methods used by the International Biological Programme
would have detected it. I think that he is mistaken on all three counts.
First, nowhere do I say that grasslands store as much carbon as do forests.
In fact, globally, tropical forests store 10 times as much carbon as do
grasslands. Although I did not make this point explicitly, I did say that
‘the destruction of rainforests is a large source of carbon dioxide. . .’
However, grasslands are probably responsible for storing more carbon than
we think, in organic material in the soil. It is also important to note
that 700 million hectares of grasslands are burnt every year, compared with
around 11.4 million hectares of rainforest. The initial carbon released
from burning grasslands is three times greater than that released from rainforests.
Secondly, the high productivity of grasslands is of great significance.
Even though some of the carbon is eventually returned to the atmosphere,
at any one time tropical grasslands hold a tremendous quantity of carbon.
Destroying grasslands, or converting them to subsistence agriculture, results
in a release of some or all of this carbon to the atmosphere.
Finally, the IBP’s methods do not measure the productivity of grasses
accurately because they do not take account of the productivity below the
ground, and do not measure death and decomposition. Carbon stored even temporarily
in roots and tubers, and more permanently in the soil, was therefore missed.
Peter de Groot London E17
Letter: Science and religion
Sue Birchmore tries personfully to reconcile science with religion (Forum,
3 March), but what she is really doing is using the word ‘religion’ as if
it were a synonym for ‘ethics’. Many have made this same epic confusion.
Religions certainly do contain within themselves ethical systems but
religion isn’t ethics, any more than I am my gall bladder. Atheists and
nonreligious systems possess codes of behaviour; science certainly does,
though that is not to say that all or even most scientists regularly obey
them with any greater fidelity than most Christians obey the dictates of
Christ or Moslems those of Mohammed.
What distinguishes religion from ethics is supernaturalism, the (as
yet uproven) belief that there exists in or ‘beyond’ the Universe a spiritual
essence capable of being personified, as God or Nature or Life Force or
Teleology or Entelechy or the Anthropic Principle – I once made a list of
them and gave up at number 23 – which (or Who) possesses a keen, if inexplicable,
interest in the welfare of human beings, so much so that it (or He) created
and maintains the physical Universe with that one thought in mind: how will
it affect human contentment? Defined in this way, a religious – as distinct
from an ethical – outlook, takes on a somewhat different aura, and a real
scientist, as distinct from an unreal one, cannot embrace its basic tenet,
no, not even on Sundays, without also embracing the spiritually and intellectually
invidious qualities of double-think that George Orwell warned us of, where
we are deeply committed to believing two diametrically opposed and mutually
contradicting systems of thought.
I have no doubt that Birchmore can point to numerous scientists who
do exactly that, and if she cannot, or is too polite, I certainly can. But
this does not alter the fact that an honest scientist, which is to say,
one more interested in pursuing aspects of reality than in pleasing or consoling
himself or herself, would engage in such frivolous insincerity, to use Russell’s
phrase, and still call himself or herself a scientist.
‘Is it possible,’ Birchmore asks, ‘to be simultaneously a good scientist
and a religious believer?’ No, if by ‘good’ she means honest, and if by
‘religious believer’ she means supernaturalist. Is it possible to be simultaneously
a good scientist and a holder of a personal moral code, a system of ethical
beliefs? I do not see how it can be otherwise.
Ralph Estling
Ilminster, Somerset
Letter: Neutrino detector
I am writing to correct a misunderstanding that could arise from Leigh
Dayton’s article on the Sudbury Neutrino Detector (This Week, 13 January).
While it is true that the idea of an underground laboratory in Canada was
being studied by W. F. Davidson, myself and others (Proceedings of the International
Conference on Baryon Non Conservation, 1984, p 173), the proposal to build
a large heavy water Cerenkov detector for solar neutrinos was made by H.
Chen who pointed out the advantages in a paper at the Homestake Conference
in 1984 (AIP Conference Proceedings, vol 126, p 249). Discussions with him
led to a joint Canadian-US proposal to build the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
detector. We would like to put on record the major contributions by Herb
Chen who passed away in November 1987.
George Ewan Department of Physics Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario,
Canada
Letter: Lucid dreams
I read Susan Blackmore’s article on lucid dreaming with great interest
(‘Dreams that do what they’re told’, 6 January). While I was a graduate
student at Cambridge I became interested in dreams, and for a month or so
recorded as many as I could remember as soon as I woke up. On a number of
occasions I dreamt that if I tensed my shoulders I could lift myself from
the floor and drift up to the ceiling, and travel round the room or along
passages without touching the floor. I do not know whether I was deeply
asleep but it happened a considerable number of times, and I used to go
to sleep each night hoping it would happen again. I don’t know how many
times this happened before I had a lucid dream, in which I realised I was
dreaming and thought ‘This is a dream; now I can fly!!’ and found that I
could.
This happened again several times, but stopped at the end of term and
has not recurred since. It left no observable effects; but lucid dreaming
may have been of importance in the development of early civilisations.
I have no idea how primitive peoples interpreted even ordinary dreams;
but it seems quite likely that after the death of a chief or close relative
a lucid dream of him alive and active and answering favourably questions
by the dreamer would have been accepted as a real visitation from another
world in which the ‘dead’ were still active.
It has always puzzled me that practically all early civilisations –
with a meagre subsistence level for the large majority of their people –
believed so firmly in the existence of a deity or deities as to spend a
huge proportion of their available resources surplus on the maintenance
of powerful priesthoods and expensive religious ceremonies. I now suggest
that this may have resulted in many cases from efforts to explain lucid
dreams.
It is easy to see that a small group of cooperating lucid dreamers,
recruiting to their ranks any new lucid dreamers, could have formed and
maintained expensive and powerful priesthoods in independent communities.
That it was such priesthoods which advanced knowledge in several parts of
the world by studying the heavens, making calendars, and forecasting storms,
was a real advantage of their privileged state.
J. H. Fremlin Birmingham
Letter: Wrongspeak
Unless ‘Techspeak’ means totally inaccurate as well as linguistically
obtuse, you had no business giving a prize to Alan Larman for describing
a Christmas tree as a ‘seasonally appropriate non-deciduous crytogametic
angiosperm’ (Review, 17 February). The Christmas tree will have been a phanerogram,
not a cryptogram, and a gymnosperm, not an angiosperm.
Jean Welbeck Harpenden, Hertfordshire
Letter: Mites and mattresses
Paul Harvey and Robert May (‘Matrimony, mattresses and mites’, 3 March)
stated that asthma-causing house dust mites seem to flourish on dried semen,
that mattresses are a rich source of semen and that the use of condoms in
asthmatics’ homes could ‘help to break the last link in this causal chain’.
I feel this is a misrepresentation of my work and their suggestion about
condom use is unjustified. Some mite-hypersensitive asthmatics may have
found it insulting and/or worrying. I would like to assure them there is
no evidence for a ‘causal chain’.
My study demonstrated two things. First, that 52 out of 66 mattress
dust samples contained prostatic acid phosphatase (PAcP) activity – an indicator
of the presence of seminal fluid – confirmed in 46 PAcP-positive samples
by the presence of sperm heads. I did not quantify the semen in each sample
so it was wrong of Harvey and May to conclude that mattresses contain a
rich source of semen. Also, all dust samples were taken from beds of healthy
non-allergic, non-asthmatic adults. Many asthmatics regularly vacuum clean
their beds to get rid of mite allergens. Thus quantities of semen, if they
existed, in the beds of asthmatics would be likely to be lower than in non-asthmatics’
beds. The words ‘asthma’ and ‘allergy’ were not mentioned in my paper.
Secondly, my study demonstrated that female mites fed a 2:1 mix of dust
and dried semen laid significantly more eggs than mites fed on dust only.
This does not demonstrate that mites flourish on dried semen.
I hypothesised that under comparable conditions of temperature and humidity,
in mattresses where there is regular input of semen, mite populations will
be larger than in those where semen is absent. I have not yet tested this
hypothesis. My study, incidentally, was not about asthma or allergy. It
was a preliminary investigation of one of several human-derived products
found in mattress dust to find whether it would be worth examining its potential
effect on house dust mite population ecology. Harvey and May have written
a fanciful, light-hearted story. I question whether asthma, a disease that
causes about 2000 deaths a year in Britain, and house dust mite allergy
are suitable topics for such treatment. For those that wish to read an accessible
account of house dust mites and allergy, I suggest they consult J. Allergy
Clin. Immunol. (1987), vol 80(6), pp 755-775.
M. J. Colloff Department of Zoology University of Glasgow
Letter: Little green men
So, long-distance space travellers can look forward to space sickness,
loss of red blood cells, loss of minerals from bone and atrophy of the muscles,
inter alia (This Week, 3 March). Is this why visiting men from Mars are
always little and green?
Richard Wilson Lutterworth, Leicestershire