Modern alchemists' guide to image making
David Phillips in his review of Nina Hall’s book The New Chemistry
is right to lament the forlorn reputation of chemistry
(23/30 December 2000, p 77).
And, indeed, much of this has to do with the unfortunate association in the
layperson’s mind of chemicals with dangerous substances. It may take some effort
to convince the public that the word “chemical” also applies to naturally
occurring substances, whether beneficial or harmful, but Phillips’s “glimmers of
hope” may lead us to feel optimistic.
On the other hand, chemistry does seem to lack the charisma of a number of
other major sciences. Physics, dealing as it does with the most fundamental laws
of the Universe has its awe-inspiring mystery in quantum mechanics and the
fascination of cosmology. Biology is a subject much closer to home, dealing as
it does with the function of living things, ourselves included. The discovery of
DNA and investigations into the function of the brain have extended our natural
interest in this subject.
Even geology provides us with a fascinating insight into the history of our
planet, and indeed our own origins. But where is the intrinsic appeal of
chemistry? And why is it that chemistry is defined as a separate subject anyway?
After all, a physicist might claim that all chemistry is physics.
Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found in that physical
manifestation of all chemical compounds: the chemical bond. Maybe we can use it
to establish the uniqueness of chemistry and start to restore the tarnished
reputation of this subject so that it might gleam alongside its fellow
sciences.
What, no evidence?
Your editorial “Uranium-burgers”
(20 January, p 3)
hits the nail on the head.
I can still hear John Gummer when he was Britain’s minister of agriculture
saying “there is no evidence that…” This was in the 1980s when BSE struck. I
was astonished when today’s government began to spout the same reassurances
about depleted uranium (DU).
So I started thinking about why the BSE lesson has not been learned. If it
were the same firm facing depleted DU that faced BSE, I’m sure we would get a
precautionary approach and honest statements from ministers (for example, “there
is no evidence because it looks like no one has been asked to research the
precise effects of low-level inhalation or ingestion of tiny DU dust particles
and we’ll get onto it right away…”). But it’s a different firm now, and I
don’t mean a Labour government instead of a Conservative one. The firm that
mishandled BSE was the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The firm
handling DU is the Ministry of Defence, and the senior civil servants there will
not have had their fingers burnt, so they’re making the same mistakes when
advising ministers as their MAFF colleagues did.
Of course, scientists provide advice, and I suspect that one of the things
that allows this kind of poor thinking in government is that most senior civil
servants still have no science education to speak of.
Stealth missile
Why is George W. Bush proposing to squander billions of dollars of American
taxpayers’ money on “Son of Star Wars”
(20 January, p 14)?
Hasn’t anyone told
him that it would be useless against the most likely weapons delivery system to
be used by a rogue state: a shipping container on the back of a truck?
Pox warning
You report that “an engineered mouse virus leaves us one step away from the
ultimate bioweapon”
(13 January, p 4).
So putting the interleukin 4 (IL-4) gene
into mousepox virus produced a surprisingly virulent virus. Putting IL-4 into
human smallpox seems like overkill, as it is already one of the most contagious
and virulent viruses. Few people are likely to try this stunt because smallpox
is tricky stuff to handle and hard to find. The US and Russia now have the only
known stocks.
Not so its African cousin, monkeypox. As a terrorist tool, monkeypox has some
advantages over smallpox. It is available in the wild and from outbreaks in West
Africa. It is less contagious and therefore easier to handle. Until now most
public health officials have dismissed its worth as a bioweapon because its
virulence and person-to-person transmission rates are low compared with
smallpox. Perhaps a little genetic engineering could do for monkeypox what it
did for mousepox.
“We wanted to warn the general population that this potentially dangerous
technology is available,” said one of the creators of the IL-4 mousepox virus.
Well, it is and we’ve been warned.
Clever cogs
Robert Matthews asks whether human ingenuity
is about to be made redundant by computers
(20 January, p 26)
but implicitly provides the answer when he quotes
John Koza on James Dyson, “Just thinking that a radically new type of vacuum
cleaner design was even possible is a big creative leap.”
Assuming the “ideas machine” comes into existence within the next decade,
this doesn’t mean that human ingenuity will be superseded, but that it will be
harnessed to drive the new machines.
It does seem to suggest, however, that entrepreneurs working on designs in
their garages will be superseded by large multinationals, who would only employ
designers as machine operators.
Body lore
The article on the load-carrying ability of the Luo women and others was
fascinating
(13 January, p 38).
Another area which Norman Heglund and his colleagues might find interesting
to study is Taijiquan (T’ai Chi Ch’uan). T’ai chi exercises were
originally developed for self-defence, and include many interesting ways for the
body to store and re-release energy, although measuring these may be more
difficult than for walking and load-carrying.
Having studied T’ai chi for many years, it is quite clear to me how
inefficiently most people use their bodies. Although I now move quite
differently from the way I did when I started, my ideas about how the system
works are purely subjective. It would be nice to have a more objective basis for
understanding these techniques. Such an understanding might have benefits in
other areas, such as in designing walking robots.
I am willing to volunteer if anyone out there wants a guinea pig to
study.
Food cravings
In response to your news item “Acquired taste”
(6 January, p 13) on a woman’s
eating habits during pregnancy affecting her baby’s food preferences, could it
not also be possible for the cravings experienced by a woman during pregnancy to
be caused by her unborn baby?
Cravings and food choices during pregnancy are normally unusual鈥攖hey
are noticeably different from what the woman would eat when not
pregnant鈥攕o perhaps the fetus could affect its mother’s food choice.
I only suggest this because many of the foods I cannot tolerate, or have a
dislike for, such as coffee, are foods which my mother enjoyed before and after
her pregnancy with me, but could not tolerate during it. She could tolerate
these foods during subsequent pregnancies. Just a thought.
Swing man, swing
At last, a thoroughly enjoyable presentation of a difficult but fascinating
subject: swing
(“All that jazz”, 23/30 December 2000, p 48).
Superswing theory
has long suffered from want of good, readable expositions at a level accessible
to the non-specialist reader. Articles such as this one are therefore
particularly welcome.
I’m sure many of us look forward to more coverage of related topics. For
example, what happened to the All Stars immediately after the Big Band?
Wobbly ride
Your article on airships
(6 January, p 20) raised a doubt in my mind. You say
that the R101 airship had been lengthened and modified because the original
design was unstable, which I believe to be contrary to the facts. According to
J. E. Morpurgo’s biography of Barnes Wallis (Longman, 1972), R101 was lengthened
in 1929鈥攁nd modified in other ways鈥攕imply to increase its lift, with
unknown aerodynamic consequences. During the Hendon Air Display in June 1930 it
showed “…extraordinary and sinister behaviour…overcontrol, plummeting when
she should have dived gently, bucking . . . and pitching as much as 25 degrees
from the horizontal.” Compare this with the eyewitness report in your
article.
Mind the bends
I enjoyed your article on the bends
(13 January, p 9) but I must make one
correction. When divers breathe gas at depth it is dissolved in their blood. If
the ultrasound device measures gas in the blood, which seems reasonable, it will
not measure anything while the gas is in solution. However, as the divers ascend
the gas forms microbubbles. As the divers ascend further the bubbles get larger
until they have the potential to block small capillaries, depriving tissues
downstream of oxygen and killing them.
Presumably the device can warn divers when this unhappy situation is
approaching and they can stop their ascent, wait awhile (assuming that they
still have enough air left to breathe) and then continue ascending when the
bubbles have been filtered out by their lungs.
Meaning obscured
Psychologist Peter Wason’s paradoxical sentence “No head injury is too
trivial to ignore”
(25 November 2000, p 51, and
13 January, p 55) makes sense in
its “true” context鈥攁s a notice in nurses’ quarters in a teaching hospital,
telling them that no matter how trivial a head injury seems to be, they should
leave it to the surgeon.
Wason, my colleague at University College London, used to recast ministerial
agencies’ convoluted prose into readable English at their behest. He stopped
when he found out that his translations were used only to reassure civil
servants that their circulars were opaque enough to be incomprehensible to the
general public.
Correction
In our news story on the technology that could warn divers of the bends
(13 January, p 9),
the developer’s name should have been given as Robert
(not Ken) Forbes and the funding organisation is the Wellcome Trust, not
Britain’s Health and Safety Executive. Many apologies for these errors.