Letters : Ships on ice
Kangaroo Valley, Australia
Fred Pearce describes an interesting Arctic research project which will
involve the deliberate freezing of the Canadian icebreaker Des Groseilliers into
the Arctic pack ice north of Alaska
(This Week, 27 September, p 16). He states
that this will be the first time that scientists have deliberately frozen a ship
into the Arctic ice since 1893.
I hope you will correct the historical record by informing your readers that
the MV Calanus was deliberately frozen into fast ice near Igloolik in Foxe Basin
in 1955 for oceanographic studies by the (then) Fisheries Research Board of
Canada.
Of course, the Calanus was only a little ship (50 tonnes) with a crew
consisting of one scientist (Ted Grainger) and the skipper (Hans Anderson). They
were joined for the following summer season by a team of students from McGill
University in Montreal, which included myself. Once free of the ice, the Calanus
was used for transepts of Foxe Basin, in collaboration with the Canadian
icebreaker HMCS Labrador.
The Calanus expeditions of the early 1950s are now largely overlooked,
although at the time they added significantly to our knowledge of Canada’s
eastern Arctic.
Letters : Tale of two Toms
gmbuchan@imation.com
Having come across it myself some twenty years ago, I was pleased to note the
reference to the paper coauthored by D. Lindsay, J. A. Howard, E. C. Horswill,
L. Iton, K. U. Ingold, T. Cobbley and A. Ll
(Feedback, 1 November).
As I recall, at the end of the paper the authors expressed their gratitude to
a Dr T. Pearse.
Letters : . . . . . .
Readers who are mystified by this letter and the original Feedback item
may like to know that a once-popular folk song begins “Tom Pearse, Tom Pearse,
lend me your old grey mare…” and ends “…and Uncle Tom Cobbley and
补濒濒”鈥抬诲
Letters : Beating bias
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan
Michael Day gives a timely appraisal of the long-standing problem of the
inaccessibility of the most prestigious scientific journals to Third World
authors (“The price of prejudice”, 1 November, p 22)
As a reviewer for science journals and as a field worker and lecturer in many
developing countries, I have seen both sides of this story. Bias against
submissions from Third-World scientists there certainly is and it is to be hoped
that articles such as yours will make editors more receptive to them. However,
there are things which budding authors can and should do to improve their
chances with journal editors.
First, there is an almost universal tendency to have multiple authors. Papers
with five or six joint authors are common and ones with up to ten joint authors
are by no means rare. This leaves reviewers and editors alike uncertain as to
who exactly has done the work described.
Secondly, multiple authors sometimes resubmit the same basic work using their
different names as first authors. This is extremely aggravating to editors and
reviewers alike and will surely sour a budding relationship.
Third, scientists in Third World countries do not always use the skills which
are available in their own country to peer review their work thoroughly before
it is submitted to overseas journals. In particular, the statistical methodology
used in many papers is suspect. A competent statistician would spot such
mistakes and could easily rectify them.
Finally, putative authors should remember that most editors are obliged to
have a high rejection rate鈥�70 per cent is not unusual鈥攁nd screening
measures are simplified by sloppy submissions.
They should also bear in mind that journal reviewers are generally unpaid and
that the reviewing they do is a labour of love done mainly in their own time. It
is just not reasonable to expect them to spend hours working on sloppily or
improperly previewed submissions. When there are many silly errors, the patience
of even the most dedicated of them grows thin.
Letters : . . . . . .
Newport, Shropshire
An additional difficulty for scientists in developing countries trying to get
papers published in Western journals is the imposition of page charges by some
journals in the US.
For example, in Phytopathology, a seven-page paper (the mean length
of papers in the October issue) will cost the author $910 and a further
$50 if an electronic copy cannot be sent.
Abolishing page charges would remove one impediment to the ambitions of
authors from developing countries and would leave more cash for research.
Letters : Saying no to junk
rodbuck@telespeed.demon.co.uk
Feedback (8 November) doesn’t understand
why Microsoft needs your address to
avoid sending you unsolicited mail, or your fax number to prevent you getting
unsolicited faxes.
But unless it has the details, how is it to stop you getting this stuff?
Companies can’t just “take you off the mailing list”. Which list? New lists are
being created, or bought in, all the time.
The number of people who ask not to be mailshotted is a tiny fraction of the
populace, so mailshot companies keep a “do not send” file of these people on
their computers. At mailshot time, the computer scans down the mailshot list and
checks it against the “do not send” file. If there is no match, the person gets
a mailshot or fax. If a match is found, they don’t get one.
This is the only way it can be done, isn’t it?
Letters : Less throttle
Qiryat Bialik, Israel
Hitomi Suzuki calls for regulations to limit the loads that diesel trucks
carry (This Week, 25 October, p 4).
Unfortunately, a diesel engine can be
overloaded no matter how light its cargo, simply by the driver stepping too hard
on the accelerator.
As a biker, I am well aware of the clouds of smelly smoke that buses and
trucks emit whenever they start up from a stop.
I think the only solution is to redesign the fuel injection system so that
the driver cannot give too much fuel. This may, however, decrease the maximum
power of the engine, which is obtained precisely by using a high fuel-to-air
ratio.
Letters : Film fame
Hethersett, Norfolk
New 杏吧原创 appears to be more famous than I had thought. I have
just noticed a copy of the magazine taking a fairly major role at the start of
the 1965 Michael Caine film The Ipcress File.
Does anyone know of any other films that have featured your esteemed
journal?
Letters : Habit forming
Northampton
Laura Spinney describes the theory that natural selection favours certain
behaviour patterns and cultures in animals, and that this affects their
evolution, as “new thinking”. She adds that this view “might possibly inflict
the first serious damage to the dogma of the selfish gene”
(“The unselfish gene”, 25 October, p 28).
Spinney refers to this idea as “gene-culture evolution”, but surely it is
another name for an idea that has been around for a long time鈥�”organic
evolution”. This view, espoused by zoologists such as Alister Hardy and Ernst
Mayr some thirty years ago, takes the view that the specific mutations favoured
by natural selection are dependent (in part) on the habits that a particular
species has adopted.
For example, according to Hardy, different species of Darwin’s finches did
not evolve beaks of different shape by chance, they acquired different feeding
habits and natural selection favoured the beak most suited to these. To use an
even clearer example, Hardy argued that otters did not evolve webbed feet by
chance and then take to an aquatic lifestyle鈥攖he more adventurous of their
terrestrial ancestors took to the water first, so that, ultimately, otters that
began to acquire webbed feet were favoured by natural selection. In short, habit
affected evolution, rather than vice versa.
Certain passages in Spinney’s article might seem, for many biologists, all
too close to two ideas which would present serious challenges to neo-Darwinian
orthodoxy, namely the inheritance of acquired characteristics and directed
mutations. Organic evolution does not present as serious a challenge to
neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, and is an idea that many biologists might use to
explain some of the findings reported in Spinney’s article, but it is not an
idea that should be described as “new thinking”.
Letters : New danger
Maidenhead, Berkshire
What an amazingly defensive position the National Radiological Protection
Board takes (Letters, 1 November, p 66).
The work of Eric Wright and others on genomic instability arising from
exposure to alpha particles is very new (“Radiation roulette”, 11 October, p
36). It is therefore not surprising that “its role in radiation-induced human
disease remains obscure”, to quote the NRPB letter. It could hardly be
otherwise.
Roger Cox and his colleague from the NRPB say that humans have evolved to
cope with natural background radiation. But the radiation present while we
evolved was nearly all external radiation. Recently, our well-insulated homes
have allowed radon gas to build up and we are absorbing more and more alpha
particle emitters into our bodies. Plutonium, the subject of Wright’s work, has
only been present on the Earth and been introduced into our bodies during the
lifetime of my father.
Biological defence mechanisms to cope with other forms of radiation damage
may or may not work with this new sort. Research that helps to elucidate the
impact of these artificial isotopes on humans should be welcomed by all.
I am puzzled why the NRPB, an organisation charged with protecting the public
and nuclear workers from radiation, does not seem to share this view.
Letters : . . . . .
Aberystwyth, Wales
Wright has been able to demonstrate genomic instability and believes that it
may be a consequence of damage which causes an increase in the number of free
radicals in the cell. Keith Baverstock focuses his explanation of these effects
on damage to repair enzymes. What neither of these theories can explain is why
epidemiological studies鈥攂oth from Hiroshima and from comparisons of areas
with different levels of background radiation鈥攆ail to discover significant
differences between populations that have been differentially exposed.
My own theory, which I call the second event theory, is that the ability of
some artificial radioisotopes to decay twice within the period of the body’s
10-hour repair sequence explains why they are more deadly to DNA than natural
background radiation.
They can decay, damaging a cell and prompting it to begin a repair cycle, and
then decay a second time, attacking the repair mechanism at some critical
point.
I presented this idea at a recent symposium in the House of Commons, at which
I showed how the greater incidence of cancer in Wales, an area more affected
than elsewhere in Britain by weapons fallout, can be statistically correlated
with cumulative exposure to strontium-90. This isotope, the most dangerous
second-event emitter, binds to chromosomes and may also explain the Sellafield
leukaemia cluster.
The defensiveness that Rob Edwards encountered at the NRPB arises from the
failure to make this distinction between natural and artificially produced
isotopes. But we would surely expect them, as guardians of the public health in
this area, to be acting with caution. When so many lives are at stake, and in
the light of the accumulating epidemiological evidence of clusters of mutagenic
ill health near nuclear plants, the precautionary principle must surely be
applied.