Letters: Sighantitic Inglish
In ‘Bacteria turn straw into liquid gold’ (Technology, 2 April) Andy
Coghlan refers to ‘a genetically engineered bacteria’ and goes on, in ‘Fungi
makes (sic) a meal of toxic waste’ to describe Phanerochaete chrysosporium
as ‘the principle fungus used by Biotal’. I find these mistakes so irritating
I would like to exile Coghlan to a remote loci, possibly an arctic peninsular,
or bury him under a thick strata.
Tony Crisp Shrewsbury
Letters: Treem trumped
From a read of your editorials (26 March), it is already clear that
William Waldegrave and Bill Stewart will go down in history, remembered
and cursed, as ‘the men who closed Grimbledon Down’.
Mark Cantley Brussels
Letters: Fact not fiction
Philip Diamond’s letter (26 March) points out that the statement, attributed
to a talk given by me at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, that Nobel laureates Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg were high
school Star Trek fans is suspect, since Star Trek was not yet even a gleam
in Gene Roddenberry’s eye when they were in high school.
However, what I said was that they were science fiction fans then, their
particular addiction being the science fiction magazine Astounding. Since
the forum in which the remark was made was billed as ‘The science in Star
Trek’ I suppose your reporter made a forgivable, but wrong, connection.
Frederik Pohl Palatine, Illinois
Letters: Pluto e flexi
De u lingua problema in skience unio (U-Ci Setimana, 12 Mars); Glosa,
un internatio lingua, es u posi solutio. Id es u modifi de morta Lancelot
Hogben Interglossa. Id es fo-facili de disci, pluto e flexi.
Glosa Mo-Kilo (Glosa 1000) uti solo 1000 Latin e Greko radi; qi sati
pro panto speci, klu tekno, konversa. Pe uti mu panto di in holo Euro media.
Na dice; ‘Glosa es un internatio lingua; tu ne ski; tu ski’.
Plu flexio gene vice per plu brevi bi-litera verba. Exempla: Glosa face
panto usuali tensi per plu permuta de nu (now) pa (pa-st), fu (fu-ture)
e du (duration). Il es nuli plu parti de dice. Komo in Cinese e, kresce,
in English ali verba akti nomina-, qalita-, alo klavi-verba, minus muta.
Glose gene doci in oligo sko-do e kolegi in US, Uganda, Tanzania, e
Taiwan. Pa Septembra in Brusel, Wendy Ashby pa dice de Glosa a proxi 150
persona inklude plu MEP e Euro-Komisio ergo-pe, in diskusio: ‘A qo metri
u ge-plana lingua pote kontribu a solutio de Kommunika e u lingua problema
in Euro-Komunita?’
* * *
About the language problem at scientific gatherings (This Week, 12 March):
Glosa, the international language, is a possible solution. A modification
of the late Lancelot Hogben’s Interglossa, it is extremely easy to learn,
rich and flexible.
Glosa 1000 has a vocabulary of 1000 Latin and Greek roots. These 1000
roots suffice for all kinds of even technical conversations. They are already
being used every day in the media. We say that ‘Glosa is the international
language you don’t know you know.’
Flexions are replaced by two-letter particles. For example, permutations
of nu (now), pa, (pas-st), fu (fu-ture), and du (du-ration) provide for
all the usual tenses. There are no parts of speech. As in Chinese and increasingly
in English, any word can act as noun, adjective or verb without undergoing
any change.
Glosa is being taught in a number of schools and colleges in the US,
Uganda, Tanzania and Taiwan. Last September in Brussels Wendy Ashby spoke
about Glosa to about 150 people including MEPs and members of the European
Commission staff in a discussion on ‘To what extent a planned language can
contribute to the solution of communication and the language problem in
the European Community.’
Wendy Ashby and Ron Clark Glosa, PO Box 18, Richmond, Surrey TW9 2AU
Letters: Forked only once
Vincent Kiernan in ‘Intimate secrets of the snake’s forked tongue’ (This
Week, 26 March) suggests that the forked tongue independently evolved twice,
perhaps four times, by snakes and one, possibly three, groups of lizard.
But snakes, monitors and heloderms must have had joint ancestry (back
in early Jurassic or in Triassic), which in turn derived from skinks. Thus
there is a strong possibility that all of the above had a single common
ancestry, derived from skinks, in which the forked tongue was evolved –
once only.
Snakes and lizards should each be a subclass, and skinks with their
lizard derivatives should be classed as a separate order of lizards.
J. French Watford, Hertfordshire
Letters: Losing combination
The poignant letter from Oliver Pawley (9 April) showed that science
can be just plain boring. As implied by William Bown in the same issue (This
Week) the inception of the science National Curriculum was a ‘back-to-basics’
move which, after two decades of teaching innovation such as the Children’s
Learning in Science Project, set science teaching back by thirty years.
Now, the overloaded, content-ridden curriculum gives little opportunity
to the average teacher to enthuse and motivate. Without proper care, the
nature of the Baconian scientific method easily turns science teaching
into a didactic, stultifying litany of facts.
For example, it used to be easy, and fun, to do projects on forensic
science. Problems would be set, hypotheses discussed and tested, police
detectives would come to the classroom, school visits would be made to pathology
labs and the students of either sex would come away understanding the
relevance of science and be enthused enough to want to do it. While discovery
learning may not be an efficient method of transferring information, it
can motivate students who will then pursue the information for themselves.
Now the back-to-basics curriculum makes motivating pupils difficult
and it is possible that girls in particular are turning their backs on this
dry information-for-its-own-sake subject.
We are both professional science educators, but our daughter is now
an undergraduate historian using analytical processes which, like Oliver
Pawley, we recognise as ‘scientific’. When, as a teenager, she said ‘I don’t
like science; it takes the magic out of everything,’ we were speechless.
For us, the science is the magic . . . but not through the National Curriculum.
Georges and Molly Dussart Canterbury, Kent
Letters: Losing Combination
I am currently studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry in the lower
sixth (incidentally one of only six female physicists in the sixth Form).
Last year I passed the MEG Double Science Award gaining two grade A passes.
There are many advantages to this subject, as it introduces youngsters
such as myself to many aspects of science. It also gives students two more
years to decide whether they wish to take a scientifically based choice
of A levels. I believe that having to choose what science subjects you wish
to study at GCSE level is too early, as teaching before this stage bears
little resemblance to the GCSE course.
The course that I took consists of continuous practical assessment,
a requirement which asks us to examine data and the results of experiments,
and find a suitable conclusion. We also took three written papers, the third
spanning biology, chemistry and physics, (which were mainly taught individually)
and involving lateral thought on the part of the candidate.
I admit that the subject does not cover sufficient ground to bring our
knowledge up to the required standard at which we start the A level courses,
and time is wasted at the beginning of the lower sixth in gaining lost ground.
However, I feel that if science reverts to being taught as three separate
GCSEs, teaching time will not be sufficient for all three to be taken without
other subjects falling by the wayside. Science is just as important as
any other subject, but it should not take precedence.
Jane Spoors Norwich, Norfolk
Letters: Closer control
Your analogy of bolting the stable door after the horse has fled, applied
to the debate on ethical issues raised by biological research (Comment,
9 April), is indeed appropriate. If public debate cannot keep pace with
scientific advance, it follows that a reactive approach to ethical issues
simply cannot work. To correct this situation, research needs to be subject
to control from outside the scientific community. There are two complementary
approaches to this.
The first step involves research funding. Present arrangements are far
too cosy – the scientific community itself decides on the disbursement of
funds, even when the state provides most of the money for research. Closer
control by open, publicly accountable bodies over the type of projects that
are funded would avoid many nasty surprises.
The second step would be to change the legal approach to research. At
present, legal controls tend to be very specific and developed in response
to research that has already been carried out (for example, consider those
relating to IVF). A better approach would be to prohibit whole areas of
research likely to cause ethical problems (for example, positive eugenics)
in advance of any developments. If the public then decided that the advantages
of a particular proposed strategy outweighed the disadvantages, the law
could be changed.
We really can no longer afford laissez faire in scientific research.
It is time for society to flex its muscles.
C. Mather Sheffield
Letters: Shredded subs
The letter from Hadrian Jeffs in your 9 April issue has prompted me
to write – I am also convinced that the dangers of sunken nuclear submarines
are greater than the military would admit to.
After Thresher sank, the US Navy found it with the aid of the newly
commissioned Alvin submersible. More accurately, they found fragments spread
over the patch of sea bed, which indicated that it had broken up into a
shower of what amounted to radioactive confetti. In what would hardly be
likely to occur nowadays, the US Navy trumpeted their success through the
pages of National Geographic magazine, which ran a feature showing colour
photographs of materials which had originated in the reactor area but which
were now lying on the sea floor.
My reaction to this is simple: shredded submarine has a vastly increased
surface area, and will deliver all manner of contamination into the environment
much more quickly than, I believe, we have been told.
Bob Shaw Glasgow
Letters: No sell-out
So the Radiocommunications Agency would like to auction broadcasting
frequencies to the highest bidder in imitation of some Australasian examples.
(This Week, 2 April). This proposal should be vigorously resisted.
The auction will lumber a successful bidder with a large, up-front and
unproductive debt that must be paid for by the audience. In practice this
will mean lower production standards and unadventurous programming. There
is no reason to believe that the most cashed-up contender is the best
able to provide a good service.
If the holder of such a licence is allowed to later sell or trade control
of this ‘property’, it will likely keep new blood out of broadcasting and
almost certainly lead to further concentration of media ownership.
Australian media madness is not a good example to follow.
Rod Hibberd Leichhardt, Sydney
Letters: Unspeakable
David Bradley reports the preparation of ‘isosaazatricyclohexacontane’
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 2 April). That means 60 atoms, an unintelligible
number of them nitrogen, arranged to form three rings. By my reckoning,
the diagram you showed was an eicosaaza-pentacyclooctahexacontane, 68 atoms,
20 of them nitrogen, arranged in 5 rings. The numbers, on the line, in your
name agreed that there were 20 nitrogens, 5 rings and 68 atoms in them.
The superscript numbers seem, to me, to be entirely impossible, demanding
pentavalent carbon among other things. Whichever it be, the name is both
unmemorable and unspeakable, even with the numbers left out.
In the March issue of Chemistry in Britain I asserted that systematic
chemical nomenclature has become unworkable, since chemists themselves cannot
understand it, still less apply it. I thank Bradley and yourselves for
a further illustration of this, in what is quite a simple, if large, system.
Peter Urben Kenilworth, Warwickshire
* * *
David Bradley writes: Peter Urben is right, except that ‘icosa’ does
not have an ‘e’. I have severely beaten one of the assistant editors of
the Journal of the Chemical Society, Chemical Communications for the original
error.
Letters: African affair
It is staggering that you chose Cynthia Moss to review At the hand of
man: peril and hope for Africa’s wildlife (11 December 1993). She and her
organisation, the African Wildlife Foundation, are mentioned prominently
in the book, often critically, and she was a passionate lobbyist for the
ivory ban, which is the subject of the book. Did the New 杏吧原创 readers
get a fair analysis of the ivory ban debate, given this?
In her review, Moss mentions a few African officials who supported the
ban. What she fails to note is that those African nations which have more
than half of the continent’s elephants all voted against the ban in 1989.
Moss devotes most of her review to attacking my criticism of conservation
organisations for being ‘the monopoly of white Westerners’. When the African
Wildlife Foundation, which is based in Washington DC, celebrated its 30th
anniversary, it did not have a single African-American on its board. In
AWF’s Nairobi office, eight of the nine senior associates were Westerners,
including Moss.
Moss does not dispute these facts. Rather, her defence is that news
organisations in Nairobi also employ Westerners. In other words, so what
if we discriminate, so do others.
Moss wrote that I ‘ignored what African conservationists are saying
and doing’. In fact, the book opens and closes with chapters about the work
of conservationists in Namibia and Zimbabwe, and there is another chapter
on what the Maasai are doing to protect the pristine Ngortongoro Crater.
These individuals deserve the accolades which At the Hand of Man gives them.
Raymond Bonner Warsaw, Poland
Letters: Out in the cold?
Whether cold fusion is bad science or good science which received bad
publicity is a moot point. ‘Ancient experiment turns heat up on cold fusion’
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 8 January) notes a decline of radioactivity in
a titanium-tritium mixture when heated from 115 oC to 160 oC, an observation
made in the 1960s. The tritium decay is as follows: Equation
Heating titanium and tritium mixture at about 150 oC probably results
in the formation of a new chemical compound with a different radio decay
constant, which by itself is not a rare phenomenon. Changes in radioactive
decay constant depending on the physical and chemical environment of the
nuclide has been known for 40 years. The decay rate of 99Tc at a pressure
of 105 atmospheres rises by 0.025 per cent compared to the one at normal
pressure. Technicium septisulphide (Tc2S7) and potassiumpertechnate (KTcO4)
show higher decay constants than the metal. The artificial 7Be shows a small
difference in half life between the metal and oxide. Cold fusion may be
out in the cold – cold and down but not out.
R. Sankaran Hyderabad, India