Safer breast scan
I was pleased to read your article describing how an ultrasensitive infrared
camera has been developed that may detect breast cancer
(12 February, p 14). A
replacement for mammograms would be welcome. Mammograms are breast X-rays. While
the amount of radiation received from each is small, the effects appear to be
cumulative. Mammograms are recommended for women over 50, every three years,
over many years.
According to Michael Swift, now director of the Institute for the Genetic
Analysis of Common Diseases at New York Medical College, some women carry a
mutated ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) gene which makes them unusually sensitive to
“appallingly low” doses of X-ray radiation. Swift estimates that in the US alone
between 5000 and 10 000 breast cancers a year could he prevented if A-T gene
carriers were protected from radiation.
Understanding rape
Two points need to be made concerning the falsifiability of Randy Thornhill’s
theory of rape as a purely sexual behaviour
(19 February, p 44).
Firstly, if rape were only about sex and not about power, then women who are
forced by religious laws to cover themselves from head to foot, including their
faces, would never be raped.
And second, if rape were only about sex and not about power, then there would
never be anal rapes of anybody, let alone of men鈥攚ho are famously hard to
get pregnant. If rape is about power and only secondarily about sex, then you
would expect more anal rape to occur in places where there are a lot of men kept
in close quarters, in power hierarchies mostly governed by violence鈥攕uch
as prison, for instance.
Rape is a desperately complicated subject full of ambiguities. I have no real
objections to Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s core theory鈥攊t seems
unexceptionable that rape will sometimes allow men to breed who normally
wouldn’t get the chance. Rape by invading armies seems an obvious case.
However, Thornhill and Palmer have fallen into the usual traps. They seem to
think that because rape is sometimes genetically beneficial, then that’s what
it’s always about.
The law has been struggling for years to cope with the complexities of rape.
Have Thornhill and Palmer handed another useful defence to rapists: “I
desperately wanted to breed, your honour, and could find no other way”? I
suppose the good thing is they have made the case for abortion after rape
unanswerable.
Letter
Thornhill admits that his data on the fertilisation rate following rape are
based on interview evidence. If this particular assertion is to bolster his
theory, he needs to prove that all women will report rape in equal proportion,
whether or not they become pregnant. An alternative explanation is that most
women who get pregnant through rape will admit it, but the reporting rate is far
lower for those who do not get pregnant.
His conclusion regarding the likelihood of rape during break-ins and the
victim’s age also presupposes that this crime is consistently reported. Not for
the first time, a behavioural scientist appears to have erred through affording
social scientific data鈥攖he product of cultural and institutional
filters鈥攅qual validity to the results of controlled experiments. Humans
cannot be studied like scorpion flies.
Letter
I am concerned that at no time did Thornhill present his definition of rape.
If, as the law in Britain states (but no longer in all parts of the US), rape
requires the insertion of the penis, then his thesis is very strong. However,
many women experience what British law calls serious sexual assault鈥攂ut
which they would describe as rape鈥攚hen an alternative object such as a
knife or a broken bottle is inserted into the vagina. While I can see that this
might serve to prevent a woman conceiving another man’s child, it cannot assist
the rapist’s desire to spread his genes.
Letter
I applaud Thornhill’s comments on rape, perhaps not because he has a
plausible biological theory on the motives which drive men to rape, but instead
for considering our actions in terms of animal behaviour. For far too long,
people, including scientists, have suffered from a superiority complex which has
driven a wedge between Homo sapiens and “nature”. We consider our
behaviour to be civilised and our interactions with the environment as unnatural
or “artificial”.
We have the intelligence and the means to communicate, to develop new
technologies and to decide what is morally and ethically acceptable. But we are
also bound by our biology and the evolutionary forces which shaped us as a
species.
Perhaps the provocation and outrage that has resulted from Thornhill’s theory
comes partly from H. sapiens’s continual denial of its animal ancestry.
Name that rock
Feedback is incorrect to assert that “astronomers are still in the habit of
giving orbiting objects boring names like RX4“
(19 February).
For a start, there should be a year given, such as 1998RX4, to
differentiate it from 1999RX4 and the yet-to-be-discovered 2000RX
4. More importantly, however, the “RX4“-type designation is given
to asteroids which, although they have been observed, have not yet had their
orbits established over a long enough period to guarantee that they will not be
lost in future. It is only when they have been observed on three separate
occasions that they are regarded as confirmed, and only then are they eligible
for the more exotic designations that Feedback so obviously demands.
Biodiversity
Norman Myers’s definition of a “biodiversity hotspot” has altered radically.
The old formula on which I commented for New 杏吧原创
(26 February, p12)
included, for example, arbitrary fragments of West Malaysia and Borneo. In
his new paper, however, on which your report was based, that whole region is now
one giant hotspot. So any organisation that prioritised forest conservation
using Myers’s hotspot approach would have to radically alter its plans and
policies.
However, the new spin on hotspots is also highly distorted. New Guinea, one
of the planet’s treasure houses (with 155 endemic rhododendrons, for example),
isn’t a “hotspot”, nor is any part of the Congo basin, nor the 2.6 million
square kilometres of the Brazilian Amazon (which is being deforested at a rate
of 13 000 square kilometres annually and includes some of the world’s richest
forests, near Manaus).
That is why the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Global Environment
Facility are indeed much wiser and more realistic to focus on globally
threatened ecosystems within particular countries.
Brand image
European Patent Office staff warn that increasing workload will result in
their missing “prior art”
(19 February, p 6). Ironically, on the facing page, we
see an account of “tan tattoos” (EP 962 155). Obviously, the staff at the EPO
are too young to remember the late 1960s bikinis with floral cutouts. Perhaps a
solution would be for the EPO to employ some ageing technologists who have seen
most things before.
Letter
Serendipity strikes again! “Old ideas and inventions could be mistakenly
granted European patents unless examiners’ workloads are reduced…” The
examiner of EP 962 155 obviously had no time to read Girls’ Night Out
by Kathy Lette, first published in Australia in 1987. In a chapter entitled “A
melanoma called Bruce”, the author provides prior art: “We used to cut our
boyfriends’ names out of paper and sticky-tape them onto our tummies to get a
tan tattoo.”
Salt of the earth
I was reading an article about superbugs clinging to fabrics and other porous
surfaces when I remembered a story about a hospital in (I think) Czechoslovakia
during the Second World War, built in a salt mine to protect patients from
bombing attacks.
In the story, doctors were intrigued by the almost complete absence of
disease transmission, even of usually contagious pathogens. They concluded that
the heavy concentrations of salt on everything鈥攖he floors, walls and
ceilings were carved out of pure salt鈥攚ere responsible. Bacteria floating
around in the air would make contact with these surfaces and promptly die.
I always wondered why doctors didn’t pick up on that clue. Why not try
recreating those conditions in an above-ground hospital? Develop high-saline
paint, salt-impregnated fabrics, salty floor wax, maybe even a salt filter for
the air? If you make all the surfaces in a hospital too salty for bacteria to
survive, then you might just eradicate most of the superbug problem.
Off their trolley
I agree with
Feedback (5 February) about retailers being to blame when
shoppers on the Internet abandon their electronic shopping trolleys. Through a
link via a recent book review in the Electronic Telegraph I was connected to
amazon.com (the branch in Britain).
Although the price was clearly advertised at the beginning, proceeding to
checkout revealed the extras: the only choices for shipping were airmail and
“priority”. At the final stage I saw that nearly 拢6 (拢3 for posting
and a fixed handling fee of 拢3) was being added to the 拢5.59
paperback. My trolley was abandoned in Hong Kong.
Timely advice
Feedback describes the difficulty of the cooking instructions for a chicken
bought at Tesco’s supermarket
(12 February). Our local Sainsbury’s quotes 30
minutes per half kilogram of lamb plus 30 minutes. I had trouble with this until
I substituted one hour per kilogram plus half an hour.
But why not calculate and print the cooking time and temperature on each
joint?
Correction
In the story “An unhealthy glow”
(22 January, p 6) we reported on
a new technique for spotting skin cancer devised by Scottish researchers. We
would like to make it clear that the Glasgow and St Andrews university
physicists, including Miles Padgett, and the University of Dundee dermatologist
James Ferguson, developed the camera system for imaging skin fluorescence, but
did not create ALA cream, which is made by a manufacturing company.