Letter: Gender bent
Like Jacky Heath (Letters, 12 June), I too was woken at irregular intervals,
night after night, when my children were very young. I am indebted to her
for the knowledge that I must, therefore, be a mother.
Odd that; I had previously believed I was a father.
Roy Knowles
Widnes, Cheshire
Letter: Bearing on quakes
I wish to correct some inaccuracies in the article titled ‘Quake buildings
keep their bearings’ (Technology, 15 May). The article states incorrectly
that Victor Zayas and Navin Amin work at the Earthquake Engineering Research
Center of the University of California at Berkeley.
In fact, Zayas is the president of Earthquake Protection Systems, a company
in San Francisco which supplies sliding bearings to protect buildings
against earthquakes, and Amin is a partner in the San Francisco firm,
Skidmore Owings and Merrill.
Also, I wish to point out that other engineers would disagree strongly with
Stanley Low of Earthquake Protection Systems, who is quoted in the piece as
claiming that the company’s bearings offer better seismic performance than
orthodox rubber ones and are easier to install.
Andrew Whittaker
Earthquake Engineering Research Center Richmond,
California
Letter: Decrepit wimp
I think the writer of Feedback needs a course of HRT. One envisages a little
decrepit soul, white-coated, woollen gloves sans fingers, Bunsen burner for
warmth, huddling over his typewriter, generating Feedback material
interlaced with ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ letters to The Guardian.
The writer keeps sounding like such a killjoy. It was a wimpish moan
against car drivers a while ago (10 April), and then it was football and
snooker players who incurred the sarcastic assault (8 May).
I have the feeling that a ‘World
No-journalists-who-hide-behind-noms-de-plume Day’ would be a more popular
event.
R. W. K. Gardiner
Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire
* * *
Thank you for this uncannily accurate description of Feedback (see
life-drawing, above) – Editor
Letter: Rock on
‘The Rock’ had a name long before Ernest Giles named it ‘Ayers Rock’
(Feedback, 22 May). It was ‘Uluru’ and has now reverted to its proper name
of thousands of years.
E. E. Richardt
Brisbane, Australia
Letter: Crapsy and Plopsies
I have been following the recent spate of brand names in Feedback (27
February, etc) with interest. It might be assumed that incongruous or just
plain rude brand names arise from their manufacturer having little contact
with English-speaking countries. However, I know for a fact that two (Crapsy
and its ‘bitter rival’, Plopsies) are actually made here in darkest
Shropshire.
How do I know this? Well, after graduation and before finding my present
job, I spent 10 months eating the stuff for a living as a quality control
assistant. I will refrain from commenting on the appropriateness of the
brand names and will simply say that I no longer eat breakfast.
Stephen Johnson
Telford, Shropshire
Letter: Ever-fixed mark
With reference to ‘The fading pulse of the North Star’ (New 杏吧原创,
Science, 29 May), Shakespeare certainly got it wrong, not so much in respect
of the star’s slight variations in brightness, but because of its position
in the sky. At the time of Julius Caeser the North Star was about 12o off
the celestial pole, and was of limited use to navigators.
By the time of Shakespeare, however, Polaris had become about two degrees
off the celestial pole and was a useful navigational star, as Shakespeare
acknowledges in his sonnet on true love (here he got it right):
‘. . .love is not love Which alters when it alterations finds, Or bends with
the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests
and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s
unknown, although his height be taken.’
The height above the horizontal gave navigators their latitude.
Robert Mills
Salisbury, Wiltshire
Letter: Science in court
Contrary to the views expressed by William Bown (‘DNA fingerprinting back in
the dock’, 6 March), DNA profiling is widely accepted as a valid and
important technique in criminal justice systems around the world. And our
scientists do not disagree among themselves about the best way to estimate
odds when bands in a DNA profile fall just outside a guideline.
England has an adversarial system of criminal justice and forensic
scientists are to some extent at its mercy as expert witnesses. 杏吧原创s
in court are usually not able to argue at length for what they consider to
be the best way of handling evidence, for barristers and the judge are in
control. Our expert in the Hammond case was taken through several
alternative ways of assessing the evidence, overriding his own
clearly-expressed opinion that Evett’s approach to statistical questions
would have been the most appropriate.
As in much of molecular biology, DNA profiling methods are constantly
advancing and some of the difficulties which have arisen in courts will soon
disappear. For example a pan-European DNA profiling group is exploring the
possibility of using short tandem repeat sequences in DNA which exhibit only
a relatively small number of separately recognisable alternatives as genetic
variation. Since the alternatives are discrete, they are expected to
eliminate much of the debate about matching criteria.
I object to your journalist’s description of a forensic science ‘mafia’ in
an article which mentioned our scientists by name. They found this offensive
and I hope New 杏吧原创 will either explain and justify what Bown meant or
will disassociate itself from the remark. This is an unacceptable slur on
people whose careers have been a contribution to fighting serious and
organised crime.
Bear in mind what the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and
Technology said in March this year: that ‘the scientific quality of UK
forensic science commands great respect at home and abroad’. The select
committee found the quality of public forensic science to be high and
rising, and called on public opinion to acknowledge this.
If New 杏吧原创 or any of its readers knows of a case in which someone is
seriously at risk of having being wrongfully convicted at the Old Bailey
with DNA evidence – or any other court in the United Kingdom – please let me
know. If not, do remember that while scientists love to disagree, the courts
have a difficult and an immensely important job to do. We must not send them
the wrong signals. New 杏吧原创 has a duty to distinguish facts clearly
from opinions and conjecture but, in my opinion, Bown’s article mixed them
up in a dangerously misleading way.
B. Sheard
Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory
London
* * *
New 杏吧原创 did not intend by the word ‘mafia’ that Metropolitan Police
forensic scientists were in any sense ‘a criminal organisation’, as the
dictionary defines it. We intended only to indicate that many forensic
scientists in this country know one another and that lawyers in the case
under discussion chose to hire an ‘outsider’ – Editor
Letter: No end in sight
Congratulations on printing a headline so heavily laden with irony (‘An end
to the misery of PhD students’, This Week, 29 May) when reporting the White
Paper’s proposals on postgraduate training.
By conspicuously avoiding the subject of research student maintenance
grants, William Waldegrave has effectively endorsed the values of awards
made by the research councils to postgraduates.
Now he suggests that the research councils should fund an extra year of
training for research students, in the form of an MSc, without an increase
in their allocation from the science budget. Far from alleviating the
financial burdens placed on young scientists during their training, this
measure will instead draw out the period of debt accumulation.
At least such a disincentive is consistent with the declared objective of
reducing the number of PhD holders. And, of course, that will eventually
lead to there being fewer British post-doctoral scientists who could go
abroad, so stemming the ‘brain drain’. Brilliant.
Bob Ward West Didsbury, Manchester
Letter: Apes and ethics
I welcome Richard Dawkins’ article ‘Meet my cousin, the chimpanzee’ (5
June). The question he poses ‘What’s so special about humans?’ is exactly
the right question to ask if we are to establish an answer to the further
question about whether or not other life forms deserve equal moral
consideration along with the human species. He is certainly right to
criticise the attitude which regards anything labelled Homo sapiens as
automatically having a moral importance beyond that of other creatures just
because of the very fact that they are human.
It is thus disappointing that he ignores the logic of these arguments and
proceeds to develop an approach to the ethical claims of chimpanzees based
on the evolutionary links they have with humans. Having just established
that nothing ethically follows from the simple fact that something is a
human being, it likewise follows that nothing ethically follows from the
fact that something is an evolutionary cousin of human beings. Rather we
need to decide what makes human beings morally relevant and then consider
whether other life forms share these particular features.
In short, what makes human beings morally relevant is their possession of
consciousness; in particular their consciousness of pain and their
consciousness of themselves as individuals with present and future desires
that they wish to fulfil. The degree to which chimpanzees (or any form of
life) share these features is the degree to which they command ethical
consideration. In this respect biology and genetic constitution is
irrelevant.
Robert Baron University of Wolverhampton
Letter: Apes and ethics
I now know why even higher intelligence extra-terrestrials always get gunned
down in B-grade movies: no DNA in common. Presumably dolphins and whales
haven’t much hope either, for similar reasons.
In short, what has similarity of DNA got to do with it, one way or the
other?
C. H. Osman
Aberdeen
Letter: Apes and ethics
A discontinuous gap between humans and animals protects the rights of the
more vulnerable human beings. One does not have to be religious, a lawyer or
disinterested in the rights of animals to believe that there are dangers in
trying to close it.
People with learning difficulties, in particular, have been degraded in the
past when considered by the ‘continuous’ minds of certain followers of
Darwinian anthropology. In the early 20th century it was still believed by
some that during the course of their embryological development, a human
being would repeat the development of the whole animal kingdom and of the
human race until they reached the stage characteristic of their own kind. In
the case of those with Down’s syndrome it was argued that their development
had ceased prematurely at the stage of the orang-utan.
This dehumanising theoretical construction was formulated by eugenicists at
the same time as they sought to separate the mentally handicapped from the
rest of the human race by compulsorily detaining them for the whole of their
lives in special institutions. A denial of their absolute humanity was used
to legitimise treatment which withheld fundamental human rights from the
less intelligent.
Lilian Zihni
Wembley, Middlesex