Letters: Priorities on ice
The British Antarctic Survey concludes that it can best carry out research
into problems of global concern, such as global climate change, global
weather processes, sea-level rise, atmospheric pollution (including ozone
depletion) and sustainable marine living resources by spending its recurrent
funding on optimising the use of its new infrastructure (rebuilt Halley and
Rothera Research Stations, Rothera gravel airstrip and fleet of five
aeroplanes, and ice-strengthened, world-class oceanographic vessel) and not
on refurbishing less vital research facilities such as Faraday and Signy
Research Stations (This Week, 26 June). In today’s financial climate, even
projects within an internationally recognised, first class research
programme must be prioritised.
I must view the comment on the National Audit Office report as malicious.
The implication is that mismanagement has led to the shortage of funds. I
would point out that capital project funding is totally separate from
recurrent funding, and the ‘major programmes’ referred to were in fact major
capital projects.
BAS would not deny that some mistakes were made; no person or institution is
perfect. However, the NAO did conclude that ‘the Survey had achieved
reasonably good value for money on each of the projects’.
Barry Heywood British Antarctic Survey Cambridge
Letters: Selective quotes
I was saddened to observe that no women were quoted in the extract from
Clive Rassam’s book The Second Culture: British Science in Crisis – The
杏吧原创s Speak Out (‘A tale of two cultures’, 26 June). If this is
representative of the whole book, I am even more dismayed – not because of
the bias it might imply that the author has shown, and I am sure he has been
impartial, but rather because it seems to reflect the pervading attitude to
women in science and indeed in society.
Maureen Cooper University of Stirling
Letters: Spring protest
Thanks to publicity in your own and other journals, there can be few
scientists in Britain who do not know about the proposed closure of Warren
Spring Laboratory.
Warren Spring is respected in Britain and abroad for its independent
environmental research. As well as the standards setting work it has just
embarked upon for European Community partners, its scientists run an
invaluable advice service for many nongovernmental organisations working in
developing countries.
Staff and their unions are determined to fight this closure. They have
launched an international protest – inviting people from around the world to
voice their objections to the loss of the laboratory.
If any of your readers, at home or abroad, would like to register their
support for an independent environmental research laboratory, we urge them
to write to the President of the Board of Trade and Industry, 123 Ashdown
House, Victoria Street, London SW1E 6RB. They can also use an on-line number
to call and leave a message through the Green Base Exchange on: +44 501
2164.
Bill Brett Institution of Professionals, Managers and Specialists London
Letters: Trial on trial
Philip Nieburg and colleagues are arguing for a randomised controlled trial
of breast versus bottle-feeding (This Week, 19 June) which we argue is not
ethically justifiable.
Much is already known about transmission of HIV infection from mother to
child through breast-feeding. In the European Collaborative Study, where
children born to women known to be HIV infected at or before the time of
delivery are followed prospectively from birth, breast-feeding doubled the
risk of transmission from 14 per cent to 28 per cent. Similarly, in the
French multicentre prospective study, breast-fed infants were twice as
likely to be infected as bottle-fed children.
Review of the literature shows that the additional risk of transmission
through breast-feeding, over and above transmission during pregnancy and at
the time of delivery, is about 14 per cent. This estimate of the additional
risk is sufficient to provide a firm basis for advice to pregnant women.
Although the confidence limits around this estimate are wide, it is obvious
that further refinement will have little public health relevance.
We would therefore question the need for further ‘sound science’ if that
would entail a randomised controlled trial of breast versus bottle-feeding.
Given the information already available, this is no longer justifiable. Some
of the ethical questions that would have to be addressed in such a trial
include: (1) Is it justifiable to do a trial in a population where
bottle-feeding is not sustainable outside the trial? (2) What effect will
the trial have on breast-feeding practices in the population? (3) Can the
results be generalised from the trial to the real daily situation in the
population? An ethical trial will have to ensure that bottle-feeding is
hygienic and safe, which is not the normal situation in some populations.
It is time researchers questioned their need for ‘further sound science’.
Why do we do it: do we merely want to satisfy our own curiosity or does it
serve a public health purpose?
Marie-Louise Newell and Catherine Peckham
Institute of Child Health
London
Letters: Adding to apples
Kay Bagon takes Nicholas Soames to task for his remark that apple juice ‘is
a useful source of Vitamin C’, since she says ‘there is virtually no vitamin
C in apple juice’ (Letters, 3 July). This is only partly true.
Fresh apples contain moderate amounts of vitamin C, but this is rapidly
destroyed by a coupled oxidase system when the fruit is milled and pressed.
If no other measures are taken, therefore, most of that vitamin C is indeed
lost by the time the juice is filtered and packed. The subject of Soames’s
remarks, however, was the modern style of cloudy ‘fresh-pressed’ apple
juice.
Vitamin C is added to such juices during processing to offset adverse colour
and flavour changes, and this fact is recorded on the bottle or pack. In
this case the result is an apple juice containing levels of vitamin C of
around 300 parts per million, similar to those found naturally in orange
juice.
Andrew Lea Reading, Berkshire
Letters: Carbon con
Do the advocates of the carbon tax appreciate the drawbacks of this
proposal?
All taxes on goods and services have a disproportionate effect at the
margin. This partly accounts for the intractability of the economic problems
suffered in areas of geographical disadvantage, away from the largest
centres of population: examples of such peripheral locations include
Northern Ireland, the North East, Merseyside, etc.
A carbon tax would magnify the problems experienced in these areas and
promote rural depopulation by adding to transport costs. It would also hit
the poor generally, and those living and working in colder parts of the
European Community; in Scotland, buildings must be heated for two months a
year more than is needed in the south of England. The carbon tax would
discriminate especially against tenants because their fuel consumption can
only be reduced if their landlords invest in energy conservation measures,
which they have no incentive to do.
Before rushing into imposing a carbon tax, governments should take steps to
remove the existing obstacles to energy conservation. The most important of
these is to implement transport and land-use policies which are even-handed
as between road and rail, instead of the present ones which are loaded in
favour of private road transport. It would also help to get rid of the
present absurd method of business rate assessment, under which modern
energy-efficient premises are penalised in comparison with dilapidated and
energy-wasteful buildings.
Like most of the foolish and destructive taxes with which we are saddled
(income tax, VAT, council tax, etc.), the carbon tax is a superficially
bright idea which would be rejected if its consequences were fully thought
through.
Henry Law
Brighton, Sussex
Letters: Problems please
With Fermat’s Last Theorem about to be declared finally proved I must admit
to feeling rather disappointed (New 杏吧原创, Science, 3 July). I would
have really enjoyed the discovery of some obscure counter example with a
huge value of n, and I do regret losing such an excellent unsolved problem.
There was always the remote, tantalising possibility that perhaps it really
was possible to prove it with only the mathematics that Fermat had to hand.
Twenty-six years ago, when I first discovered for myself the beauty and
fascination of mathematics, there were two famous unsolved problems: The
Four-colour Problem and Fermat’s Last Theorem. Perhaps Ian Stewart can
supply us with some more unsolved problems to take their place.
Paula Beesley
Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire
Letters: Japanese second
In his article ‘And now, here is the technology forecast’ (10 July), William
Bown describes the Japanese use of the Delphi technique in technology
forecasting, and its impending adoption by the Office of Science and
Technology in Britain. Despite Bown’s implications, the process is not
Japanese in origin.
As with many other things, the Japanese have put it to good use, but it was
first devised in the 1950s to improve the efficiency of using group
information by Norman Dalkey and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation. The
technique was used in 1964 by Gordon and Helmer for technology forecasting.
The ‘Japanese feel’ detected by Bown is probably imagined.
One might ask how many other western visionaries are there like Dalkey and
his RAND colleagues, whose work has to be exploited by the Japanese before
it is recognised in the West?
David Nicholls
Canberra, ACT, Australia
Letters: Japanese second
I would like to point out that Japanese technology forecast survey which
started in 1971 has been carried out not by the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (MITI) but by the Science and Technology Agency (STA).
Famous MITI is not almighty.
Toshihiro Kimoto
STA, Tokyo, Japan
Letters: Rumbling tummies
All of your many readers with quiet luxury cars and sleepless babies need
not worry (G. A. Malcolm, Letters, 10 July).
A tape recording of our washing machine was presumably very close to the
rumbling and gurgling of my insides as it soothed both of our children when
they were small babies. What they thought of the door bell that rang halfway
through the recording session, we shall probably never know.
Katherine Le Sueur Stockport, Cheshire
Letters: Carping on
I write with reference to the item on Robin Weiss’s ‘Dorian Gray mice’
article from Nature (Feedback, 26 June).
It would appear that fictional scientists may also suffer the problem of
plagiarism by unscrupulous colleagues. Aldous Huxley wrote of Sigismund
Obispo researching longevity in carp in After Many a Summer, but James P.
Blaylock, in Homunculus, mentions the unspeakable Ignacio Narbondo, the
hunchback vivisectionist, working to the same end using unspecified glands
from carp in London, circa 1875.
That Narbondo was successful is not in doubt. He resurfaced in Los Angeles
under the name of Hilario Frosticos, in the second half of the 20th century
(The Digging Leviathan, also by Blaylock). He finally met his end in the
storm drains and sewers under that city at the hands of one of his
unfortunate patients, who deprived him finally of the carp extracts that had
extended his life for so long.
The problem with fictional science, of course, is who was first? Admittedly
Huxley published first – Blaylock did not publish until the 1980s, but
Narbondo was working on (and appeared to have solved) the problems Obispo
researched, much earlier than Huxley’s doctor.
I suggest that both authors are beyond reproach and could never be
considered part of any deliberate deception. It is also possible that Obispo
and Narbondo were unaware of each other’s work, though Narbondo’s 40-volume
treatise, Illustrated Experiments with Gilled Beasts, appears to have had a
wide if scattered circulation. Huxley and Blaylock may have received their
information from Obispo and Narbondo by ‘information tunnelling’ from a
morphic source. Dissemination of information by such relativistic means is
at best intermittent, and tends to arrive unsequenced. Unfortunately this is
one of the few methods open to fictional research scientists for publication
of their work.
Perhaps we shall never know the true story.
David Gullen Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex
Letters: Acid test
The problem with using vinegar, Coke or old wine on a jellyfish sting, as in
‘Stings go better with Coke’ (New 杏吧原创, Science, 10 July) is that one
does not always have the articles to hand when meeting the jellyfish. This
was pointed out to me by the students in my First Aid classes in Papua, New
Guinea – the nearest chippy or wine bar may be a long way through the
jungle.
They assured me that their traditional method of dealing with jellyfish
stings was very effective and used an easily obtainable acidic fluid –
urine. One just has to remember to go to the loo after swimming rather than
before.
Jane Giffould Halstead, Essex
Letters: Correction
‘The smart way to pay your fare’ (Technology, 3 July) referred to the pilot
smart card ticketing scheme for London Transport as being supplied by ‘AES
Scanpoint of Denmark and Westinghouse of the US’. Westinghouse Cubic Limited
(WCL) is a British company jointly owned by BTR plc and Cubic Corporation,
and is not connected in any way with Westinghouse of the US.