Sulphur sucker
“But even this teacher, like many others, happily allowed pupils to suck pipettes 鈥� (Feedback, 22 April). I am a pupil in the sixth form, and I always have sucked pipettes. And we are still taught that “sense of smell” is “a primary tool of chemical analysis”. We often take a “whiff” of chlorine, bromine, hydrogen sulphide, and so on.
Last year our science teacher, when showing the different allotropes of sulphur, stuck the sulphur in his mouth and chewed on it until it went yellow and then spat it out after removing his false teeth.
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Trading in carbon
The flaw in all proposals for trading our way out of the climate crisis with carbon dioxide permits derives from a remarkable faith in market economics, combined with a perverse desire to own parts of the biosphere and buy and sell them like a commodity, or in this case a derivative (Forum, 29 April)
I was particularly astounded by the suggestion of issuing the entire adult population of the world with smart cards which would be credited with each individual’s carbon dioxide quota at the beginning of each year. Forget for a moment the mundane logistical and administrative obstacles, the nightmare of monitoring and verifying of emissions, not to mention the question of children’s rights to emit carbon dioxide. Schemes such as this will go nowhere because they fail to address the north-south political conflicts that we have already seen in the Climate change Convention and which sent governments away from Berlin virtually empty-handed.
Assuming that I am an average consumer in the industrialised world, my annual carbon dioxide emission is 11.6 tonnes. If you are an average consumer in a developing country, your annual emission is 2.4 tonnes. Our carbon dioxide quotas, based on the global average emission, would be 4.4 tonnes a year.
Trade in emissions permits should aim to redress the imbalance of greenhouse gas emissions between rich and poor. A low price, favourable to the industrialised world, would allow high energy consumers to continue business as usual. A high price might do the trick, but would that be fair? Free marketeers know in any case that if permits are not allowed to find their own value, then the black market will undermine the whole system.
The trouble is, as with many environmental problems, we are abusing what is essentially a free resource. What we do not pay for, or own, we do not value. But parcelling up the environment and giving it a price tag is no solution; privatising a public good does not address questions of equity or sustenance. Preaching voodoo economics won’t solve anything.
Stating the obvious
There is one very good reason for the funding of research into the obvious (Feedback, 13 May): to stop politicians from using the phrase, “There is no evidence that 鈥� “with the implication that this means, “There is no link between 鈥�”
These words have been used apropos poverty and ill-health, asthma and vehicle exhaust, dioxins, nuclear waste, hormone feeds, overhead power lines 鈥� and much more.
When a government pursues policies likely (or intended) to result in a large pool of unemployed labour, they consider it advantageous for there to be a lack of research into the “obvious” consequences.
Ethics and openness
The proposals of the Boyd Group concerning the establishment of institutional ethics committees for animal experimentation (This Week, 6 May) fail to address the principal issues relating to accountability and openness in the regulation of animal experimentation in Britain. Rather, they appear to be largely concerned with improving “public confidence” in the regulation of animal research.
The whole basis of these proposals appears to be that such committees should be established, not as independent bodies, but in order to “protect” institutions from legitimate animal rights criticism. Indeed, the Boyd Group’s document goes so far as to assert that, “the very existence of ethics committees 鈥� would engender public confidence in decisions about the ethical acceptability of scientific work involving animals”.
Furthermore, the Boyd Group fails to provide any evidence whatsoever that the establishment of such ethics committees would actually lead to either a reduction in the numbers of animal experiments or indeed real improvements in the welfare of laboratory animals.
In Nature, the architects of this group correctly identified openness and accountability as being of great importance and acknowledged that, in Britain, it is the Home Office which holds ultimate responsibility for ethical judgements regarding the use of animals in scientific research. However, the Boyd Group’s proposals fail to address in any way how the Home Office itself should be held accountable for its decisions.
For the concept of accountability to have any meaning within a parliamentary democracy, it is first and foremost the government and its civil servants who must be accountable to the public.
Any commitment to openness and accountability in the regulation of animal experimentation should therefore begin with the disclosure of all project licence applications (in a form which does not compromise the confidentiality of individuals), so as to allow public comment prior to any decision being made. The Home Office should then publish its reasons for accepting or rejecting any such applications. Only through such a system will the operation of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 be open to genuine public and parliamentary scrutiny.
Of course, if animal researchers are really committed to “improving public confidence” in the regulation of animal experimentation they could do far worse than calling upon governments and institutions to ban immediately the use of animals in areas such as cosmetics, warfare, alcohol, tobacco, LD50 and Draize eye irritancy tests 鈥� moves for which there would be overwhelming public support. Then, we can begin serious and constructive discussions as to how to bring about a complete end to the use of animals in research.
Think about nothing
Paul Davies, in his article “The Thought That Counts”, (6 May) says that we can easily imagine alternative worlds that are not logically absurd and quotes two examples. Yet he does not mention the simplest world, which would consist of nothing whatsoever. There would be no space, no time, no laws of physics and perhaps no mathematics and logic. To put it another way, there would be no universe.
Surely, the most important question is not why our particular universe exists, as opposed to a logically possible alternative, but why any universe exists at all.
Smelly men
Whilst it is interesting that women should prefer the smell of men whose immune system is different from their own (New 杏吧原创, Science, 6 May), there is a much simpler explanation than the biological desirability of ensuring genetic diversity as suggested by Wedekind. The question “Which do you prefer?” guarantees that the subject will take notice of her positive responses, which will include association with pleasure, and ignore any negative ones such as repulsion at the stink of dirty clothing.
We get used to smells very quickly, including our own. So the more different a man smells from a woman, the stronger he will smell to her. Wedekind’s results may well show that human male smell is related to major histocompatibility complex (MHC) variations and that women are turned on by it and that this response is modified by pregnancy hormones, but perhaps the explanation is simply that people prefer pleasurable odours which they can smell rather than those which they cannot.
I read Peter Aldhous’s article about the effect of the Pill on women’s preference in male odours with great interest. This is surely of great importance to people getting married. If a woman comes off or goes on the Pill after her wedding, she may find herself less attracted to her chosen mate and any friction between them will be exacerbated by this. Perhaps the rise in the divorce rate since the sixties has been influenced by the prevalence of the Pill?
There may be other drugs which influence men in a similar way, so I suggest that engaged couples investigate each other’s pharmacological state before taking the final step.
Also, marriage guidance councillors may need to be able to prescribe the Pill to save a marriage. The Roman Catholic church will have to decide which is the lesser of two “evils” 鈥� divorce or contraception.
Finally, perhaps someone could discover a “fidelity” drug which married couples take to make themselves attractive to each other and unattractive to anybody else.
Fingering fish
In his article on tests to identify “fake” food (Technology, 1 October 1994), Paul Rodgers says: “Unfortunately, neither the protein test nor the antigen test works if the food has been cooked or tinned. The processing breaks down proteins and antigens, making it impossible to distinguish species.”
This may be the case for canned fish, but it is not the case for cooked fish. In our 1985 paper, “Electrophoretic identification of raw and cooked fish fillets and other marine products” published in Food Technology in Australia (vol 37), J. Shaklee and I clearly demonstrate that there is a heat stable class of protein (parvalbumins) that can be used to identify many species of fish. This comes as quite a surprise to many people.
Rational bombs?
I have just read your editorial “Cults for the rational” (8 April) in which you express astonishment that “chemists, biologists, physicists and even a rocket scientist” were found among members of the religious sect Aum Shinrikyo, which is suspected to be responsible for the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Your further editorial “The colour of danger” (29 April) concerning “red mercury”, which you describe as “the ultimate terrorist weapon”, adds “deep chill” to your earlier wonder.
You go on to wonder whether such cults as the Aum Shinrikya offer something special which appeals to otherwise rational people who, having had a scientific training, should in theory have been inoculated against the lure of irrationality.
My wonder and astonishment concerns the willingness of scientists, supposedly immune to irrationality, to develop weapons of mass destruction and terror for the use of governments and states of all political shades.
If chemists, biologists, physicists and rocket scientists had in the first place not developed these weapons, religious sects and other cults would not have been able to utilise them.
Anonymous peers
In her reply to our criticism of anonymous peer review (APR), Phyllis Starkey (Forum, 22 April) down-plays the central point: lack of convincing (not anecdotal) evidence that APR does indeed improve the quality of science. The bulk of historical data overwhelmingly supports the opposite case (see for example, “The philosophical basis of peer review and the suppression of innovation” by D. F. Horrobin, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 263, p 1438).
This and many other reputable studies disprove the commonly held myth that the prime function of APR is that of a “quality control valve”, but suggest that its main underlying function is a validation of the “belonging to a club”. Furthermore, proliferation of APR is the prime cause of the publish-or-perish hysteria in modern science which, in turn, leads to an enormous overproduction of routine data; over half of all science literature is never cited after the publication.
Paradoxically, as some APR critics have pointed out, a dismantling of the APR system will lead to a reduction, not an increase, of the information pollution in science. In the absence of APR-driven publish-or-perish pressure and rat-race funding “competition” (which fails to deliver anyway), scientists will generally prefer to publish fewer but more substantial and well thought through papers.
Lending light
I am surprised that Lawrence Crum says that “no one knows” why noble gases help luminescence (“Bubbles hotter than the Sun”, 29 April). As an honours student in 1936 and 1937 I learnt that quantum mechanics predicts a metastable state for a helium atom. This only radiates very weakly to the ground state but can transfer its energy to another atom by a “collision of the second kind”, thus exciting it.
Since the helium atom is not used up, it can go through the sequence again and again, explaining why only a small amount is needed.