Cold comfort
Patrick Wise asked in the 19 May issue how he could know whether the light in
his fridge goes out when he shuts the door. Your correspondents give admirably
rigorous suggestions using proper scientific method
(16 June, p 55), but here’s
a simpler one.
The easiest way to find out is surely to climb inside the fridge and shut the
door鈥攆ridges no longer have latches on their doors, for obvious reasons
not unconnected with the subject.
In fact, a number of us tried this experiment a few years ago at university.
The only equipment we needed was one diminutive maths student and some
beer鈥攁fter, all you’d hardly do it if you were sober. The trickiest part
was taking the shelves out first so that he could fit inside.
And yes, we did determine that the light went out.
Don’t forget that people have died trapped inside fridges, so we strongly
urge readers not to repeat this experiment under any circumstances鈥擡d
Depressed cats
Your article on depression and the immune system
(16 June, p 34) reminded me
that when I was a practising vet, we used to use betamethasone or similar
anti-inflammatories to treat elderly cats that had gone off their food and
become apathetic, symptoms which I suppose might indicate something similar to
human depression.
According to the owners, the drugs restored the cats’ appetites and they
almost always became brighter and more lively. Perhaps this is a veterinary
version of an antidepressant anti-inflammatory.
Virtual humans must have feelings
Leaving the brain out of the virtual human makes as much sense as leaving
out the liver or the heart
(16 June, p 26).
Researchers who ignore the role of
the central nervous system will find out to their cost that their predictions
are inaccurate. Pharmacologists learned this lesson many years ago when they
discovered that animals without their brains react differently to drugs.
In addition, the response of a virtual human to a new drug will be unreliable
if it is not programmed to experience fear, anxiety and pain. So the virtual
human must have a brain as well as a body if scientists and regulatory agencies
are to take its responses seriously.
Of course, this raises an interesting new ethical question: is it wrong to
inflict virtual pain on a virtual human if it virtually feels it?
The Five Percenters
Jennian Geddes’s study on shaken baby syndrome (16 June, p 4) is an important breakthrough for families wrongly accused of shaking, whom our organisation represents.
Imaging techniques and clinical investigations cannot distinguish with certainty between accidental and inflicted injury. And deciding on the cause of death is even more difficult when, as sometimes happens, a parent admits shaking their baby in an attempt to revive it.
We call ourselves The Five Percenters because some doctors say that shaken baby syndrome is the correct diagnosis in 95 per cent of cases, but not in the other 5 per cent.
Our organisation gives information and advice to families who say they have been wrongly accused of shaken baby syndrome. We have collected data on 115 families in Britain and 43 in the US, and work with legal teams and other health professionals involved in investigations of alleged SBS.
We have also been contacted by doctors who say they have been pressured into diagnosing SBS when they felt that the cause was something else. We are now looking for funding to collate our data and help change the way SBS is diagnosed.
During our research we have found several other possible causes of the injuries commonly associated with SBS. These include non-malicious shaking, undiagnosed birth trauma, infection, accident, bone, blood and metabolic disorders, cot death and undiagnosed vaccine damage.
Shaken baby syndrome remains a poorly researched condition that embraces a range of symptoms, and the interpretation of those symptoms sets parents against doctors with appalling consequences for all concerned.
Safer bonnets
The idea of modifying car bonnets to minimise the risk of injury to
pedestrians in accidents is excellent
(23 June, p 23).
I hope that the European
Union’s rules on safer car design will cover the “off-road” vehicles that are
shaped more like battering rams than cars.
Even more urgent is the need to ban the vehicles that still have bars on the
front.
Doubts about dabs
Simon Cole describes fingerprint practitioners as his “implacable enemies”
(16 June, p 42).
His animosity is obviously provocative to people who, like me,
have devoted a lifetime to the subject. Condescending allegations, accusations
of widespread incompetence, and a general insinuation that fingerprint experts
claim infallibility to hide a bumbling lack of understanding, are hardly
constructive.
Cole says nothing new by asserting that fingerprint identification is
vulnerable in theory. This has been recognised for a hundred years. No one can
have seen or compared every fingerprint in the world. Nevertheless, in those
hundred years, the system has proved to be an effective practical tool when
administered by specialists who operate a scrupulous system of checks and guard
their impartiality.
One of Cole’s salient point needs rebuttal. In common with other fingerprint
experts in this country, I have never testified in terms of the “infallible
absolutes” which Cole refers to. My evidence has always been phrased as an
opinion based on personal experience鈥攅xperience of making many comparisons
and never seeing prints from different fingers that have ridge-characteristic
sequences in full agreement.
Although methods of fingerprint analysis have changed over the
century鈥攆rom eyeballing to computers that compare thousands of prints per
second鈥攂y its nature we will never be able to say we have an infallible
system. But until someone finds the same ridge configuration on the fingers of
two different people, we will continue to be able to say that we have an
effective practical system.
Letter
Whether Operation Blowdown involved an actual or simulated nuclear
detonation, it was obviously part of the development of a tactical nuclear
weapon for potential use in the tropical rainforests of Vietnam鈥攈ad
General Lucius Clay had his way and been permitted to “bomb the Vietcong back to
the Stone Age”.
Just TNT
You ask if a mystery explosion in Queensland in 1963 was a nuclear test
(16 June, p 6).
You should believe Britain’s Ministry of Defence when they say the bomb used
only TNT. My colleagues at the Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving
Ground, Maryland, were members of the American team that participated in
Operation Blowdown. The explosive was indeed 50 tonnes of TNT, fired to simulate
a nuclear explosion on a much smaller scale.
I was sorry to read that Marie Strain’s father died from multiple cancers,
and that she blames his death on Blowdown. Living conditions at the test site
were primitive. There may have been snakes, bugs, unpleasant plants and other
hazards of the rainforest, but there was no nuclear explosion.
Using the photograph of a megaton-range nuclear explosion to accompany the
story is wildly inappropriate. The 50-tonne TNT charge produced a blast wave
similar to that of a 0.05-kiloton nuclear device.