Darling, you've got beautiful genes
People have been born equal鈥攗ntil now. Microchips with the potential to
reveal people’s genetic frailties, like those described in your news item
(11 March, p 4)
will change that and have implications for society far more damaging
than discrimination by prospective employers or insurance companies.
Even prior to birth, children will be labelled according to their future
abilities and health, and they will be stuck with those labels for life. Love
will have even less to do with marriage, as partners will be busy cross-checking
profiles even before going on their first date. Angry teenagers will blame their
parents for the less-than-perfect profile they have inherited. Lawyers will be
suing parties who have falsified their profiles in official documents.
A new genetic caste system will be introduced to the Western world where
perhaps Caste A would represent the nearly perfect human (or at least one with
an imperfection that is beyond the detection of current technology), Caste B
would have minor imperfections, Caste C would be prone to dementia or cancer in
old age, Caste D would be prone to major health problems earlier in life and
Caste E would have congenital health defects.
With people categorised according to their genes, how could there be a
homogeneous mix in society ever again? This is an avenue of research that will
do more harm than good. Governments should control it now.
Futile war
Drug prohibition, a global policy based on pseudoscience and wishful
thinking, has an unbroken record of futility. Pursuing it has also become an
irresponsible bureaucratic goal, especially in the US.
Kurt Kleiner’s account of US attempts to deploy a “bioweapon” against the
coca bush
(11 March, p 5)
provides a good example. It suggests how careless
implementation of “anti-drug” policy can injure the environment. The fungus they
propose using has an incompletely known avidity for flora besides the coca
bush.
Kleiner’s carefully neutral article neglects another, equally important facet
of drug war futility. Even if the wildest dreams of government plant
pathologists were to be realised鈥攃oca precisely nudged into extinction
without damage to other plants鈥攖he most predictable result would simply be
a huge boost for the already robust black market in methamphetamine, cocaine’s
substitute of choice, which, when synthesised by criminals, is an environmental
nightmare in its own right.
Widen the tests
You report new developments in the debate over whether HIV was transmitted
from chimps to people during polio vaccination programmes in the late 1950s
(12 February, p 4).
I welcome the news that the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia is
proposing to test some of the CHAT polio samples in its freezers for host DNA
and for the presence of SIV/HIV鈥攁n offer originally made in 1992. But it
is surely vital that the process should be as comprehensive and fair as
possible.
I have written to the deputy director of the Wistar, Clayton Buck (a member
of the “Wistar expert committee”, reconvened to supervise the testing), to
suggest that a total of nine samples of polio vaccines and polio virus seed
stocks from the Wistar freezers should be tested. These include examples of five
“Koprowski strains”鈥擟HAT, SM, TN, P-712 and Fox.
Buck replied that between three and six vaccine samples only would be tested.
However, this information appears inconsistent with a letter sent me by the
Wistar director, Giovanni Rovera, in 1995, stating that the one sample of CHAT
that was “possibly directly relevant to the Congo trials” involved “polio virus
stock”, rather than the final vaccine.
Buck’s letter also revealed that the Wistar committee would not test the
three samples of CHAT vaccine, dating from February 1958, presently held at the
Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SIIDC) in Stockholm. In 1994
and 1995, SIIDC scientists tested these samples and found no SIV or HIV, but
concluded that further testing鈥攆or the mitochondrial DNA of host
species鈥攚as “not warranted”.
The latter decision was surprising, given that (as stressed by Bill Hamilton
in our original meeting with the Swedes, and in subsequent correspondence), it
is as important to know the primate species used to make CHAT as whether a
particular batch was SIV-contaminated.
Tragically, Hamilton died last month as a result of complications following
malaria contracted during an expedition to Kisangani in the rebel-held
Democratic Republic of Congo to collect faecal samples from local chimpanzees.
Effectively, this great biologist sacrificed his life for one basic scientific
principle鈥攖hat viable hypotheses (in this case that some of the CHAT
vaccine fed in Africa may have been contaminated with chimpanzee SIV, thus
sparking the AIDS pandemic) should be tested scientifically.
It would be a fitting tribute to his life, and to that principle, if the
Wistar, the SIIDC鈥攁nd the Rega Institute for Medical Research and Smith
Kline RIT in Belgium (where 75 per cent of the CHAT given to patients in Africa
was made)鈥攚ould now release their remaining vaccine samples for
independent analysis.
Cut in its prime
The campaign against climate modeller Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore
laboratory in California
(4 March, p 43)
reminds me of a similar happening two decades ago.
As officials in the field of environmental research at the US Department of
Energy, we were urged by scientists such as Roger Revelle, Bert Bolin, Syukuro
Manabe, Wallace Broecker, Stephen Schneider, Rudolf Engelmann and others to
initiate a research programme on global climate change. We dubbed it, rather
grandly, “A National Program on Carbon Dioxide, Environment and Society”.
The DoE provided financial support for the programme, which doubled in each
of the next two years. New research began almost immediately and the DoE was on
the way to becoming the focus for an integrated and comprehensive research
programme on everything from gaseous emissions to societal effects.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President and it quickly became evident
that the DoE’s enthusiasm for the programme was plummeting, despite its
uniformly excellent technical reviews. One morning in mid-1981 we were informed
that the programme was being “disestablished” (which it ultimately was not) and
that we were to be removed as its directors. The only reason given for these
actions was that we had “raised the issue (of anthropogenic climate change) to
too high a visibility”.
Currently, the federal government has raised the issue immeasurably higher by
assigning a budget for research and assessment in the global change arena of
some $1.8 billion. We can and do commiserate with Santer for the
short-term outcome of his integrity and steadfastness. He deserves our
congratulations and we are sure that he will be rewarded in time.
Letter
It is inaccurate and unfair to Frederick Seitz, a former head of the US
National Academy of Sciences, to dismiss his criticisms of Santer’s handling of
the UN climate report as the product of a self-interested “PR machine”. Seitz
raised legitimate concerns regarding editing of the draft report after it had
been approved.
What is most disturbing is the impression left in your article that those
raising questions about the UN report are just tools of industry. That
impression is one that serves to marginalise and silence critics. Neither
science nor public policy is advanced when debate is muffled.
And for the record, the Marshall Institute’s funding policy is open for all
to review on our website (www.marshall.org).
Mirror, mirror
The mirror test for self-awareness of animals鈥攚hich assumes that if
animals recognise themselves in a mirror they are self-aware鈥攔ears its
head yet again
(4 March, p 27).
Unfortunately, human bias means there are serious flaws in the usefulness of
this test. A better design would be to use the animal’s primary sense instead of
our own. Imagine a group of canine scientists inventing a device that reflects
scent and holding it up to humans to see if they recognise their own smell. I
seriously doubt that a single human would pass the test. The dogs would be
forced to conclude that we aren’t self-aware, no matter how cute our antics.
Visual tests for self-awareness have been applied throughout animal cognition
research. For instance, the results of the mirror test on dolphins have been
inconclusive, but I bet clearer results would have been obtained had mechanisms
for reflecting “sonar images” been used instead.
Useful depression
I’m not a woman and therefore am unlikely to have a baby, but when looking at
postnatal depression from an evolutionary psychology point of view
(26 February, p 50),
surely the reasoning goes like this:
Postnatal depression is an evolutionary adaptation to allow new mothers,
especially first-time ones, to concentrate on nurturing the infant while they
temporarily withdraw from society at large, with all its competing demands. Men
just see postnatal depression as a “woman’s problem”, and therefore (mainly
male) doctors try to treat it as such.
Infants raised by postnatally depressed women should therefore have a
stronger start in life. Contrary to the assertion ascribed to evolutionary
psychologists in the article, this would lead one to predict that older,
first-time mothers would be more likely to suffer from postnatal depression.
Studies show this to be the case.
Midas mistake
Feedback is very gracious to make Midas an honorary Greek
(26 February), but
the Phrygians would have boiled your writer in molten gold for such an insult.
They were of other stock, probably from central Europe.
Memories on Mars
The British idea for a low-cost mission to Mars
(19 February, p 38) is a good
small-scale project, but at the opposite end of the funding scale there is
science that can only be done with crewed missions.
The meteorite ALH 84001, found in the Antarctic, was ejected into space by a
large impact on Mars, but meteorites can also travel in the opposite
direction–so crewed missions to Mars may get information on the past history of
Earth and Venus as well. Meteorites that were ejected from Earth 4 billion years
ago and crashed on Mars would have been slowed down by the thicker ancient
atmosphere before impact. Large fragments of Earth’s ancient crust may have
reached the Martian surface intact.
Meteorites landing in the large permanent bodies of water believed to have
existed at the time would have become embedded in sediments and protected from
erosion once the water disappeared. On Earth, all crust from the period has been
subducted or eroded, so Mars is the only place where fragments of such crust can
be found.
Such samples will be valuable for understanding the development of the crust
on Earth, and also for determining when life originated, since the presence of a
biosphere will affect the ratio of some isotopes. For instance, it will be
possible to see if life originated once, or got started several times, only to
be interrupted by planet-sterilising impacts.
Similarly, pieces of Venus’s crust from the time before the planet became a
“runaway greenhouse” would have been ejected into space, and some would have hit
Mars. Venus’s crust has been resurfaced, and any trace of life has long since
been destroyed by the heat, so the only way to probe the planet’s early history
is to look for fragments on other worlds.
A human presence on Mars can thus give us invaluable information about the
crustal development, and the presence or absence of life on three different
planets during the time of the early Solar System.
Royal wit
Feedback mentions an “apocryphal” story about an eminent lecturer at the
British Association asking why a bowl of water was no heavier after a goldfish
was added to it
(18 March).
In the version I read (in a school history book long ago), it wasn’t the
British Association, it was the Royal Society. And it wasn’t an “eminent
lecturer”, it was the society’s founder, His Majesty King Charles II.
Correction
Our report on the physics of collapsing bubbles
(4 March, p 15)
failed to mention two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who played important roles in elucidating the processes involved. Sahraoui
Chaieb performed the delicate experiments which revealed the ripple pattern and
analysed the data, and L. Mahadevan led development of a comprehensive theory.
The lead author, Rava de Silveira, is a doctoral student who completed the
analysis and theoretical interpretation.
Also: In the story “Art of darkness”
(18 March, p 22) was the statement that
the speed of light in water is “220 million kilometres per second”. As several
readers have pointed out, that is several hundred times faster than light in a
vacuum. It should have been 220 million metres per second.