Joyous repentance
Near the end of his article, Paul Davies writes: “If there is a hidden law at
work in the Universe banning excessive negative energy, then it would seem to
ban information from appearing out of nothing. Since the spontaneous appearance
of information is tantamount to a miracle, and deeply irrational, such a
principle goes to the very heart of the scientific description of nature”
(“Paradox lost”, 21 March, p 26).
This is good news, for it marks a decisive change from Davies’s long-held
cosmological view that the Universe erupted acausally from a state of absolute
nothingness. The Universe consists of a great deal of information, in fact all
the information there is, was, or ever will be.
If Davies now feels that the origin of space, time, matter, and energy ex
nihilo is deeply irrational and goes to the very heart of the scientific
description of nature, his conversion on the road to Adelaide from creation myth
to scientific method will be met with the joy at one big banger that repenteth,
more than for ninety-nine steady-staters, which need no repentance.
I dare say lots of adjustments will have to be made to big bang mythology
before it is dropped, at least in its present form. Perhaps it will continue as
the cause of our little corner of the cosmos, but will no longer apply to the
Universe as a whole, which will turn out to be far, far bigger than we thought.
To talk about a beginning and an ending in time or in space may become
meaningless in this context and, as Davies now seems to indicate, mysticism,
miracle and the deeply irrational will fade away among cosmologists. Verily.
Tea with attitude
As a tea-drinking mother, I was interested to read that women who drink tea
find it easier to conceive
(This Week, 14 March, p 23). But I am intrigued to
learn what the “unknown lifestyle factors linked to tea drinking” could be that
might also be important. Any suggestions?
No change
Your special on cannabis contained a great deal of fascinating material, but
in the end failed to convince me that the government is wrong in its view that
the current illegal status of this drug should remain
(Marijuana Special Report, 21 February, p 23).
Nor did it undermine the credibility of the conclusion of
the WHO report on the health effects of cannabis.
In response to your news item (p 4), the WHO has explained that the
prepublication changes to its report were part of the normal editorial process:
there is nothing sinister about removing an off-the-cuff comparison between
cannabis and tobacco when the report is not about tobacco in the first
place.
That the consumption of dangerous drugs such as tobacco and alcohol remains
lawful does not undermine the government’s case against the legalisation of
cannabis. Suffice to say that both the WHO report and your own analysis
demonstrate abundantly the many reasons for believing that cannabis has harmful
physical and mental effects, both in the short and long term.
The British Crime Survey suggests that there are about 1.5 million people in
Britain who have used cannabis in the last month, compared with an estimated 12
million people who smoke cigarettes every day, and 42 million who drink alcohol
to a greater or lesser extent. The illegality of cannabis is one of the main
reasons why we don’t have a cannabis problem which is just as big.
And that brings me to your interpretation of the Dutch experience, and your
statement that the leading researchers on this subject, Robert MacCoun and Peter
Reuter, “have concluded that `reductions in criminal penalties have little
effect on drug use, at least for marijuana'”. That is a seriously misleading
quotation from the editorial summary of their article in Science which
appeared on 3 October last year (vol 278, p 47).
The article itself, in the critical passage (p 50) says that “there is no
evidence that the depenalisation component of the 1976 policy, per se, increased
levels of cannabis use. On the other hand, the later growth in commercial access
to cannabis, after de facto legalisation, was accompanied by steep increases in
use, even among youth.” We have no intention of conducting a similar experiment
on the young people of the UK.
The MacCoun and Reuter article does indeed conclude that there was an
increase in cannabis use in the Netherlands during the 1980s. But as the authors
go on to say, the link with coffee shops “may not be causal; we have already
seen that recent increases occurred in the US and Oslo despite very different
policies. Second…throughout most of the first two decades of the 1976 policy,
Dutch use levels remained at or below those of the US.” Throughout the 1980s,
the prevalence of cannabis use in the Netherlands was comparable to that in
Germany, Sweden, Britain, France and Austria. To imply that the Dutch policy
backfired is therefore misleading.
Unpreferred lives
Ian Gibson MP raises very important points about genetic testing and life
insurance
(Letters, 21 March, p 52).
The Human Genome Project makes it likely
that an increasing number of disorders will be found to have a genetic basis.
However, I would differ from Gibson where he states that “enough information to
assess risk can be gleaned from an individual’s family history”. This is quite
untrue for a number of genetic disorders.
Let us imagine an applicant for life insurance who states: “My brother has
antitrypsin (AT) deficiency.” This disorder (1 in 3000 of the British
population) roughly obeys the laws of Mendelian genetics, so the applicant has
only about a 1 in 4 chance of also having AT deficiency.
Medical logic dictates assessment of the precise phenotype. If the result is
positive, appropriate action can then be taken, and giving up smoking might well
be the most important. If negative, then anxiety is relieved.
Insurance logic, however, dictates quite the opposite course: not to have the
test in case it leads to a financial penalty. There is the additional temptation
to conceal the result if it is already known.
But even if the AT phenotype has actually been assessed, the potential
insurer is not much further forward. The outcome is only poorly predictable and
may well depend as much on smoking history as on the genetic error. Many
AT-deficient nonsmokers have a normal life span and there are clearly other
factors which have not been defined.
Actuarial survival tables have been constructed for this disorder but are of
questionable value, being based largely on patients who have already developed
symptoms and attend chest clinics. They take no account of all those who remain
symptom-free and thus undetected in the general population.
So in this disorder and probably in many others, use of the “genetic test” to
establish insurance risk has little predictive power, and family history
virtually none. The idea being bandied about that one will soon be able to
predict everyone’s date of death at an early age is absurd. It would be quite
unfair to assign our insurance applicant to an inferior category of insurance
(the “unpreferred life” in insurance terminology) even if the precise phenotype
is known.
Imminent immortality
The article on repairing damaged brains
(“Brain repair kit”, 21 March, p 40)
raises a very interesting question. Have the first immortal humans already been
born?
We already have techniques for replacing almost all the vital
organs鈥攈eart, lungs, kidneys, liver and bone marrow. True, the current
techniques usually mean a transplant from a donor, but it seems clear from
recent advances in both transgenics and tissue culture that it is only a matter
of time before replacements could be grown on demand, without the need for
donors.
Until now, the one tissue that could not be replaced or repaired was brain
tissue. However, if the hopes of the immortomouse cell researchers turn out to
be well founded, and it is possible to repair “even the mental decline that goes
with normal ageing” there would seem to be no technical reason why a person with
a suitable overhaul and replacement programme should not live for ever.
Of course, that still leaves open the question of whether society would
permit an individual to go on using resources for hundreds or even thousands of
years.
Nuclear Moon
Mark Ward points out the serious problems of lunar base development that
remain, despite the presence of water ice confirmed recently by NASA’s Lunar
Prospector spacecraft
(This Week, 14 March, p 4). Quotes relating to the high
costs of setting up infrastructure on the Moon and a factory to produce
propellants were particularly good.
Studies which have looked at these problems have found solutions which
minimise the required infrastructure and avoid the need for a factory to produce
the propellant (cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen). In my view, the best of these is
the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory’s paper on a
“Nuclear-heated steam rocket using lunar ice”, posted at
http://infoshare.inel.gov/Zuppero/public_html/Lunar_Ice_Rocket/.
This paper examines the most cost-effective ways to get the lunar water off
the surface and into lunar or Earth orbit (much cheaper than boosting it up from
the surface of the Earth) for use on space stations or to make rocket fuel for
further exploration of the Solar System.
Whereas the most economical lunar lander would use the water directly in a
steam rocket (under supercritical P-T conditions), interplanetary nuclear
rockets would probably use pure hydrogen with a solid nuclear fuel core, or for
higher performance, a homogeneous mixture of water and a nuclear fuel such as
uranium-233 or americium-242m (in a salt solution) in an open-cycle arrangement
operating at 30 000 kelvin or 60 000 kelvin.
Interplanetary nuclear thermal propulsion rockets are documented on NASA’s
website at http://trajectory.lerc.nasa.gov/aig7820/projects/ntp/index.html.
Drugs and bugs
I read with some dismay your piece on antibiotics given to livestock as
growth promoters and “superbugs”
(This Week, 21 March, p 13). I feel that the
article leans very heavily in the one direction.
For example, we are told how vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) can kill
people. The last statistic which I saw had the death rate at just 1 or 2 per
million in Europe each year.
It is also important to stress that most people who die with an enterococcus
infection are infected with many other organisms and are often seriously sick
with a primary disease which alone would give them a very low life expectancy.
They are often already in intensive care units.
We are told that the European Union has banned avoparcin because it promotes
the emergence of VREs in animals and these were a risk to people, but not that
the ban was requested by Denmark, a country yet to have its first case of VRE
infection. This is despite the fact that Danes are greatly outnumbered by pigs
and poultry, those species which have received the greatest amount of
antibiotics and harbour the greatest number of VREs.
We are also informed that American hospitals have a VRE problem. But
avoparcin has never been marketed in the US. In fact, the problem is worse there
than it is in Europe because vancomycin was the antibiotic of last resort for
enterococcal infections in the US, in contrast to most European countries.
In addition, much vancomycin was used in the US as part of the practice of
defensive prescribing, which is a medical response to the perceived threat from
an aggressive legal profession waiting in the wings.
Your writer’s further gloom-and-doom remarks about virginiamycin and
avilamycin somehow give the impression that there has been a wanton diversion of
valuable drugs away from people into the animal market. This is not the case.
The antimicrobials issue was addressed by the Swann Committee in Britain in 1967
and a line was drawn between antibiotics to be reserved for human use and those
which could be used as growth enhancers for farm animals.
As you might expect, it was those antibiotics for which no human market was
foreseen which found their way onto the list for use in animal feed. Many had
properties which made them unattractive for human use.
Crash course
Your article on science demonstrations
(Forum, 7 March, p 51) reminded me of
a chemistry lesson which was introduced by the lecturer igniting a balloon
filled with a hydrogen/oxygen mixture. The violence of the explosion, which
shook a cloud of chalk dust off the blackboard, held our attention for the full
two hours of the lecture.
This, I believe, backs my flying instructor’s conviction that the best
learning environment is a bloodstream full of adrenaline.
I remember in particular an occasion when the instructor wished to
demonstrate the need for maintaining speed and balanced flight in a practice
engine-out landing. By persuading me to carry out some questionable, but
understandable, actions to compensate for a poorly judged approach, we were
placed in a situation where, in less than a second, a rather unbalanced but
seemingly harmless approach turned violently into a vertical dive.
I doubt that my adrenaline levels have ever been higher, and I remember every
detail of the scene, which occurred over 35 years ago. This was reinforced by
the subsequent debriefing, which pointed out that if we had not chosen to do the
exercise at a safe height, we would, at that moment, be dead.
So that we would carry the lesson through life, we were also taught the
couplet: “They watched him crash, they watched him burn, He held off bank in a
gliding turn.”
Science is served
After reading the cannibalism article with its descriptions of skulls being
scooped out
(“The people eaters”, 14 March, p 42),
I turned the page only to be
hit with your pullout subscription form describing New 杏吧原创 as
“Brain Food”, complete with a sketch of a deskulled brain. It certainly had
maximum impact.
Speaking of coincidences鈥攁ren’t we all, following your article “That’s
amazing, isn’t it?” (17 January, p 24)鈥擨 noticed this tasty titbit in the
Bangkok Post the same morning: “Forty Years Ago: A Chinese man pleads
guilty to murder for cannibalism and failure to renew his alien residence
permit, and is fined 100 Baht.” If he is still around, perhaps he might have
some recipes to pass on to William Arens, who asks why there aren’t any.