Bond on bruising
Henry Arnold is correct to say that James Bond preferred his drinks “stirred
not shaken” in Ian Fleming’s novels (as opposed to the celluloid version), but
Arnold misquotes 007 when he suggests that this bruises the alcohol
(Letters, 10 October, p 54).
In Casino Royale鈥攖he first James Bond novel鈥擝ond tells
Vesper Lynn that a gin-based cocktail must never be shaken because this “bruises
the gin”. I concur with Bond: the flavour of the gin comes from delicate
essences鈥攋uniper oil and aniseed oil鈥攚hich are indeed affected by
the violent actions of a cocktail shaker. Grain alcohol (ethanol) is a neutral
spirit: its flavour cannot be “bruised” because it is flavourless.
On another point, Feedback
(17 October) has quoted a nonexistent source.
There is no Tom Lehrer song called Proliferation. The lyric you quoted,
“Just to use on you-know-who”, is from Lehrer’s ditty about nuclear
brinkmanship, which he called Who’s Next?
Back to fusion
It is deeply saddening that the International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor (ITER) project is suffering the effects of reduced funding
(This Week, 17 October, p 4).
Fossil fuels are meeting our planet’s bulk energy needs for now, but they are
a finite resource and should be mined as lubricants instead of being squandered
as easy energy. No responsible scientist or government official involved with an
energy portfolio can ignore the fact that the bulk of future energy requirements
cannot be met by fossil fuels for many more decades.
Alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind and wave power should, and
will, be part of our future, but the world’s huge energy requirements are
unlikely to be sated by these alternatives.
Low public awareness of these realities has allowed New Age greenies to take
the stage and move public opinion away from nuclear energy of all kinds. The
situation is so bad that the words “fission” and “fusion” are now regarded as
synonyms, though nothing can be further from the truth.
One day, this inactivity will cause us to run out of energy. We may then
discover that it takes so long, and uses so much energy, to get thermonuclear
energy up and running that we are in danger of slipping into a new Dark Age.
Fetal indecision
French Anderson of the University of California has proposed trying genetic
engineering on fetuses which will be aborted
(This Week, 10 October, p 5).
I would counsel that this project should not be approved. While I was still a
medical student, it was disclosed that a trial had been approved in an
Australian hospital to see whether immunisation for rubella (German measles) had
caused defects in the fetus.
Several women in early pregnancy whose fetuses
were to be aborted were immunised. But despite counselling, some of these
women decided to have their babies after all.
Fortunately, no harm came to the babies from the immunisation, but for
obvious ethical reasons the trial was abandoned.
Using a live fetus inside a live woman involves the risk of that woman taking
decisions over which the experimenter has no control.
Children of Africa
While not wishing to downplay the terrible reality of HIV infection in
Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa, I was disappointed to read in the story about its
effect on the continent that Zimbabweans “will be lucky to become grandparents in
their lifetime”
(This Week, 17 October, p 12 ).
Pearce seems to neglect the nature of demographics growth in Africa.
According to the UNFPA State of the World Population report 1998, Zimbabwe has,
on average, 129 births per 1000 women in each of the years from age 15 to 19. In
other words, there will be 645 births per 1000 women in their late teens.
So a woman in Zimbabwe has a 65 per cent chance of having at least one child
by the time she turns 20, and a 40 per cent chance of becoming a grandmother by
the time she turns 39. In all of this, I assume the child’s father is the same
age as the mother, which I feel is a reasonable assumption in the absence of
detailed cultural data.
Add to this the statistic that a lot of people will die later than age 39,
and one can see that a great many Zimbabweans will live to see their
grandchildren born.
Refining ethics
I was delighted to see Inside Science
(Number 114, 17 October)
highlight the ethical dilemma associated with the use of animals in scientific
research. However, the article contained an error concerning a very important
concept.
“Refinement” is not “extracting the maximum information from the minimum
number of experiments”. This is actually another example of reduction.
Refinement means minimising pain, suffering and distress during and after
experiments and improving welfare, which is a legal requirement of the Animals
(Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.
Animal husbandry can (and should) also be refined beyond the minimum
requirements of the Act by giving all animals an appropriate and interesting
environment to live in.
Ethical decisions therefore need to be made, not only about whether to use
animals and how many to use, but also about how they will be used and whether
they can be housed and cared for so as to minimise both physical and
psychological suffering. This can have an immediate positive impact on the
welfare of laboratory animals for as long as their use continues.
Telling terms
In one of your articles on recent patents, I was disturbed to see the Patent
Office using antiquated nomenclature such as iso-pentane and toluene rather than
the systematic International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) terminology
(This Week, 29 August, p 9).
Whilst I accept that iso-pentane presumably covers all branched pentanes and,
as a consequence, is a useful catch-all term, I regard the use of triptane (2,
2, 3-trimethylbutane) and toluene (methylbenzene) as unforgivable.
Surely such an august body as the Patent Office, and, indeed, the company
involved (BP), should use the most accurate terms available in order to avoid
the possibility of patent violation.
Farmers first
I was delighted to read Rob Edwards’s account of how biologists are beginning
to value the environmental knowledge of local people
(This Week, 17 October, p 18).
A number of us鈥攕ocial anthropologists, political scientists,
geographers and others鈥攈ave for many years been promoting the value of
such knowledge.
I mention particularly the contributions of Robert Chambers of the University
of Sussex, who has published several books on this topic including Farmer
First, and also the Indigenous Knowledge series (of which I am
co-editor), both published by Intermediate Technology Publications.
After decades of development disasters, many caused by “development from
above”, it is time to take seriously the beliefs and practices of those most
directly affected by aid efforts.
Home brews
The brewing process reportedly developed by the Miracle Beer Company
(This Week, 17 October, p 12)
seems only to be an update of a process which I used 20 years ago while living in Darwin, Australia.
The brew pack consisted of powdered ingredients which were added to 25 litres
of cold water. To this was added 1 kilogram of sugar along with a small sachet
of brewer’s yeast and a sachet of concentrated hop extract. This whole process
took less than five minutes, including the sterilisation of the brewing
equipment. Primary fermentation took between five and seven days, after which
the beer was siphoned off into bottles primed with one teaspoon of sugar.
Although green, the beer could be consumed within fourteen days.
These days, home brewing does not require any time-consuming steps. Using
modern brew packs, there is no need to boil malt extracts, and sterilising
equipment takes very little time.
Your article would seem to indicate that home brewing in Britain still uses
processes long since dispensed with in Australia. I am aware of some very good
home brew packs which are imported into Australia from Britain and none of them
requires complicated processes to produce a good beer, so it is somewhat
surprising to find that a British company has gone to so much expense to
reinvent the wheel.
Sri Lankan cells
Your report on the work of Michael Gr盲tzel and his colleagues on solar cells
(This Week, 10 October, p 11) is incorrect.
The energy conversion efficiency of the cell as reported in Nature
is only 0.74 per cent. The photon to electron conversion efficiency (IPCE) of 33
per cent is not the same as the energy conversion efficiency which, in practise,
is the important parameter. Your reporter may have been misled by the fact that
the paper in Nature highlighted IPCE instead of efficiency. Getting an
IPCE of 33 per cent is not a remarkable achievement.
The condensed matter physics group of the Institute of Fundamental Studies in
Sri Lanka has developed solid state dye-sensitised solar cells which are
superior in performance to the Gr盲tzel solid state cell you have
reported.
Our cell, which was developed in 1995 using a flower pigment, gave an energy
efficiency of 0.8 per cent. This was later improved and we obtained an
efficiency of 4.5 per cent using another pigment (Journal of Physics D:
Applied Physics vol 31, p 1492).
This work was published prior to the work reported in Nature. It is
strange that Gr盲tzel’s group has failed to quote our paper in the letter to
Nature.