Letter: Prison appeal
I am writing a history of imprisoned scientists. It extends internationally
from the era of the Ancient Greeks to the present time, and includes every
kind of imprisonment, political and otherwise. Its aim is to answer questions
such as how commonly political imprisonments have taken place, how much
they were work-related and what effect they had. I should like to include
a chapter on woman scientists who have been imprisoned, but have so far
found only three cases.
If you are a woman scientist who has been imprisoned, even if for only
a few hours over such trivia as parking tickets, I should like to hear from
you with as many details as possible. Your name and identifying details
will be withheld at your request.
Molly Gleiser 1920, Bonita Berkeley, CA 94704, US
Letter: Social contract
The editing process omitted two important points from my article ‘Opening
the door to social scientists’ (Talking Point, 8 September). Both are relevant
to your report and editorial on the recent IPCC discussions.
The IPCC’s treatment of response strategies to climate change demonstrates
how scientific expertise will not, by itself, be sufficient to cope with
the potentially awesome problems which we may face. A different kind of
expertise, an essentially social scientific expertise, which analyses, evaluates
and communicates about options for policy and change is required alongside
the climate modelling.
Secondly, many solutions to global warming will require widespread changes
in social and economic arrangements. Public consent to these will be essential
if economic well-being and orderly transitional arrangements are to be sustained.
Each point underlines the centrality of social science in the study
of global environmental change. However, social scientists, as much as natural
scientists, must be careful to limit their role to informing policy options
and not to decidng which one to adopt. This is the point at which social
science becomes personal politics.
Howard Newby, Chairman Economic and Social Research Council Swindon,
Wiltshire
Letter: Cultivate nature
As a farm conservation adviser, I suggest that Norman Adams not only
takes another look around British organic farms to see how they compare
with today’s intensive systems, but also makes an attempt to understand
modern holistic agriculture (‘The case against organic farming’, Forum,
15 September).
Wildlife cannot be confined to non-cropped areas nor should it be. The
work of the Game Conservancy with its ‘conservation headlands’ shows how
wildlife and farming may be better meshed, but the organic system takes
this to a logical end point: the wildlife is distributed throughout the
whole farm.
The argument that efficient systems means that less land is taken into
production is laughable. Chemical farming goes hand-in-hand with large fields,
large machinery and field drainage, the inevitable result being the lifeless,
prairie farm.
It is ironic that Adams uses the Irish potato famine as an example of
organic farming gone wrong, as this was monoculture agriculture and, chemical
or organic, would have resulted in catastrophe. An organic system based
on rotations requiring stock, grass, arable and root crops would help to
prevent disease.
Before encouraging the further use of a chemical system, Adams should
look around other African countries. Intensive chemical-based prairie farms
growing cash crops for export have not provided food for the people, but
they have raised the share price of many an agrochemical company.
William Marks Camberley Surrey
Letter: Top-notch message
John Mooney intimates that the young scientist with the impressive research
record is one and the same as the communication-shy introvert (Letters,
8 September). His message is that if the universities recruit the former
they turn their back on the latter. Do not believe him. Good researchers
are good communicators: they have to be. If you cannot communicate, your
results do not get published, your grants dry up and your potential students
ride off into the sunset.
Let us fill the universities with top-notch researchers. These are the
people that have something to say, something worth listening to, and the
vast majority of them say it very well.
David Hughes University of Sheffield
Letter: Kingdom come
William Bown, through no fault of his own, has misrepresented me in
his story (‘A new tree of life takes root’, Science, 11 August). I did not,
of course, claim than animal cells have chloroplasts nor that brown algae
are plants.
Bown’s article not only makes my criticism of Carl Woese look contentious
but by statements like ‘Margulis does not think any molecular classification
can work ..’ it implies that I do not recognise Woese’s magnificent work
towards developing a useful evolutionary classification for all life on
Earth. Of course, molecular classification is invaluable and can work, but
like everything else in science it must be judged in relation to the body
of knowledge from which it emerges.
Woese and his colleagues have produced a partial phylogeny, one based
on extremely powerful nucleotide sequence data, but still only a partial
phylogeny. My dream is to construct as total a phylogeny as possible – that
is, to reconstruct the history of life from information from the fossil
record and the genetic basis of all biological organisation. A total phylogeny
must integrate all molecular clues with genetics, development and cell biology.
Recognising symbiosis, and therefore the anastgomosis of phylogenetic
trees, is crucial; all eukaryotes have more than a single bacterial ancestor.
Therefore, one 16S ribosomal RNA sequence can never suffice to characterise
any eukaryote.
Following our eclectic approach, K V Schwartz and I defend our ‘five
kingdoms of life’: Monera (including eubacteria and archaeobacteria); Protoctista
(including algae, slime nets, water moulds and ciliates); Fungi (moulds
and mushrooms); Animalia (sponges, arthropods, molluscs and chordates);
and Plantae (bryophytes and tracheophytes). We defend this system because
it is most attentive to both the fundamental biology of life and the need
for a logical classification scheme accessible to scientists and pedagogues
alike.
Woese now sees about a dozen phyla. This is because he has had limited
experience with the incredible diversity of the eukaryotic microorganisms:
the Protoctista. If Woese continues to use his criteria to explore the protocists,
he will find that he will need far more groups to accommodate them.
Researchers interested in the evolution of the diversity of life on
Earth recognise the immense contribution of molecular biology and sequence
data. Woese has helped to show that in spite of its morphological and physiological
diversity, the underlying molecular system argues for a common origin for
all living organisms; they all have protein synthesis on bipartite ribosomes
and display ultimately homologous ribosomal RNAs.
However, he must answer these fundamental objections to his new imposition
of an idiosyncratic and unjustified scheme for the higher taxa. If unimpeded,
I am afraid he and his large school of followers will continue to ignore
those organisational properties of life that distinguish biology from biochemistry.
Such scorn toward the rest of the biological sciences would be especially
tragic at a time when bacteriology promises to be truly integrated with
the rest of evolutionary science.
Lynn Margulis University of Massachusetts Amherst, US
Letter: Information retrieval
Kingdoms were prescientific concepts used to group the natural world
into animals, plants and minerals. Modern science inherited them and has,
mainly through indifference, tried to legitimise them. Like any good scientific
paradigm, each new piece of information has been used to enlarge the system
by creating new kingdoms for supposed fundamental difference. The last offering
of 14 kingdoms in 3 domains must, at long last, push this paradigm to its
logical self-destructive end. That is, there are no kingdoms; rather, ‘life’
has branches of descent recognisable by the clustering of common characteristics.
Kingdoms are merely a useful category for information retrieval; they are
not real, and should not be used as taxonomic units.
Geoff Ridley University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand
Letter: Stirling work
As one of the few researchers of Stirling cycle machines in Britain,
it was pleasing to see your article ’19th-century engine refrigerates without
CFCs’ (Technology, 1 September).
Sunpower’s cooler is one in a large number of such machines which the
company has built over a period of 25 years. Though the advantages attributed
to the free-piston design are true, lack of commercial success may be due
to the fact that manufacture requires unrealistic levels of accuracy and
performance is compromised by non-uniform piston motion and high losses
in the gas springs on which they oscillate. Stability and load matching
are also difficult.
At the University of Cambridge we have a high-temperature Stirling cycle
heat pump for use in industrial waste heat recovery. We are also developing
a couple of low-cost sub-kilowatt Stirling engines. All three units have
arisen from our advanced theoretical modelling work and development of key
components such as burners and regenerators.
David Rix University of Cambridge