Round the pole
I agree with John Little
(Letters, 30 January, p 50)
about circumnavigation. So-called “round the world” yacht races
are really races around Antarctica.
Proceed with caution
The rise and fall of the loudly trumpeted “Atoms for Peace” nuclear age in
the postwar years holds valuable lessons in the debate about genetically
modified (GM) foods and genetic engineering in general
(Editorial, 20 February, p 3).
In the 1950s, influential scientists were confident of their ability to
handle ionising radiations safely in the form of nuclear emissions and X-rays.
杏吧原创s thought that they knew enough about the level of risk to allow
civilian and service personnel to be exposed to nuclear fallout during weapons
testing. We poured “safe” levels of nuclear waste into the sea, we exposed
unborn babies to X-rays because of the perceived medical benefits of doing so,
and large shoe shops had X-ray machines.
In the late 1990s, with many thousands of research-years on ionising
radiations behind us, we are able to exploit their benefits, with what should be
acceptably low levels of risk.
杏吧原创s have a moral responsibility to anticipate the threats of future
climate changes and carry out extensive research into GM crops, so that we can
prevent famine in developing countries in the middle of the next century.
杏吧原创s also have a responsibility to proceed with caution and not repeat the
mistakes of their optimistic predecessors in the 1950s.
Today’s pressure groups, with their well-developed public relations skills
and freedom from the burdens of scientific rigour, can easily outwit the best
scientists in the battle to formulate opinion on future research policy. It will
take only a few minor blunders by scientists to make all research work on GM
crops politically unacceptable in the advanced nations, with developing nations
paying the price in starvation.
Elderly online
Marcus Chown’s “Wrinklenet” concept suggesting the provision of Internet
access for the elderly is elegant and appealing
(Forum, 20 February, p 49).
A prime source of hardware to enable this already exists鈥攔edundant or
second-hand computers with little or no commercial value. Larger users,
especially companies, move equipment down and outwards within their corporate
pyramid, but eventually old computers are sold or given away.
Since we are all getting older, it would be in every computer user’s best
interests to support a project that will compensate for our decreasing mobility.
What is needed is an organisation to handle the logistics and training.
Letter
Attention has recently focused on the impending Government trials to assess
any impact on farmland wildlife of GM crops and their associated management
regimes.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds believes that the commercial
growing of herbicide-tolerant crops鈥攚hether genetically modified or
conventionally bred鈥攃ould accelerate the current decline in farmland
biodiversity. Herbicide-tolerant crops will allow, indeed encourage, even more
effective control of weeds within crops.
Some of these weeds are themselves now threatened plants, but they also
provide important food or shelter for many insects, other invertebrates, birds
and mammals. Dick Potts and his colleagues at the Game Conservancy Trust showed
that herbicides played a large part in the decline of the grey partridge,
reducing chick survival by removing food sources.
It is no great leap in logic to fear that a wider use of broad-spectrum
herbicides on GM herbicide-tolerant crops could exacerbate the current dire
situation. The Department of the Environment has recently issued a document
specifying the research needed to investigate the effects of herbicide-tolerant,
spring-sown oil-seed rape on farmland wildlife. That study will not be completed
until December 2002.
Government ministers last week guaranteed that the environmental impact of GM
crops will be thoroughly tested before any GM crops are approved for commercial
release, but they failed to announce a moratorium. Ministers should quickly
announce that there is no prospect of approving the commercial release of
herbicide-tolerant GM crops in Britain until at least 2003.
Letter
You are right to highlight the neglect of the potential environmental effects
of GM crops and to conclude that the problems lie not with the crops themselves
but with the way in which they might be used
(Editorial, 27 February, p 3).
However, it is unfair to wonder whether we can trust farmers to use them in ways
that help rather than harm wildlife.
Many farmers, conventional as well as organic, take steps to benefit
wildlife, but they have to be competitive to survive. It is up to society,
through regulation and financial incentives, to provide a framework that
promotes wildlife-friendly farming.
There is widespread agreement in Britain, across the political spectrum and
including much opinion within the agricultural community, that policy should be
directed towards environmental protection and the support of rural communities
as well as production. It is up to society at large, through its politicians, to
persuade the European Union and the World Trade Organization to do the same.
This will not be easy, given different attitudes to wildlife in some other
countries and the fashion for increasing liberalisation of markets. In terms of
the environmental effects of GM crops, the position is particularly difficult
because of the paucity of evidence. Britain must back the work of our
negotiators by investing in significant research into the potential effects of
GM crops on our wildlife heritage.
Letter
You dismiss calls to ban GM foods as a knee-jerk reaction that “ignores the
possible environmental benefits of some modifications”.
Does this mean that policies to introduce GM foods are a knee-jerk reaction
that ignores the possible environmental hazards?
Perhaps your failure to realise this is why you find calls for a moratorium
“deafening” rather than wise.
Letter
Your reader from Bankstown failed to read the other side of the plaque, which
was cemented to the wall. It reads: “This plaque will be preserved for the next
library to occupy this site.”
Steady-state libraries
In
Feedback (20 February),
you mention an inscription on a library wall which reads: “This plaque
was preserved from the previous library which occupied this site.”
The problem resulting from such a statement puts one in mind of the
difficulties facing the big bang theory, where the Universe is thought of as
evolving from a singularity without, it seems, a past.
Perhaps the Universe is only a semantic delusion.
Nearest figure
Tesco’s calculations for the energy content of its “value lemonade”
(Feedback, 27 February)
could be perfectly acceptable. The label says “100 ml of
lemonade provides 8 kJ of energy, while 200 ml provides 17 kJ.”
If the drink provides 8.4 kilojoules per 100 millilitres, for example, this
could be rounded down to 8 kJ per 100 ml. Double the original figure, and you’ll
find that 200 ml contains 16.8 kJ, which in turn could be rounded up to 17 kJ.
GUT for socks
Following your correspondence on missing mass
(Letters, 20 February, p 53),
has anyone ever considered unifying two of the most perplexing problems to
confound the informed modern thinker: What exactly is all this mysterious
missing mass in the universe? And where do all the odd socks/remote controls/
earrings/biros/pencils/paperclips disappear to?
Overwhelmed
I find Marcus Chown’s article on the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope proposal mind-boggling
(“Galactic visionaries”, 20 February, p 36)
and have not been so exhilarated since the early Moon landings.
What a splendid device for examining the rest of the Universe, and most of it
with established technology. If this proposal is not taken up, I despair of the
human race and propose that Planet Earth be handed over to the cockroaches as a
more deserving form of life.
One minor shortcoming is apparent, however. It would be best to plan for two
such instruments, one for each hemisphere, in order to get as complete a sky
coverage as possible.
Out of the woods
Fred Pearce claims that Canada has overestimated the amount of timber it can
harvest without harming forests
(This Week, 6 February, p 11).
The article quotes extensively from a report by Sten Nilsson and others.
In British Columbia, our forecasting takes into account a wide range of
requirements for maintaining forest cover that the report would list under
“political economy”鈥攔iparian areas, wildlife habitat, protection against
soil erosion, provisions for biodiversity and for recreation, and more.
Our timber supply analysts work from updated inventories to assess the volume
and growth of timber available for harvesting, after land base reductions for
protected areas, environmentally sensitive areas, wildlife management areas,
biodiversity conservation and other values. We simply do not assume all timber
can be harvested.
Nevertheless, we have strong evidence that timber growth rates in a number of
cases have been underestimated by up to 30 per cent, meaning that long-term
sustainable levels in British Columbia are likely to have been under rather than
overestimated.
With respect to planting, reforestation is required by law in British
Columbia. Roughly 70 per cent of the area harvested in the province is planted.
Natural regeneration methods are used to reforest areas where there is a high
likelihood that this will succeed.
Hidden HIV
I was surprised by your report of the claim by Imam Al-Sheik of King Faisal
University in Dammam that some unknown factor protects Arabs from HIV infection
(This Week, 20 February, p 17).
I worked in Saudi Arabia for ten years. At the oil company that employed me,
staff at the company clinic told me they were under instructions to report all
cases of HIV infection and AIDS as something else. Any other diagnosis would do
as long as AIDS was never mentioned.
At the time, the Saudi government maintained that AIDS was a disease of the
decadent West and could not occur in a morally upright, strictly Islamic society
such as Saudi Arabia.
The notion that Arabs have some sort of mysterious natural resistance to HIV
contradicts my observation and is profoundly dangerous. If young Arab men are
led to believe that they are naturally immune to AIDS, it will encourage them to
indulge in risky behaviour.
Laying the blame
Tam Dalyell states: “One of the most time-consuming jobs faced by an MP in
his or her constituency work concerns industrial accidents. It so often seems
that this sort of mishap could easily have been avoided”
(Thistle Diary, 20 February, p 50).
Well said, Mr Dalyell. So why are these avoidable mishaps allowed to
continue? There are two major obstacles to preventing industrial
accidents鈥攎oney and accountability.
Britain’s Health and Safety Executive only investigated 4 per cent of the 50
000 major incidents in 1996/97. Please note “investigated”. An investigation is
a mere inquiry, not a prosecution, let alone a conviction. The HSE is grossly
understaffed and this could easily be put right if the political will
existed.
Employers are potentially responsible for such accidents under civil and
criminal law. But civil cases often yield low damages and, in English law, there
is no tort of wrongful death. In criminal law, offences under HSE legislation
usually only result in a fine and it is cheaper for companies to take their
chance on this, particularly when so few cases are investigated.
The people who have the power to put things right are company directors.
However, the larger the company, the harder it is to prove that the directors
knew what was going on and are therefore guilty of manslaughter by gross
(criminal) negligence.
A simple solution would be to change company law and make it compulsory for
every company to have a safety director who would be registered at Companies
House and named on the organisation’s headed paper.
For example, next time someone sees a ferry leaving harbour with its bow
doors open鈥攁s I did ten years before the Herald of Free Enterprise
capsized off Zeebrugge in 1987鈥攖hey could write to the safety
director.
The safety director could escape criminal responsibility for any subsequent
deaths by showing that he or she had brought it up in a board meeting. If the
other directors unreasonably refused to implement safety measures, they would be
criminally responsible.
Instead, the Law Commission proposes a mere fine on the company as a whole.
However large this may be, it will not stop these avoidable deaths.
Too much too old
Your report on the problems with drug dosages for children
(This Week, 20 February, p 18)
brought to mind a committee I sat on around ten years
ago鈥攖he ethics committee of Beecham Pharmaceuticals. One of
the problems highlighted during my tenure was that, like children, old
people have a different metabolism from that of the usual mid-age range of
the human volunteers employed in drug studies.
With the steadily increasing proportion of our populations being of the
“third age”, it was decided to investigate the possible use of older volunteers
in drug development. The result of that investigation was a paper recommending
this change, but it was published just before Beecham became SmithKline Beecham
and our ethics committee was dissolved. With the merger, I imagine our
suggestion was lost.
Since drugs companies are loath to spend money where there is a small market
(such as children), they should be very keen to get into a growing
market鈥攗s old people. But I would be happier if I were sure that any new
drugs that are designed to make our passage into eventual oblivion a long and
healthy one have been properly tested.
Letter
Age Concern in South Staffordshire is working on the Millennium World Window.
This is a simplified graphical interface which we hope will provide older people
and the disabled with easy and direct access鈥攂y using a trackball or touch
screen, with speech recognition or easy-to-use keyboard options鈥攖o
applications such as word processing and leisure pursuits.
A secondary screen will interact with the Net to give access to virtual
shopping, banking, local tradespeople and global search facilities, as well as
providing fast contact with caring agencies and emergency services.
Microsoft kindly donated software for the project last year, but development
has been stalled because of lack of funding. We are looking for partners to help
us take the project further.
Who needs windows
I will be in Devon for the eclipse this August, but I wonder if I will see a
repeat of what I saw during my last total eclipse. It was in Brandon, Manitoba,
in February 1979鈥攁 cloudless day and a spectacular event, with solar
corona, Bailey’s beads, shadow bands and a brief drop in temperature from
鈥�28 掳C to 鈥�40 掳C.
This may partly explain the attitude of the neighbour on the opposite side of
the street. Despite having a large south-facing window which would have given
him the perfect view, he watched TV throughout. But you could not accuse him of
a lack of interest in matters astronomical because the programme he was watching
was, yes, live coverage of the eclipse in Manitoba.