Double standards on animal testing
Your recent editorial on the rights and wrongs of animal testing
(27 January, p 3)
was highly relevant, for both sides of the Atlantic. Public
awareness of official inaction is increasing in the US. The Environmental
Protection Agency continues to condemn hundreds of thousands of animals to
painful death by promoting massive animal-testing programmes that do nothing to
protect human health or the environment. It sets rigorous standards of
scientific validation for non-animal tests, but uses animal tests that have
never been validated, such as the developmental neurotoxicity test that kills
2000 animals each time. The EPA spends virtually none of its $500 million
annual research and development budget on tests that don’t involve
animals.
The EPA remains an obstacle in the international arena to the promotion and
adoption of faster, cheaper, more predictive test methods that do not require
animals to be killed. The fact that countless animals suffer because of
bureaucratic ineptitude, complacency and disinterest will continue to fuel the
anger and frustration of people who advocate the rights of animals worldwide.
Out with the old
Feedback reports light-heartedly that people may soon live for 130 or even 150 years
(27 January).
Have the scientists who are engaged on anti-ageing
research given any thought to the social, economic and environmental
consequences if their work is successful? I find it far more frightening than
genetically modified food or even cloning.
Frontier spirit
Nick Deane
(27 January, p 51)
is very negative about space colonisation, and
believes it will only be done to benefit us here on Earth. Yes, emigration to
other planets or into space cannot possibly solve the burgeoning problem of
overpopulation and it would take colossal numbers of space launches just to keep
up. But if, and I hope when, space is colonised, the small number of pioneers
will create their own colonies, which will exist for their own benefit and only
incidentally for ours, trading goods more easily produced in vacuum or zero
gravity for example.
Solving our living space or resources problems are separate issues from
colonisation. We need frontiers, not as a source of virgin territory to despoil,
but for the intellectual and physical challenges they represent.
Letter
Although our technology won’t permit large-scale migration into space for
quite some time, this is not an argument against exploration. We have never
turned aside from challenges and adventures鈥攊t would be a sorrier world if
we did. To those who say we should not expand into space before resolving all
the problems on Earth, I would say where there are humans, there will always be
problems.
A frontier serves many purposes鈥攊t enriches us materially, culturally
and spiritually. It makes us think on a scale beyond our own backyard, and keeps
our sense of wonder at the Universe alive. Let’s go!
Letter
I congratulate Nick Deane on his excellent letter. Space colonisation is,
indeed for now, a triumph of hope over reality. Many of us have seen how glossy
space movies make the whole thing look easy, rather than unbelievably difficult.
Only if science can save our little planet will we be able to boldly go any
further.
Stand your ground
Patrick Bateson was correct to highlight the dangers of scientists being
influenced by the self interests of funding bodies
(6 January, p 38),
especially when this concerns public debate or even government policy. While such dangers
cannot be ignored, we can only hope our system of peer review will prevent such
a study being published.
In his article, Bateson defends his report commissioned by the National Trust
on the effects of hunting deer with dogs. Subsequently, stag hunting on National
Trust land was banned. When the report was released, exercise physiologists and
veterinary pathologists criticised the supervision of the study in the field,
the inadequacy of the measurements for the “conclusions” drawn and the exercise
model used to explain the findings.
As a result, the Countryside Alliance commissioned a second Joint
Universities study involving a biochemist, pathologist, veterinarian and
physiologist from the universities of London, Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle
respectively. The results of this study were not released to either the sponsors
or the public until after anonymous peer review. The second study aimed to
repeat and expand only the physiological aspects of the first and to examine the
fate of escaped deer. However, the final aim was abandoned because the Home
Office refused to grant the required licence, despite speculation that tissue
damage could have been life threatening to escaped deer.
Where similar measurements were made, the new data agreed numerically with
that presented in the first report to the National Trust. However, when an
exercise model derived from established principles was applied, the
interpretation was different. Following a review by the principal authors of
both studies, Bateson and Roger Harris, the model presented in this second study
formed the basis of their submission to the committee of inquiry into hunting
with dogs, questioning the relevance today of the initial report to the National
Trust.
As this case highlights, scientific contributions to public debate must be
backed by solid data, carefully interpreted.
Angelic order
While looking through some obscure websites the other day, I came upon one
concerned with the functions of angels in religious traditions. Two quotations
leapt out at me:
“Angels are what are called the laws of nature” (John Henry Newman);
“Whatever is happening in the physical system does not take place without the
mediation of Angels” (Mirza Ghulam Ahmad).
On delving a bit deeper, it seems that angels are believed to be God’s
messengers and intermediaries, running the material world in every detail.
All of this reminded me of the family of subatomic particles called bosons.
The bosons are the particles passed between the hadrons and the leptons, thereby
“causing” the forces of electromagnetism (the photon), gravity (the graviton)
and the strong nuclear force (the gluon).
So, in the spirit of reconciliation between science and religion, I propose
to rename the bosons as follows:
Old name – New name
Boson – Angel
Photon – Cherub (guardians of light and of the stars)
Graviton – Seraph (regulators of the movement of the heavens)
Gluon – Archangel
I leave it to others to suggest new designations for the W and Z angels,
bearing in mind that the Higgs boson has already been dubbed the “God
particle”.
Cloning controversy
C. Wells
(20 January, p 50)
suggests that MPs were not aware that blood stem
cells are available from placentas and umbilical cords after birth when they
voted to allow the use of embryonic stem cells for research. I would like to
reassure your readers that this was not the case. Indeed, some of us read your news item
(19 August 2000, p 16)
which reported that Angelo Vescovi and Margaret
Goodell, who had carried out separate research demonstrating that differentiated
cells can be reprogrammed, supported research on embryonic stem cells.
杏吧原创s need this research so that they can learn how to apply the same
techniques with stem cells from adult tissue and cord blood.
Cod's last gasp
Regarding your news article “Cod’s last gasp”
(27 January, p 16),
while the demise of North Sea cod is a major worry, I must quibble with your south of
England bias.
I was brought up in Yorkshire, the home of “fish and chips”, and if you go
into a chip shop there and just ask for “fish” you will find that you get
haddock not cod. The same is true now that I have moved to Scotland. It is only
the people in southern England who prefer to eat that pale bland fish called
cod.
Robosex
The patent for remote-control robotic sex
(20 January, p 7)
will come as no surprise for readers of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Peace On Earth.
Lem, who predicted nanotechnology and virtual reality as early as 1963, also
anticipated another application for full-sized remote control
mannequins鈥攁s a proxy for criminals committing robbery.
When the police backtracked the signals to the remote control, they would
find a second, abandoned mannequin at the controls for the first one. For more
information, see the official Lem website at www.lem.pl.
Another side to it
Ben Sewell in his search for 1-sided paper in a stationery shop
(Feedback, 6 January)
didn’t even need to turn his paper into a M枚bius strip as Lee Angus suggests
(27 January, p 53).
Since a piece of paper is made of atoms it
also has depth and is in fact a cuboid, which is topologically equivalent to a
solid sphere and thus only has one side anyway. So it is the 2-sided paper that
the stationer is selling that is indeed remarkable.
Off the rails
Richard Turtle asks for suggestions as to how he might while away a long
space flight running his model railway
(27 January, p 52).
Surely he has not
overlooked the possibilities of magnetism or centrifugal force, though I imagine
spinning the spacecraft just to keep him happy might be considered a bit over
the top.
However, it’s not as simple as it looks. Scale model enthusiasts suffer from
the fact that wheel flanges change in dimension linearly with scale whereas mass
is a cube function, so that there is insufficient mass to ensure satisfactory
performance. Keeping the train on the tracks in space would be much harder,
given the constraints in generating pseudo-mass.
One could perhaps lay the track as an endless figure-of-eight helix against
the walls of the craft but this would work only so long as the train was in
motion, besides no doubt raising objections from philistine engineers over other
aspects of the craft’s performance.
Has Turtle considered the possibility of going in for tube trains? The layout
could be in clear plastic tubing, and the addition of a simple roller
spring-loaded against the tunnel roof would provide the necessary adhesion with
only minor loss of authenticity.
My preferred solution would be to have the trains performing on Earth while
connected in some way direct into the enthusiast’s brain, giving full sensations
of sight, sound, touch and even smell. This way, Turtle’s fellow astronauts
would be spared the annoyance of living with an anorak while providing him with
the comfort of his favoured hobby.