Letters : Cutting edge
Bradford, West Yorkshire
I have just found the tin that the chocolate cake arrived in
(Feedback, 7 June).
I thought that it and the daft advice it gave were lost, but someone here
kept it for posterity. It is, in fact, William Lusty’s Double Chocolate Rum and
Raisin Cake with Lamb’s Navy Rum (pretty yummy, as you can imagine).
The reason for telling you this is that upon reading the instructions again
they prove even dafter. Under the title “Cutting Instructions”, after stating
“We advise that this cake is cut with a sharp serrated knife. Using a sawing
motion, cut across the cake into slices,” they add as their pi猫ce de
r茅sistance, “large slices should then be cut into smaller
portions”.
Letters : Tobacco gangsters
Wimbledon
Your Editorial of 28 June was
uncharacteristically naive in suggesting that a
total ban on tobacco could be useful.
I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and loathe being exposed to other
people’s tobacco smoke, but I am quite sure that criminalisation is not a viable
solution. The only effect of banning tobacco would be to transfer the vast sums
of money earned by a legal industry into the hands of organised crimimals (who
could not control the quality of the product and would use violence to control
financial matters).
Not only would taxes be lost, but substantial public funds would have to be
spent enforcing an unenforceable ban. The same effect occurred during
prohibition in the US, where one-third of police expenditure went on controlling
alcohol usage, allowing the Mafia to develop a power base that they would never
otherwise have achieved.
A modern example is the ridiculous and widely flouted global prohibition on
cannabis. Ultimately, if members of a free society decide that they are prepared
to pay to indulge in a harmful activity, invoking the criminal law creates more
problems than it solves.
Letters : Greenhouse nukes
Gympie, Queensland, Australia
Bill Wilkinson makes the often repeated claim that nuclear power is “CO2-free”
(Letters, 28 June, p 51). I have nagging doubts about the truth of
this claim.
Certainly, the process of generating power using nuclear fission in a reactor
produces zero or minimal CO2 emissions. But is this true for the whole
nuclear fuel cycle, which involves uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel
element fabrication, nuclear fission, reprocessing and ultimately waste
disposal? All these processes, with the exception of nuclear fission, are net
consumers of energy and it’s a fair bet that most of this energy is provided by
fossil fuels.
Given the relatively low thermal efficiency of nuclear power stations, and
the relatively low “fuel burn” ratio in a reactor, it is worth asking how much
fossil fuel is consumed for each kilowatt-hour of power generated. Perhaps Bill
Wilkinson or the British Nuclear Industry Forum can provide data to allay my
nagging doubts.
Letters : Whale trade
London
Fred Pearce boasts of eating minke whale steaks and then manages to
regurgitate wholesale the line taken by the advocates of Norwegian whaling
(Forum, 28 June, p 45).
It is wrong to assert that the minke whale population of the northeast
Atlantic hunted by Norwegian whalers is healthy and fast-growing. The Scientific
Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) currently accepts two
different population estimates鈥攐ne of 65 500 and another of 118 000. It is
impossible, therefore, to make such an assumption about the population
trend.
Norwegian whalers like to portray their whaling as small-scale and
traditional when in fact the Norwegian minke hunt started in 1930 with a catch
of 10 whales a year and peaked in the 1950s with a catch of more than 4300 a
year. Repeated calls for increased quotas and the failed attempt by the
Norwegians to downlist the North Atlantic minke whale at last month’s meeting of
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) make clear
the whalers’ true intention鈥攖he reopening of international trade.
Past experience has told us that such trade is uncontrollable and that the
activities of pirate whalers and smugglers would put all whale populations at
risk. The parallels with the ivory trade are obvious. The fact that pro-whalers
stood “shoulder to shoulder” with those calling for the resumption of the ivory
trade at CITES was revealing. Pro-environmental observers and even some
Norwegian media observed that this “alliance” looked more like a trade鈥攊f
Norway supported trade in ivory, the ivory-producing countries would support
trade in whale meat.
If recent meetings of CITES and the IWC have indeed been hijacked, it is by
organisations such as the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission which, in
common with the proponents of the ivory trade and groups that make up the
so-called “wise-use” movement, view wildlife solely as a resource to be
exploited.
Letters : . . . . .
Troms酶, Norway
Pearce eloquently highlights the ideological conflicts between urban animal
rights groups and northern societies where hunting whales and seals is part of a
sustainable and environmentally conscious way of life. I must, however, set the
record straight on the role of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission.
NAMMCO is an intergovernmental body based on an agreement between its four
member countries鈥擭orway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faeroe
Islands鈥攚hich aims to contribute to the conservation, national management
and study of marine mammals in the North Atlantic. NAMMCO was established in
1992, not as a lobby group for hunters, or a counterpart to private interest
groups such as Greenpeace, as Pearce’s article implies, but as an international
body for conservation and management of whales and seals in the North Atlantic
region.
Pearce paints an accurate picture of the exploitative nature of campaigns
against whaling and sealing by groups such as Greenpeace, which have long been
concealing an animal rights agenda behind their appeals to the general public’s
concern for the environment, with an alarming disregard for cultural differences
and internationally agreed principles of conservation.
NAMMCO’s member countries have seen conservation efforts derailed by such
campaigns, and are concerned to put the conservation and management of marine
mammals back on track. This can best be achieved through genuine efforts to
cooperate internationally to ensure that our shared resources can continue to be
productive for future generations鈥� not by shouting louder than
Greenpeace.
Letters : Gene for love?
Darmstadt, Germany
Chris Goodey does an excellent job of warning us of the dangers of those who
would define social normality and use genes to back up their arguments
(Forum, 7 June, p 49).
But he fails to mention that we are seeing the replay of a game
that has been historically repeated many times. Now genes have been added, like
the new additive in the washing-up liquid. Will they make everything much
clearer than before? I have my doubts.
If genetic differences underlie the behaviour by which psychological
“syndromes” are defined, of one thing there is little doubt: the effects
ascribed to the gene will not be reflected in much of the population expressing
the gene product. This is because genes and their products act not in isolation
but within a cellular protein network. Here the when, where and with whom as
well as the simple presence of a gene product is critical.
An average gene product has around five protein partners with which it
interacts. Each in turn is regulated in terms of activity, position and
expression, and so on through the network. In practice, this means that when a
gene is defective the results are often not critical to the organism. Other
members of the network may take over the function of the defective gene鈥攁
phenomenon termed “redundancy”.
Yes, there are genes whose expression or suppression leads to disease, but
how many genes make a syndrome? Shall we seek the genes for “appreciation of
beauty”, for “love” or for “a sense of humour”? Who decides which behavioural
syndromes are undesirable? Who guards the guardians?
In the words of the ancient sage: “All the world’s queer except for thee and
me, and even thee’s a little strange.”
Letters : Bonking budgies
Darwin, Australia
I don’t think the evidence that budgies “do it out of sight”
(New 杏吧原创, Science, 7 June, p 19)
would stand up in court, as this seems to be a clear case of entrapment.
Letters : Sweaty humans
Putte, Belgium
Isn’t it sad that Ann and Patrick Fullick
(Inside Science 101, 7 June) are
still rehearsing Raymond Dart’s old savanna story that human ancestors evolved
in the dry, hot and open African plain where the Taung fossil was discovered and
where Dart believed this australopithecine had lived鈥攅ven though Tim
Partridge later provided evidence that the Taung child, like all other
australopithecines, had lived in a much more humid environment.
In fact, humans are the opposite of savanna dwellers. Most savanna mammals
run four times as fast as humans, protect themselves from the sun with short,
light-reflecting fur, don’t have dextrous hands like raccoons or monkeys, don’t
make much noise like birds, otters or chimps, never copulate face to face (lying
on your back in the grass is dangerous), have a keen sense of smell, grow up
fast and reach adulthood in two or three years, can sustain body temperatures of
more than 40 掳C (Grant’s gazelle can maintain 46 掳C for many hours) and
show temperature fluctuations of more than 6 掳C between day and night. They
can concentrate their urine three or four times as much as humans (1450
milliosmol per litre), can bear a dehydration of 20 per cent, are very
conservative with salt and water (oryxes don’t need drinking water) and never
sweat ten litres a day as Montgomery’s soldiers did under the African sun, etc.
etc.
Letters : Boom boom
Biggleswade, Bedfordshire
Ben Iannotta has four pages on the problems facing future supersonic
transport aircraft (SSTs) without referring to one of the most difficult
problems鈥攖he sonic boom that is produced throughout flight at supersonic
speed (“Son of Concorde”, 7 June, p 40).
Previous SST projects such as Concorde, the Boeing 2707 and the Soviet Tu-144
were all begun in the 1960s, when designers assumed that people on the ground
would accept the boom. Publication of the facts about its effects was a major
factor in the abandonment in 1971 of the Boeing SST, and in the dwindling of
Concorde’s sales from the predicted hundreds to the 14 that were given to
British Airways and Air France.
For “Son of Concorde” to be viable, hundreds of planes would have to be sold.
At twice the size and weight of its “parents”, its booms would be much
worse.
Iannotta predicts “a revolution in flight times over a huge number of
routes”. Which routes? Routes with enough passengers between pairs of cities
both near an ocean and crossing no land en route are few.
Letters : Conflict of interest?
The Nirex radioactive waste disposal contract was apparently worth 拢3
million a year to the British Geological Survey. Peter Cook, the BGS director,
appears to be complaining that the gravy train has now come to a halt as a
result of Nirex’s failure to get planning permission for its ill-conceived plans
to develop a repository at Sellafield
(Letters, 21 June, p 54).
The BGS should be a public service body, acting in the national interest.
However, it was unable to participate in the Sellafield planning inquiry because
of its commercial relationship with Nirex. With a better arrangement than exists
now, BGS scientists could have been there to point out the misrepresentation of
the geological understanding of the area as presented by Nirex. Instead, it was
left to individuals like myself to do this. The absence of BGS representation
was unfortunate, since much of the crucial evidence was to be found in the BGS
reports to Nirex, which conflicted with Nirex’s public stance.
There is a clear conflict of interest in permitting a supposedly public
service organisation such as the BGS to undertake commercial contracts on behalf
of organisations like Nirex. Much of the future geological research into British
radioactive waste disposal issues should continue to be carried out by the BGS,
but the funding must be at arm’s length from “customers” such as Nirex. The real
customers are us, the public.
I am surprised that Cook appears to be trying to rehabilitate West Cumbria as
a potential site for deep radioactive waste disposal. It is clear that a
fundamental rethink of British policy on deep radioactive waste disposal is now
required. In the meantime, Cook should be patient, and keep his BGS expert group
usefully employed by publishing its work to date for Nirex in the proper
peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Lastly, I understand that Cook will soon be retiring as BGS director. It is
to be hoped that a new director will have the vision and independence to
reestablish the BGS’s reputation for strict impartiality.
Letters : Through the film
Mexico City
Regarding the possibility of room-temperature superconductivity mentioned by
Mark Buchanan and Bennett Daviss
(“The heat is on”, 3 May, p 26), I should like
to draw attention to the fact that, among various published claims of
observations of superconductivity at or close to room temperature, those of the
Institute of Synthetic Polymeric Materials in Moscow have been consistent since
1988.
They claim to have created superconductivity at room temperature in narrow
channels through films of oxidised atactic polypropylene. Since the experimental
results are not well known and the claims made are certainly not generally
accepted, there are few theories to explain these results, compared to the
plethora of hypotheses for oxide superconductors.
One theory that has been published combines the Moscow group’s ideas about
why conducting channels exist (involving long strings of an unusual type of
polaron that can occur in a polar elastomer) with my suggestion that
enhancements of electron-electron interactions at certain special drift
velocities can be greater in quasi-one-dimensional systems, and that such
enhanced pairing of carriers within the conducting channels mediated by plasmons
may account for superconductivity at room temperature.
Although this theory may turn out to be false, there is little doubt about
the validity of the claims based on experiments, and the only question is
whether or not there is some intrinsic limitation which restricts
superconductivity to channels up to a certain length. So far, there have been no
reports of high conductivity through films of thickness greater than 100
micrometres.
Letters : Total collapse
Clinton, New York
Perhaps one cannot adequately treat the history of ideas regarding the
“collapse” of the wave function in a brief article
(“Crossing the quantum frontier”, 26 April, p 38),
but I was startled to find that Ian Percival and
Nicholas Gisin were given credit for ideas that I introduced.
Moreover, no mention was made of the “continuous spontaneous localisation”
theory (CSL), arguably the most satisfactory and complete collapse theory at
present, introduced by myself and developed in collaboration with Gian-Carlo
Ghirardi and Alberto Rimini.
In 1966, David Bohm and Jeff Bub introduced the idea of modifying
Schr枚dinger’s equation to incorporate the description of wave function
collapse. I showed in the late 1970s how this could be done by making the
additional term depend on randomly fluctuating quantities鈥攖he Brownian
motion idea lauded in the article鈥攚hich all subsequent workers in the
field have adopted.
CSL is the natural generalisation of the theory of Ghirardi, Rimini and
Tullio Weber described in the article, unlike the phenomenological theory of
Gisin and Percival. In CSL, the modified Schr枚dinger equation is linear as
in ordinary quantum theory. This makes it possible to develop a relativistic
collapse theory, in contrast to the nonlinear equation of Gisin and Percival, as
was shown by Ghirardi and coworkers.
Incidentally, CSL is the only collapse theory so far to be tested and
constrained by experiment. While I share Mark Buchanan’s enthusiasm for
incorporating collapse in the equations of physics鈥攁fter all, it has been
my life’s work鈥攎ost physicists are less enthusiastic, even though collapse
theories beautifully solve the long-standing and vexing “measurement problem”. I
hope your article leads to more interest and tolerance for these ideas on the
part of the physics community.
Letters : Terrestrialism
Glasgow
I was rather intrigued by the opening sentence in your review of
Bonobo by Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting
(Review, 15 March, p 41) stating
that “the Bonobo was the last large mammal to become known to science”, having
been discovered in 1929.
As a cetologist, I could name at least five species of whales or dolphins
officially named since 1929. One of the most recent, the lesser beaked whale
Mesoplodon peruvianus, was named in 1991 and first recorded in 1976. In
addition there is still a beaked whale known as Mesoplodon sp. A, which
has been sighted but has yet to be officially named.
I find it infuriating that those mammologists working on terrestrial mammals
often make sweeping statements such as this, particularly in reviewing past work
and in review papers, without considering marine mammals. This is a particular
problem when working on whales and dolphins. As this research is often ignored
by those not directly involved in the field, few papers on cetaceans are cited
and cetology appears to be treated as a second-class science.
Please make the effort to at least consider marine mammals before making
all-inclusive statements about mammals.