Trust is not enough
Your editorial chastises the US in general and the Bush administration in
particular for trusting nobody but itself
(12 May, p 3). You cite as evidence:
failing to demand an inspection of Iran under the Chemical Weapons Convention,
threatening to scrap the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in a gamble that
“will create more missiles”, and abandoning a protocol to verify a biological
weapons convention.
You state that these actions will make adversaries edgy and lead to a
spiralling arms race. You further state that it must be better for the world’s
governments to agree on limiting weapons, even if the means to verify haven’t
been developed, rather than for the US and its allies to carry a “big stick” to
keep everyone else in line. Why not forgo independent action and put our trust
in people, you seem to say. That should work, shouldn’t it?
But wait, on the very same page we read that there are at least two
genetically modified babies in the world in spite of the fact that scientists
(those paragons of virtue and integrity) insisted that they would not permit
such manipulation without a clear medical need and a full public debate.
What happened to trust? Oh, I see, these scientists work in the private
sector in the US and didn’t need approval from a government agency. That must
explain it.
Let’s take it from the top. If, as you say, an inspection of Iran should be
demanded, any of the allied nations could issue the demand. It would be nice to
see a little leadership from Europe, even if it did risk antagonising the
oil-exporting countries.
The ABM treaty, co-signed with a nation that no longer exists, does nothing
to address the threat that missile defence would tackle. The technology won’t
work? No technological challenge remains unmet for long. Prudent research should
certainly precede deployment, but burying one’s head in the sand on the basis of
biased inputs from scientists with an agenda leaves us all vulnerable.
And as for those scientists and their genetically modified babies, I’ll bet
those private companies have protocols which were violated by said scientists.
The problem isn’t who establishes and enforces the protocols, it’s that
protocols by definition are put in place assuming most people are honest and
that those who aren’t will be caught by verification.
The government versus private sector argument is a red herring. 杏吧原创s do
what they can get away with if it’s exciting science. The Nazi scientists had
government approval for their experiments, didn’t they?
Your virulent attacks on the Bush administration, which after all is still in
its first six months, demonstrates an anti-US bias and a “not invented here”
attitude which reflects poorly on a magazine supposedly dedicated to
science.
I fear that the years of Clinton/Blair have seduced you into a strong
prejudice for the smooth-talking politician with the politically correct
chatter, even though their chatter usually results in nothing positive in the
way of action.
Lunar tourism
As a theoretical design exercise untrammelled by rude economics, Hans-Jurgen
Rombaut’s lunar hotel is interesting, but it’s about as far from reality as you
can get, now and for evermore
(9 June, p 18).
Apart from anything else, how does he plan on getting 5 or 6 acres of glass on site?
The economics of lunar construction necessitate a minimum of imports, staff
and construction time. Your standard Moon habitat, whether hotel or warehouse,
will be much simpler than Rombaut’s.
Start with a relatively shallow hole, inflate a large plastic bag, pour a
skin of mooncrete over the top and cover that with enough moon rock to absorb
the cosmic rays. Deflate the bag and move on to the next module. Join the
modules with similarly constructed tunnels. Render the inside of each cavity
with mooncrete to make it airtight, and move in. The only view of Earth will be
on a monitor鈥攕till pretty impressive.
Furniture and privacy will be minimal. Forget the personal bathroom with
flush toilets鈥攖ry communal facilities with mechanical removal of waste
products to the aseptic exterior. This shouldn’t be a deterrent. On Earth,
people pay a premium to holiday in a grass hut on a tropical island with no
phones or shops.
Letter
Your article said of the lunar hotel: “Its two needle-like towers soar over
the rim of a deep canyon, and between them you’ll see Earth rising.”
From any point on the Moon’s Earth-facing hemisphere, the Earth is always in
(almost) the same position in the lunar sky. However, it does exhibit phases
corresponding to the Moon’s phases as seen from Earth.
Where it's due
I was a bit disappointed to see your editorial claim that that the inventor
of the flu drug, Relenza, is “Glaxo Wellcome”
(9 June, p 3).
I would have thought credit for the invention belongs to the hard-working and
brilliant scientists in Australia at Biota Holdings in Melbourne, the CSIRO, and
the Victorian College of Pharmacy in Parkville.
Glaxo SmithKline helped to fund research and now markets the product, but did
not invent it.
Colour control
Dave Reay asks if smart sensors could detect the nutrient status of plants by
monitoring changes in leaf colour, so avoiding the overapplication of
fertiliser, in particular nitrogen
(2 June, p 54).
Such technology has already been commercialised and is in use in modern
agriculture. The technology is most advanced in determining plants’ optimal
nitrogen requirement on arable farms. Both hand-held chlorophyll meters and
tractor-mounted sensors are in operation. The tractor sensors control the
quantity of nitrogen fertiliser applied as the machine travels across the
crop.
Colour effects have also been shown with phosphorus, potassium and fungal
disease in plants, as yet, not to a level that offers a consistent correlation.
Additional plant colour marker technologies are being investigated.
While precise nutrient application is a relatively simple task using
inorganic fertiliser on arable farms, the greater environmental (and economic)
benefits will be gained when this technology is applied on farms where the
nutrient source is organic, such as animal and human slurries or sludges.
No smokescreen
Matthew Reed is incorrect to suggest that sprinkling provocative keywords in
e-mails, phone calls and so on will confuse Echelon, global electronic
surveillance system
(9 June, p 51).
Although I can only praise him for trying to
suggest a way to avoid communications being spied upon, it would be within the
ability of most postgrad computer students to design an algorithm which filtered
out unusual grammar and syntax. Microsoft Word has been able to point out such
errors for years. It is easy to automatically route any “suspicious”
communications to a second filter for more sophisticated analysis, which would
reject smokescreens and spot genuinely interesting exchanges.
May I suggest that readers concerned about this issue visit the site of PGP
Security at www.pgp.com/products/freeware and install the latest version of its
encryption software. This makes e-mails about as secure as you can get, and
amazingly it’s free for non-commercial use.
Junk faxes
People in Britain suffering from junk faxes and phone calls
(Feedback, 16 June)
can contact the Facsimile Preference Service and Telephone Preference
Service (fps@dma.org.uk and tps@dma.org.uk). Both services are free.
After 28 days from the date of the services’ reply, you will be registered
and can then make formal complaints about cold-callers of both kinds. Companies
are required to check the register before using numbers, otherwise they’re in
danger of being fined 拢5000.
The mail address is 5th floor, Haymarket House, 1 Oxendon Street, London SW1Y
4EE, fax 020 7976 1886 for both services, or call 020 7766 4422
(www.fpsonline.org.uk).
Think twice
In his article on biotechnology and African agriculture, Andy Coghlan writes
that Oxfam “supports the use of GM technology developed in Africa for poor farmers”
(9 June, p 6).
I am writing to clarify Oxfam’s position.
Oxfam endorses the Five-Year Freeze campaign (as does Greenpeace, the other
organisation cited in your article), calling for an international moratorium on
the growing of genetically engineered crops for any commercial purpose, imports
of genetically engineered foods and farm crops, and the patenting of genetic
resources for food and farm crops.
This endorsement reflects Oxfam’s belief that governments should adopt the
precautionary principle by regulating GM technology development to prevent
potential adverse impacts on farmers, consumers and the environment, and that
current public policy is inadequate in this regard.
This is not to deny the potential that GM technology offers to increase the
crop yields of poor farmers, or that this opportunity should be researched.
But, currently, private investment is almost entirely directed at agriculture
by rich producers for rich markets. Oxfam believes there must be greater public
investment in improving the farming systems of poor farmers, including the
potential role GM technology might play in this.
Classy coats
Rebecca Wiseman has missed some subtleties in the status signals given by
work coats
(16 June, p 53).
Lab coats come (or came) in different colours, and some of them do (or did) come
in female shape.
White, high-status, male shape (though my science teacher Miss Perriman had a
waisted version): brown, artisan-status, male shape (for storemen, janitors, and
so on) and green, low-status, female shape (for cleaners and those performing
similar menial tasks).
When I needed a lab coat for my Open University studies, I wore the old green
cleaner’s version that I used for art at school. I liked the idea of subverting
the image of the low-status coat with high-status acid burns and reagent
stains.
Picking the nits
Feedback criticises Intel’s advert “The web never sleeps”, with its string of
numbers 60/60/24/7/365, by saying that 365 should be 52
(2 June).
All well and good. But what happens on the 365th day of the year when the 364
days of the 52 weeks have passed? Indeed, what happens in leap years?
Letter
If you really want to be nitpicking, then Intel should not replace 365 with
52, but drop the 7 and replace 365 with 365.2421875.
Correction
Our report on Japan’s decision to raise the voltage of its
electrical power grid equated 80 billion yen with 拢47 million
(2 June, p 6).
The figure should have been 拢470 million.
Fish and whales
To blame whales and the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on
commercial whaling for the 16-year decline in Japanese fish catches
(9 June, p17)
is to make a false correlation. In the complex food webs of the oceans,
predator-prey interactions are rarely simple and may be counterintuitive.
Killing whales to preserve fish stocks could well have unanticipated
consequences. We cannot ignore the fact that in the past, before industrial
fishing began, the oceans supported large populations of both fish and
whales.
Furthermore, Joji Morishita of Japan’s Fisheries Agency is confusing minke
whale populations when he says that opponents of whaling maintain that North
Pacific minkes eat only krill and squid. No one is suggesting that this
particular population does not eat some fish. What we are saying is that the
vast majority of the world’s minke whales, which live in the southern
hemisphere, eat krill and little else. Morishita should be well aware of this.
Japan’s “research” whalers in the Antarctic have opened the stomachs of over
5000 minke whales and found nothing but krill. The fish-eating minkes he refers
to amount to about 3 per cent of the world’s population (and even that figure is
uncertain, since the IWC’s scientists last year accepted that they don’t know
how big the Antarctic minke population is).
With many fisheries around the world collapsing and some marine mammal
populations starving, we should not be thinking of culling whales in the false
hope that we can manipulate the ocean’s ecosystems to produce more fish. We
should be reducing the stresses we place on these ecosystems, so allowing them
to recover from the damage we have already inflicted through thoughtless
overexploitation.
No worries?
In your editorial about how people tend to worry about the wrong things
(2 June, p 3),
you write: “They worry too much about the dangers of vaccinations…”.
Then I turn to page 12 and I read the headline “The tiny villains lurking in
vaccines”. The text is crawling with words like “nanobacteria”, “contaminated”
and best of all “…compares nanobacteria to prions”.
I can’t see where this irrational fear of vaccines could come from. Any
ideas?
Putting a spin on polluting particles
You have fallen for government spin in saying that a 5 per cent reduction
in particulate pollution could add “up to three days” to the average lifespan of
people in England and Wales
(12 May, p 17).
This statistic was given in the Department of Health’s press release of 3 May
(www.doh.gov.uk). The figure of three days’ increased lifespan is per unit
reduction in particulate levels (a 5 per cent reduction on current levels). But
the report on which this figure is based, by the Committee on the Medical
Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP), actually judged that an effect per unit
three times greater is “reasonably likely” and six times greater is credible,
though “less likely”.
Furthermore, specialists believe that the health-damaging fraction of
particulate pollution comes from high-temperature combustion in vehicles and by
industry, and known technology could reduce this by some 18 units (90 per cent
of the damaging fraction), not just one unit. Because of these factors, a
reasonable upper estimate for what is possible is over a hundred times longer
than your three days鈥攖hat is, almost an extra year added to every person’s
life.
These estimates were drawn up by a team under the Institute of Occupational
Medicine in Edinburgh, using the US Health Effects Institute study of 150
American cities. COMEAP considered an estimate of around 15 months, but thought
this implausibly large in the light of health and life expectancy improvements
since the smoggy 1960s.
The more conservative estimate suggests particulate pollution takes a year
off the average person’s life鈥攐r 10 years off the lives of the 10 per cent
or so of the population who are more susceptible. The numbers are frightening
and require urgent policy changes to combat urban pollution. No wonder the
government delayed publication of the report鈥擟OMEAP met in early February
and the final report, dated March, was issued on 3 May鈥攁nd spun the
publicity so as to lose the issue during the general election.