MS horribly wrong?
There must be realistic doubt about how many diseases we are dealing with under the label “multiple sclerosis” (16 November, p 12). Professor Hans Lassman of the University of Vienna suggests there are possibly four different MS subgroups and concludes: “Therapies must be tailored towards the needs of specific patient subgroups.”
Unless we sensibly identify MS subgroups based on tests that reflect this complexity, we are as likely to get it wrong in the future as in the past. I plead from my position as both an MS patient and a scientist: please do not flatten MS to a single model, and please stop using animal model experiments as an excuse for not investigating human MS subgroups.
Letter
I am long term victim of multiple sclerosis and used to be a biologist. Over the past 30 years I have had intravenous steroids, various interferons, glatiramer acetate and mitoxantone. None of these has made one whit of difference. In your article, Stephen Reingold asserts that the “dozens of publications and regulatory approvals worldwide attest to [the relative benefits of immunoregulatory agents]”.
Where are the MS sufferers who have been cured or, at least, stabilised? Why am I reminded of the way that scientists and manufactures embraced paracetamol (acetaminophen) as the safe alternative to aspirin when I see the various nostrums that are routinely delivered to MS patients?
Fire, fire
I was interested in your articles and correspondence on fire resistance of doors because I believe there is a problem with the British fire regulations for doors in ordinary houses (24 August, p 6, and 2 November, p 28).
Our house is a two-storey brick building, but we have converted the loft into an attic room. When we did this, regulations required us to fit springs to all the internal doors so they could not be left open, particularly at night. The theory is that if a fire starts in a room, the closed door will contain the fire for half an hour, allowing people to escape.
This is fine if there is an centralised alarm system with a detector in every room, but with only smoke detectors on the landings (as recommended for domestic premises) it is my view that the closed doors will only serve to give the fire half an hour to develop undetected before the smoke reaches the alarm and people try to evacuate.
Odd rot
Plant pathologist Benjamin Held wonders about the origin of the soft rot fungi attacking the Antarctic huts, since there is no native wood in the region (9 November, p 11). One obvious possibility is that the fungus came with the original wood at the time the hut was built.
At Antarctic temperatures, the growth rate of these fungi will be incredibly slow, but not necessarily zero. There would be a very strong selection pressure for cold-tolerance, and 100 years of such harsh environmental pressure could result in the appearance of a cold-adapted strain.
Letter
It is a misunderstanding that soft-rot fungi are only found where there is wood. The 1994 list of fungi and yeasts issued by the Fungal Biodiversity Centre (CBS) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, informs us that Lecythophora mutabilis has been isolated from river water, soil from Scotland and the Netherlands, lead acetate solution, and even humans. If the Lecythophora was not already in Antarctica, maybe Scott or Shackleton or later visitors brought it with them.
For the record
鈥� Heaven and Earth is published by Phaidon, and Douglas Mulhall is the author of Our Molecular Future, both in Christmas Books (16 November, p 42 and p 46)
鈥� The “Science Friction” cartoons on 23 November, p 56, and 7 December, p 56, were by Paul Davis
Cometary calamity
Eugenie Samuel’s otherwise excellent article on NASA’s Deep Impact mission says that the break-up of Comet Linear in 2000 “was unprecedented” (16 November, p 34).
In fact, there are several examples of comets splitting into two or more parts. Astronomers got quite a shock in January 1846 when Comet Biela 鈥� the third comet to be identified as having a regular orbit 鈥� was observed to have broken into two pieces. Both fragments were seen at the comet’s next return in 1852. After that, however, the Biela was never seen again.
In November 1872, and again in 1885 and 1892, astronomers saw very active meteor showers and related these to the Earth passing close to Biela’s orbit. Just as the Leonid meteors originate from Comet Tempel-Tuttle, the Andromedids, as they were called, were attributed to debris from Biela. Even today, meteor observers around the world keep a watch each November, but Andromedid activity has been very low indeed for many years.
Letter
鈥� It is encouraging that Douglas Dickie thinks the practice of undercorrection is dying out in Britain. However, as we pointed out in the story, myopia is reaching epidemic proportions in places such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, where the practice of undercorrection is very much the norm, with parents often demanding it.
Whorl of confusion
I was very interested in the influence a total eclipse can have on surface winds (30 November, p 17). But surely increasing the density of the air by chilling it will cause it to sink. This will be associated with a high-pressure region on the ground, which is an anticyclonic situation, rather than cyclonic as suggested. The air at the surface will spread outwards from the zone of high pressure, as the article says, but in the northern hemisphere, the Earth’s spin will force the air to rotate clockwise, not anticlockwise.
Anticlockwise airflow in the northern hemisphere is associated with cyclones, or areas of low pressure, but this flow only develops if the air is rising instead of sinking as in the eclipse situation.
Letter
Paul Ratcliffe’s descriptions if cyclones and anticyclones are correct, but neither directly explains the observations. Helm Clayton’s 1901 model of a “cold-cored cyclone” was deduced from surface observations of a central minimum in pressure, cold central air, and cyclonic rotation. Our 1999 measurements found a cold outflow and Clayton’s cyclone, but we also reported weak anticyclonic flow at the centre. After a century, we unfortunately still lack numerical simulations of the three-dimensional eclipse cyclone’s structure.
Letter
I read about the “eclipse wind” with great interest. My family and I were lucky enough to view the 1999 total eclipse from a beer garden in a lovely monastery near Augsburg in Germany. The sky was clear to start with and we could see the eclipse progressing well, but clouds were moving in and there was total cover by about 15 minutes before totality.
We expected to see nothing, and began to console ourselves in the way you might imagine in a beer garden. But just a few moments before totality, a hole appeared in the cloud cover around the Sun, and stayed there for the duration of the full eclipse, vanishing shortly afterwards. A little while after this hole appeared we felt a distinctly chilly downdraught.
I remember thinking at the time that this could have been what made the clouds above us vanish: as the moisture-laden air moved downwards, its temperature would have risen, allowing water droplets to evaporate and giving us a clear view. It was particularly interesting that the hole did not move along with the other clouds as one would normally expect, but stayed put in front of the Sun.
For eyes
Your article on undercorrection of short sight (23 November, p 6), together with the usual media distortions that followed, have probably caused a great deal of needless anxiety for parents of children with short sight. For at least 30 years the standard practice in Britain has been to prescribe glasses that give full correction for children with myopia.
Of far more significance is whether spectacles should be worn continuously in the early stages of myopia, or only for relatively long-distance tasks such as looking at the blackboard or television. There is very strong evidence that a substantial proportion of the myopia in modern society is caused, or at least exacerbated, by the greater amount of time spent in close-up visual activities such as reading, compared with pre-literate society. In susceptible individuals myopia may be an environmental adaptation. The obvious corollary is that the use of spectacles should be limited to distances beyond which the unaided eye is unable to focus.
O’Leary’s findings may be explained if children given weaker prescriptions find reading with glasses more comfortable than they would with a full correction. If so, the message is that in the early stages of myopia, children should be encouraged not to wear their glasses all the time.
Monkey business
I applaud the balanced and reasonable view you took on the issue of experimentation on monkeys (23 November, p 5). Decisions as to whether primate studies are acceptable or not need to be made without whitewashing any of the associated facts.
Andy Coghlan is correct in saying that inserting an electrode into the brain is not in itself a painful procedure. However, he omits to mention that the studies in which this technique is used nearly always require monkeys to be physically immobilised in a chair, with their heads restrained, for up to six hours a day. And sometimes they have to be deprived of food and water so that a sip of fruit juice can be used as a reward to induce the animal to perform certain tasks.
While it is clearly not possible to carry out every type of study on humans, the sad fact is that some research that could be carried out on humans is nevertheless still done on monkeys. Ironically, the justification is that because of the differences between human and monkey brains, new human data cannot be added to already available monkey data. Surely it is time to start building a database of relevant human data wherever possible, rather than adding to the database of less relevant monkey data.
Evolution in context
The proposition of more or less absolute determinism in the evolutionary process suggested by Simon Conway Morris is little short of preposterous (16 November, p 26).
It is, nevertheless, sadly typical of the polarised views on evolution propounded by high-profile scientists who should know better.
Yes, convergence is widespread in nature, but to equate this with the inevitable appearance of “a humanoid creature” is simplistic and fatally anthropocentric. Besides, how “humanoid” are the giant wasps whose ascendancy Morris imagines? The main point of the piece seems to be to discredit the line taken by Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is entirely “contingent”.
Rerunning the tape of evolution would only give the same outcome if all other things 鈥� that is, the contingencies imposed by the environment 鈥� were equal. So it is contingent, as Gould held 鈥� but only if the environment is different. Alternatively, rerunning the tape will be largely deterministic, as Morris argues, only if all environmental events are identical. As ever, the truth most probably lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Intelligence would likely arise in a rerun, given its survival value, but whether it would bear more than a passing resemblance to our own is questionable.