Letters: Hot air effect
On 31 August 1988 in Erie Metropark, Michigan, the then presidential
candidate George Bush said, ‘Those who think we’re powerless to do anything
about the ‘greenhouse effect’ are forgetting about the ‘White House effect’.
As President, I intend to do something about it.’
Considering that the US is the world’s leader per capita in the production
of greenhouse gases; being mindful of President Bush’s political posturing
concerning the Earth Summit in Rio, it is now evident that the ‘White House
effect’ is to be defined as an uncontrollable release of hot air.
S. M. Emsley Lynmouth, North Devon
Letters: Right not to know
Andy Coghlan reports, in ‘Human blueprint: is it better not to know?’
(This Week, 2 May), on warnings given at the Edinburgh Science Festival
about the danger of severe trauma that could result from the increase in
genetic information arising from the human genome project. One way to try
to lessen this would be to give people the choice to decide if they want
information, as Tim Bishop suggests. In the light of this, consider the
disturbing suggestions in the report of a working group of the Royal College
of Physicians Committees on Ethical Issues in Medicine and Clinical Genetics,
published in 1991.
People may have a right to full genetic information about themselves,
the report suggests – implying that their relatives may not have the right
to refuse testing, if this is needed to discover the information. Furthermore,
it suggests that people may have a duty not to make decisions about having
children without finding out full genetic information about themselves,
which would imply that individuals should always be told if they are at
risk of transmitting a genetic disease, and that ‘conveying information
about an individual’s genetic background to potential spouses or sexual
partners should be the normal practice’.
What terrible trauma would this induce? And what on earth would be the
point of telling potential parents, against their wish to know, that their
future child may possibly have some genetic disorder – whether major or
minor – if nothing can be done about the disorder, and the parents want
to have the child anyway? There needs to be much more critical thought on
the matter than this alarming report has managed to produce.
Paula Boddington University of Wollongong New South Wales, Australia
Letters: Right not to know
Readers of New 杏吧原创 may gain the wrong impression from the report
of a brief remark that I made at the end of the forum on human genetics
held at the Edinburgh Science Festival. In supporting Professor Hilary Rose’s
call for more research on attitudes and reactions to genetic testing, I
suggested that responses to test results might not always be predictable,
mentioning the example of a recent Canadian study on predictive testing
for Huntingdon’s disease.
In this study, some people (by no means all, as your report implied),
who had lived for a number of years with the knowledge that they had a 50
per cent risk of developing the disease, encountered quite severe psychological
problems (after initial euphoria) on learning after testing that their risk
was actually almost negligible. They had assumed that they would be dead
by the time they were middle-aged and had lived their lives accordingly,
making no provision for old age and even, in one reported case, choosing
to be sterilised so as not to run the risk of passing the gene on to the
next generation.
These few people in general responded well to long-term follow-up and
counselling, as did those who had to contend with the shock of a greatly
increased risk after testing. The long-term psychological well being of
those who elected to have predictive testing was found to be at least as
good and perhaps better than those who elected not to have the test. So
my brief remark about this issue should not be taken as a warning about
the dangers of genetic testing, but simply an example to point out the complexities
of human behaviour that must be taken into account and about which we need
to know more.
Alison Stewart Trends in Genetics Cambridge
Letters: Logging's role
Jeff Sayer’s assertion (Letters, 9 May) that ‘logging has never been
directly responsible for the destruction of any tropical forests’ is about
as helpful as the statement that the HIV virus does not kill people.
True, the HIV virus only destroys the immune system, and it is other
secondary infections and disorders which actually kill. In the same way
it is logging – and conventional forestry policies – which extinguish forest-dwellers’
land rights and, by building roads into otherwise inaccessible areas, open
them up to invasion by the landless poor (and the land-greedy rich).
Land hunger is the main cause of tropical forest loss and land reform
the only plausible remedy, but logging is a major catalyst and it is bad
science to delink it from the colonisation that follows in its train.
Marcus Colchester World Rainforest Movement Chadlington, Oxfordshire
Letters: Mere matter
Mukhanov and Brandenberger are particularly pleased that all of their
calculations are valid even when matter is allowed in their (cosmological)
model (New 杏吧原创, Science, 2 May). Aren’t we all?
Alec Vans Newnham, Gloucestershire
Letters: Rossing radiation
Roger Milne’s report (This Week, 18 April) omitted to mention that the
evidence recently marshalled on health and safety at RTZ’s Rossing Uranium
mine in Namibia is contained in a book called Past Exposure, published by
the Namibia Support Committee and Partizans.
One crucial point emerging from Rossing’s internal documents is the
company’s failure to implement the International Commission on Radiological
Protein’s system of radiation control.
Under the 1977 ICRP scheme, ‘whole body doses’ are deduced from measurements
of all external and internal doses, each weighted for the type of radiation,
and the sensitivity of the organ absorbing it.
Ten years ago, in December 1982, Rossing’s Chief Environmental Officer
stated in his ‘Rossing Radiation Report’, that ‘currently only the external
dose is considered at Rossing’. His aim then was to ‘ . . . refine our control
programme and to bring it in line with the ICRP recommendations’. Among
his proposals was one to determine ‘lung irradiation burdens due to accumulation
of unsoluble uranium and its daughter isotopes’.
Very soon after Past Exposure was released in Namibia a few weeks ago,
Rossing Uranium Limited made the claim that ‘Whole body dose equivalent
of employees was assessed in 1982 and in the years prior to and after that
year by means of the Working Level (WL) and conversion formula recommended
by the ICRP.’
The WL assesses the environmental concentration of radon and its short-lived
decay products; the conversion formula predicts the dose resulting from
inhaled radon at a given WL. Neither addresses the highly important issue
of insoluble uranium dust, lodged in the lungs of workers in the final processing
area at the mine, and the radiation dose deriving from it.
Did RTZ take the advice of its own chief environmentalist, given a decade
ago? If so, when? If not – why not?
Greg Drapkin Partizans London
Letters: Complex song
The article, ‘The bird is gone, but the song lives on’, about my recreation
of the song of the extinct New Zealand bird, the huia, contains a misunderstanding
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 25 April).
Certainly ‘I began by recording the Maori whistle onto a tape recorder’,
but I did not then slow it down ‘two, to four, to eight times’, presumably
to find the hidden complexity of the huia’s song. Only the huia’s original
song could have revealed that. No human being, Papageno, Henare Hamana or
Percy Edwards, has the physical ability to accurately simulate, through
whistling or singing, the sounds a bird’s syrinx can produce. The Maori
gave a fine performance in human terms, but it was only the starting point.
To make my synthesised recreation as ornitho-musicologically accurate
as possible, and to provide the necessary material to extend the song’s
timescale to over five minutes, one of the few other straws I could clutch
was to discover the characteristics of the songs of extant birds of New
Zealand. These songs I slowed down several times in order to hear every
sound, and yes, I found their musical complexity staggering.
David Hindley Little Shelford, Cambridge
Letters: No hiding place
The proposition that a virus can hide in the printer while a program
cleans the computer of all known viruses (Feedback, 9 May) suffers several
weaknesses.
Viruses need to propagate in order to spread, so if there is only ever
one copy (wherever it is), ipso facto it is not a virus; few, if any, printers
have a memory which can be read back by connected computers; there is no
mechanism in any pc operating system that will receive, store and execute
data from a printer; such a virus cannot know all antivirus software, so
would have to move itself out of the computer while any program is run –
making the virus ineffective.
Such a virus would be self-defeating. The portion that modifies the
operating system must be permanently present in the host computer, and thus
detectable by the antivirus software it is supposedly avoiding.
Anthony Naggs Peacehaven, East Sussex
Letters: Biker drain
I was interested to read about the departure, from the shores of Britain,
of Fellows of the Royal Society (This Week, 4 April). What is perhaps more
interesting is that the data appear to be independent of peer group. The
Sussex University Motorcycle Club was founded in 1976. In the mid-1980s,
approximately 15 per cent of its original membership lived and worked abroad;
today it is almost 35 per cent! Are other readers able to offer their analysis?
C. A. Long Institut de Mecanique des Fluides Marseille, France
Letters: Cosmic egg
Marvellous! The 2 May cover is a real satirical gem. The Revenge of
Chicken Little, and a triumph for Kate Charlesworth’s ‘Life, The Universe,
& (Almost) Everything’.
Do please investigate the possibility of issuing this both as a wall
poster, and also as a T-shirt frontage.
Bernard Riley Sherborne, Dorset
Letters: Suicide by food
The recent ‘Heaven must wait’ programmes on ITV reminded us that rats
on restricted-calorie diets live to be the equivalent of 150 years old.
Does anyone know why we have such irresistible, though slow-acting, suicide
urges, in the form of hunger pangs?
Liz Green Birmingham
Letters: Correction
The study on which ‘Grain yields tumble in greenhouse world’ (This Week,
18 April) was based was edited by Cynthia Rosenzweig of the Center for the
Study of Global Habitability, Columbia University, New York, in addition
to the quoted author Martin Parry of the University of Oxford’s Environmental
Change Unit, which publishes the study this month
Letters: League of merit?
What interpretation should potential PhD students be making of the ‘league
table’ of research studentship stipends which appeared in Neil Harris’s
‘Doctoral dilemmas’ (Careers, 2 May)? The requirements and expectations
of a studentship from any of the four research councils are the same regardless
of the subject of the research, so why are the values of the stipends not
equal?
One can only assume that the differences correlate to a ranking of the
perceived worth of the training involved. Medical research is more valuable
than agricultural and food science, which is more important than the earth
or life sciences. The physical sciences and engineering are apparently worth
least of all.
However, what is obvious is that science as a whole is bottom of the
graduate training league in this country. So whilst postgraduate training
in medical research attracts a grant equating to a salary of about 拢7000
per annum, a trainee insolvency administrator in Salford starts on 拢10
000 per annum. With student grants at their current values, most new science
graduates will probably feel that their undergraduate experiences are more
relevant to a career in bankruptcies anyway, rather than one in scientific
research.
Bob Ward University of Manchester
Letters: League of merit?
The CASE award scheme (Co-operative Awards in Science and Engineering)
does indeed represent an increased level of income as far as students are
concerned; however, they should be made aware of the pitfalls also.
The increased level of support is particularly attractive to students
such as myself, who have returned from industry to study for a PhD after
several years on a salaried income. I took up such a CASE award in 1989;
it was in the field of exhaust emission measurement and control. In my case
(no pun intended) the sponsoring company had agreed to pay me 拢3000
a year on top of the basic SERC grant for each of three years.
After one year, far-reaching changes forced many people to disappear
from the company, including the sole contact who had implemented the award.
Even the sternest efforts of my supervisor could not obtain the sponsorship;
I had just been dropped. Never at any stage have I ever received a letter
to say that the agreement would not be honoured.
Fortunately, another company took over the sponsorship, although if
the project had not been of such wide commercial appeal I would not have
been so lucky. Potential CASE award students should be warned that they
could have a large part of their income (40 per cent in my instance) immediately
cut off, with no warning.
P. G. Eastwood University College of Swansea