Fossilised minds
Raj Persaud laments that “the human mind, alas, has left no fossils”
(26 February, p 50).
But what about religions ? Not to mention their offspring, the arts and the
proto-sciences鈥攁strology and alchemy.
Plutonium problems
So how did Britain get into Sellafield’s embarrassing MOX debacle? Focus
quotes Jack Harris, formerly a senior scientist involved in the Central
Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) research on Magnox reactors
(26 February, p 18).
Writing in the latest issue of Science and Public Affairs, his
assessment concluded that the policy of reprocessing to extract plutonium from
used Magnox fuel in order to combine it with uranium in MOX fuel is “entirely
unacceptable, to the point of foolishness”.
Harris first presented the arguments on cost, proliferation and radioactivity
release in an internal CEGB paper in 1977, where he also assessed the dry
storage alternative. As he relates, the CEGB ordered him and his co-author Roger
Nunn to withdraw the paper. And none of a dozen papers on the issue over the
next decade was allowed to be published. These strategic arguments were central
to the decision in the late 1970s to continue reprocessing and press ahead with
BNFL’s 拢300 million MOX plant (whose start-up is now in doubt) and
拢2.8 billion THORP reprocessing plant.
So the sacrifice of a BNFL manager or two, implied by government ministers,
will not remedy the cultural causes of the MOX scandal. A full inquiry is needed
into how the government and BNFL steamrollered the disastrous reprocessing
project. But it has to probe the government and civil service culture that
suppressed鈥攁nd still suppresses鈥攕cientific study, and subordinates
technical assessment to political/ business interests.
Safety second
Which would you rather do? Make an existing technology safer or pioneer an
entirely new one? Most people seem to prefer the second option, and this is
particularly true in medicine.
I think this helps explain why medicine is so far behind the airline industry
in terms of safety, and why effective monitoring software was not in place to
alert authorities to the Harold Shipman murders, even though it had been
available for years
(19 February, p 18).
Even in the US, safety is mainly driven by the threat of litigation rather
than the degree of risk or human suffering. It seems that when it comes to
funding, safety just isn’t sexy. President Clinton is just one of many people
throughout the developed world calling for greater safety in medicine. I hope
the authorities and funding bodies are listening this time.
Cut the clich茅s
I would like to take issue with a couple of similes used in the article on
“gene police”
(4 March, p 28).
It talks of “a transposon鈥攁 good-for-nothing bit of selfish, parasitic
DNA that hangs around the genome like an unemployed relative”. Mention is also
made of “a placard-waving hooligan”.
These phrases may be intended to be funny; they may be intended to help
clarify the meaning; they may even be intended to be ironic. Whatever, they’re
needlessly offensive.
I have unemployed relatives. I have in the past been an unemployed relative.
None of us are good-for-nothing, selfish or parasitic. Of course some unemployed
folk are all those things, but in my experience most are not. Selfishness is
just as common among employed folk, and probably a lot more so among the
rich.
On the whole, people who carry placards don’t wave them, and they aren’t
usually hooligans either. A magazine like New 杏吧原创 shouldn’t be in
the business of reinforcing these kinds of stereotypes.
Letter
Plutonium has an extremely long half-life. Perhaps one of the experts arguing
for an end to reprocessing can propose a realistic alternative.
This must include security systems, physical containment and many other
safeguards to keep the existing stocks isolated from the environment for the
next 20 000 years or more.
Given the difficulties of this approach, surely the only practical way to
dispose of plutonium is to include it in fission reactor fuel cycles and so
convert it to something less unpleasant?
Letter
Your dismal outlook on Sellafield鈥攐nly one of BNFL’s sites in only one
of the countries in which the company operates鈥攊s distorted.
You fail to point out that plutonium is created, not by reprocessing, but in
the reactors which generate nearly 30 per cent of Britain’s electricity (50 per
cent in Scotland). Nor do you mention that BNFL handles and produces not
plutonium but plutonium dioxide (not the stuff of weapons).
You seem unaware that reprocessing recovers unused uranium (96 per cent of
the “used” fuel), thus avoiding the need for mining. Leaving the plutonium and
uranium “locked up” in fuel rods is grossly wasteful and inefficient.
Reprocessing is merely industrial recycling鈥攕omething to be applauded, not
condemned.
Your argument against MOX fuel, for which there is a market and which makes
reactors more efficient, is flawed. You should instead congratulate BNFL on
finding a means of using up surplus plutonium (as PuO2) while we wait
for the fast reactor to come back into fashion, as it surely will.
Talking tots
Your report from the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science suggests that unless a person learns language before the age of five,
they never become fluent, because the brain no longer has the potential for
learning this skill
(26 February, p 14).
This immediately suggests to me that language must have been created by
infants in our evolutionary past鈥攊t could hardly have been invented by
adults whose brains no longer had the capacity for developing language
skills.
Possum poser
There are two major problems with the proposed oral vaccine contraceptive for
possums
(4 March, p 18).
First, there will be rapid selection for animals which fail to produce an
immune response against the gametes of their own species, making the method
ineffective within a few generations.
Secondly, selection will be for decreased immune function. New Zealand
possums are one of the main reservoirs of bovine tuberculosis. Increased
susceptibility of possums to this disease would be disastrous for New Zealand,
with its dependence on beef and dairy products.
Similar considerations could affect the proposed immunocontraception of
koalas in Australia. Wide public debate is needed in both countries before this
work is allowed to continue.
Random shadow
The theory discussed by Marcus Chown that randomness generates everything
(26 February, p 25)
is nothing but a downgraded version of the Pythagorean
“everything is a number” approach.
Randomness is just another buzzword which neither saves us from the infinite
regression paradox, nor resolves the
“why-there-is-something-rather-than-nothing” ultimate question. A better bet is
to appeal to the distribution of prime numbers. Though the pattern of primes
looks random, “in reality” it is fully fixed. Its inexhaustible infinitude was
(and still is) a source of inspiration for many generations of philosophers and
mathematicians.
Perhaps “randomness” is just a mere shadow of this pattern on the walls of
the Plato’s cave we all inhabit.
It's a dog's life
Your article on dogs and humans made me feel this is a receptive moment to
unleash one of my pet theories on the scientific community
(4 March, p 22).
I challenge the received wisdom that it was the brighter wolves who hung
around by cave dwellers’ fires looking cute, making themselves useful and
evolving into dogs. Wolves are a successful species with sophisticated social
systems. Why would they link up with us鈥攁nd if it was such a good idea how
come they didn’t all do it?
I think the wolves that evolved into dogs were the thick ones that simply
couldn’t hack it as a wolf. Rather than let this failed wolf perish, the pack
abandoned it with the cave dwellers鈥攁 species judged by the wolves as
nearer the reject’s level.
It was my position as pack leader to two pleasant-natured, definitely not
pampered, but very dense dogs, that led me to develop this idea. I simply could
not imagine Becca and Katy getting the hang of any wolf-like activity鈥攖hey
remain baffled by the process of stick chasing even in the company of other more
competent mutts.
Psssshhh
I’ve read of using sandbags filled with lunar soil to build shelters before,
but Ebrahim Khalili also proposes to reinforce them with barbed wire
(4 March, p 9).
To pierce the bags, the barbed wire will need to be sharp. These shelters
will be built by astronauts. Barbed wire. Spacesuits. Vacuum. Hmm.
Jumping the gun
The article on morphine making it harder to fight off infection and the one
on puerperal fever
(26 February, p 17) and
(26 February, p 52) have the common theme of
iatrogenic infection鈥攊nfection caused by medical treatment. The modern-day
failure of the medical and nursing professions in controlling infection is as
evident today as it has ever been.
However, Toby Eisenstein is muddying the science of bacterial resistance by
allowing herself to suppose that humans, hospital infections and the use or
abuse of morphine or analogues for the relief of suffering or pain are
positively linked. Only when the evidence is properly presented, repeated and
found to be conclusive and every infection control measure already known to
humankind is fully implemented can an association between bacterial resistance
and morphine be considered.
Until this is done a “science-like soundbite” may be as harmful as the
multi-drug-resistant bacteria that the patients, hospitals and communities are
fighting.
Don't waste it
Your article on recycling household waste emphasises the common-sense
approach we must take to composting
(4 March, p 14). There is obviously a
sensible balance between leaving organic waste in a bin for too long and the
well-publicised concerns of us all living in perfectly clean, sterile
environments.
The trend in waste management is increasingly to enable householders to take
responsibility for their own waste. It is better to educate the public about the
sensible precautions that should be taken when separating out their waste than
to dispose of organic waste along with the rest of our rubbish.
The composting industry has already invested heavily in research into a wide
range of health and safety issues, including bioaerosols and occupational
health. Last year, the European Union Landfill Directive was passed, obliging EU
member states to set tough new targets for the redirection of organic waste out
of landfill sites. We anticipate that composting will play a key role in
this.
Minced melodies
You describe a new system being tested in Japan for sampling music in record
shops by running the bar code on a CD case past a laser scanner
(26 February, p 11).
I am sure this is not a new system. While on holiday in France in August last
year, we stopped off in one of the large supermarkets whose CD section had just
such a setup. There were headphone stations every few feet with a shelf on which
the CD was placed to read the barcode. There were also volume controls and track
selectors. The system played maybe only 30 seconds of each track (which is
ample)鈥攑resumably to stop people spending all day in there.
Letter
How come, if dogs are so good at learning and maintaining the rules of human
social behaviour, my late fox terrier would make a beeline for any new leg
coming into the room and proceed to mate with it? He didn’t get that trick from
me.
Letter
Now that we have been told that dogs may have been our companions for as long
as 135 000 years, the question is not only how they have changed because of
us鈥攂ut also the reverse.
Our ancestral habit of sniffing one another must have stood in the way of
forming all those profitable alliances we now make with such ease. In our
warlike species, you sniff the wrong person, or the wrong person’s mate, and the
deal is off.
Perhaps nature, in pushing language and human organisation through, simply
disconnected our noses. This we could afford if we had dogs, whose noses we
could rely on when it came to hunting and cave security.
Civilised as we are, we treat body odour with the same kind of social
embarrassment as nakedness. The dogs that lent us their noses also lent us their
fur. Could it be that our ancestors had a twin hangup about fur and smelliness?
That language could not flower unless we rid ourselves of both, once we started
to form more complex groupings? That language, if it was primarily used to woo
the opposite sex, was not received kindly if uttered by someone you could smell
and whose own fur you could see?
Had we arrived on the threshold of speech with different hangups, we might
not have chosen dogs as our companions. We could have ended up olfactorily
enhanced and habitually starkers, and we might have enjoyed a mudbath with our
pigs.
Letter
I have now had to purchase my third copy of this week’s issue of New
杏吧原创, as my dogs have eaten the two earlier ones, completely
destroying the article on dogs evolving alongside humans. Do they know something
we don’t? Or is it just proof that the article is accurate?
Healthy breakfast
I note from Tom Addiscott’s article
(5 February, p 48) how nitrates in our
diet ultimately combat Salmonella. Is this why bacon and eggs are such a popular
combination?
Hollow truth
Do New 杏吧原创 writers not read New 杏吧原创? Your article implies that
the health of a tree can be judged by whether or not it is rotten inside
(4 March, p 9).
In a previous letter
(21 November 1998, p 63), I explained why this is not
true and that decay of the dead heartwood of trees has nothing to do with tree
health. The technology of detecting decay and hollows may be marvellous, but the
understanding of tree biology is certainly not.
Letter
It is true that recycling organic household waste could be bad for your
health if done incorrectly. But when composting is done properly, there should
be few, if any, of the problems suggested in your article.
When compost smells, it is simply an indication of excessive moisture. One
way to overcome this is to add something dry, such as sawdust.
There are many methods, systems and kits available for domestic composting
that produce satisfactory results without the potential health hazard.
Information in this area is readily available on the Net.