For the record
鈥� The news review on stem cells (21/28 December 2002, p 21) stated that “Two experiments this year also proved that therapeutic cloning can work”, and described embryonic stem cells as being used in both studies. In fact, only one of the two experiments involved ESCs. The other used cells from cloned cow fetuses six or eight weeks old.
鈥� In the news story “Has this chimp taught himself to speak?” (4 January 2002, p 12) we omitted to mention that further information can be found in the International Journal of Primatology (vol 24, p 1). The three authors are Jared Taglialatela, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Lauren Baker.
鈥� In “Piste Lightning” (21/28 December 2002, p 42) the figure quoted for the power required to de-ice power lines should have been 50 watts per metre, not per 100 kilometres.
鈥� The aerial image on page 9 of the 21/28 December 2002 issue was not of Washington DC, as the caption suggested, but of Des Moines, Iowa BNl The news review on stem cells (21/28 December 2002, p 21)
Monkey sense
I much enjoyed Gail Vines’s Christmas story of the great John Corner and his use of monkeys to gather inaccessible flowers in the Singapore forests for taxonomic study (21/28 December 2002, p 72). As a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1970s, I had the good fortune to hear Corner lecture to the Natural History Society on his collecting techniques, and one of the stories he told should be better known.
Travelling with mule and monkey on a narrow path in the uplands, he spied a new and unrecognised flower on a liana hanging from the path, down a near-vertical cliff face too steep for him to climb down. So he instructed the monkey to descend and collect the flower. But the monkey just looked at him questioningly with its head on one side.
Go down! repeated the eminent botanist. At which the monkey gave an eloquent shrug, took hold of the liana and pulled it up hand over hand to collect the flower. No human being, said Corner, had ever, before or since, made him feel so much of a fool.
Letter
The approach outlined by Watts, which tackles perhaps the biggest threat to us that exists, seems to have much going for it. However, the article fails to mention any consideration of the effects of such an approach on benevolent bacteria. Among these, I suppose, we should include those bacteria that seem neutral but whose possible beneficial effects we have yet to discover.
Aral madness
Caroline Williams’s article on the Aral Sea missed out one of its possible fates back in the 1980s 鈥� a bad idea that got quite a long way (4 January, p 34). This was to reverse the flow of one or more of the great north-flowing rivers, using nuclear explosions to blast new channels for them. The effects on the Kara Sea, and therefore on the Arctic Ocean, which is where a lot of our weather is made, could have been disastrous.
The idea was to allow the overuse of water for irrigation in the southern republics to continue. Williams is right about the bad construction of the canals, which are neither lined nor covered, and the water lost from them amounted to just about what they hoped to get from the reversed rivers.
Even now, odd things are still happening to the much larger Caspian Sea.
Early hostilities
After reading the fascinating article by Geoff Watts on quorum sensing bacteria (4 January, p 30), I found myself wondering if the opposite process might not be a useful tool.
The article points out that bacteria use quorum sensing to determine when there are enough of them to launch an effective attack on their host. Would it not then be useful to use the quorum indicator chemicals to deliberately trick bacteria into entering their virulent stage while there are still too few of them to overwhelm the body’s defences? An early trigger could be what the body needs to get antibodies going while the toxic effects of the pathogen are still survivable.
Applying the trigger while the patient is in a hospital, or otherwise well looked after, would ensure support facilities were available to deal with the symptoms. This strategy could be useful, for example, for triggering premature attack by Staphylococcus aureus in all patients on a hospital ward as soon as a case has occurred naturally in one of them.
The only problem is that I can’t see people being very comfortable when told “We’re just going to give you this injection to make your bacteria more hostile.”
Sailing blind
I find nothing surprising in either the sinking of the Tricolor or in the two subsequent collisions with the wreck (11 January, p 7).
In the 1950s I owned a 10-tonne sailer and was an avid reader of the yachting press. There were several stories of yacht owners who had been scared out of their wits during night-time cross-channel passages as ferries bore down on them. These vessels were seemingly blind, and failed to respond to bright electric navigation lights, Aldis lamps trained on their bridge, bells or klaxon fog-warning devices.
It was said that many skippers of these vessels believed that the newfangled radar was all the lookout they needed; yet some of the yachts carried radar reflectors and still were not seen. I was acquainted with one highly responsible owner of a converted lifeboat that disappeared without trace while on charter in circumstances where bad weather could not have been to blame.
I have every reason to suppose that officers of many large ships still fail to maintain a proper watch. I have personally encountered a liner on a collision course. When I trained a signal lamp on its bridge, and then switched it to my sails, it instantly altered course to port and manoeuvred well clear of us. Collisions are easily avoided. But on another occasion we might not have been so fortunate.
Velcro myth
“What happens up there [in space] could one day become commonplace down here too 鈥� just look what happened to Velcro” (21/28 December 2002, p 60).
This perpetuates the myth that the one good thing NASA achieved was Velcro. Velcro was invented in Switzerland in the 1940s, as related in the Web page of Velcro USA Inc. at . The name is derived from the French words for velvet and hook.
Does this leave NASA with nothing to its credit here on Earth?
"Eco-fur" won't work
There is a serious flaw in the logic of “eco-fur” from pest species (14 December 2002, p 13, and 11 January 2003, p 23). If a “fur-trapping industry” were allowed to become established, then it would be in the interests of this industry to ensure that a continuous supply of possums be maintained in New Zealand 鈥� and likewise, foxes in Australia. Any hope of eliminating or seriously reducing any species by encouraging its exploitation is doomed to failure.
Here in Britain it is obvious that fox-hunters would be unable to continue their pursuit if foxes became rare or extinct. One wonders, therefore, to what lengths they would be prepared to go to maintain a viable population of foxes to hunt.
Letter
I have lived through schemes where brown rats, grey squirrels and rabbits have all been subject to a government bounty on their tails, with no appreciable reduction in their numbers.
I also recall the last “fox fur frenzy” which swept through Wales in the 1970s. The result, predictably enough, was for many rural communities to see the red fox as a useful supplement to the local economy and for farmers to “husband” their foxes to ensure a ready supply of pelts for sale. I know of no evidence that any mammal classed as a pest has ever been eradicated by such means.
My own experience of trying to eradicate rats from a seabird island shows that it takes investment in professionals with vision and experience, prepared to ruthlessly engage the enemy with “maximum prejudice”, to tackle these unglamorous and time-consuming problems. Neither the vagaries of the fashion industry nor misguided rural economics can be relied upon.
Gene flow matters
David Concar says that “green groups in Britain have succeeded in making the question of gene flow symbolic of the whole notion of consumers and organic growers being forced to accept a technology that they do not trust” (14 December 2002, p 27).
Recent research shows that green groups have tended to reflect public concerns about GMOs, rather than create them. Nor is what the organic sector in Britain is or is not prepared to accept particularly relevant. In the European Union, organic food and farming is defined by EU regulation 2092/91. Article 6.1 (d) of the regulation states that for a product to be described as organic in the EU, “genetically modified organisms and/or any product derived from such organisms must not be used, with the exception of veterinary medicinal products”.
No thresholds for accidental contamination by GMOs, nor any other exceptions, are permitted in European law. So for the organic food sector, gene flow is a far more crucial issue than Concar realises.
The blame for Bhopal
William Krohley, one of the attorneys for Union Carbide, claims in the letter you published in the 11 January issue (p 22) that the recently released company documents referred to in the article on the Bhopal disaster (7 December 2002, p 6) have actually been in the hands of the Indian government for years. Yet in November 2002, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, which is prosecuting the ongoing criminal case in India, confirmed that it had never before had possession of these documents. The evidence couldn’t be fresher.
Krohley also states: “there is no evidence to support the claim that UC had authority or control over the plant’s ultimate design or operations and thus bears responsibility for the disaster”. But the documents make it clear that, under the 1973 design transfer agreement, all technology inputs for the key production units at the Bhopal plant came from UC. These units were operational until the time of the disaster, and not decommissioned beforehand.
The remarks Krohley quotes from the US Court of Appeals were only initial impressions which the court stated ought not be taken to prejudge the question of liability. No US court has ever rejected the assertions made by Bhopal survivors on their merits, only on procedural grounds.
Carbide’s own 1985 study found the pressure valve on the methyl isocyanate (MIC) tank that caused the disaster was leaking. The extra pipe that let water into the tank was authorised in May 1983 by UC in line with the design review process outlined in the documents. The only investigation to conclude that sabotage was to blame was sponsored by Carbide. The independent Council of Scientific and Industrial Research found a mesh of causes, such as an excess of MIC (80 times European Union limits), incautious design, poor materials, faulty alarms, and inadequate system controls and safety back-up.
Lastly, the Bhopal plant was rated superior to Carbide’s factory in Institute, West Virginia, only because the American plant disposed of waste into a river and not into solar evaporation ponds. However, this assessment ignored the danger of subsurface water pollution, which has poisoned Bhopal’s supplies.
The documents highlight Carbide’s control of its subsidiary as well as its role in causing the disaster. They contradict the “facts as expressed by Union Carbide” and provide the “probable cause standard” of evidence required to extradite Carbide officials in the unresolved criminal case.
The editor writes:
鈥� The original article referred “a 1972 memo” that discussed how investment in the Bhopal plant would have to be reduced for Union Carbide to retain control of its Union Carbide India subsidiary. In fact, the memo was dated 2 December 1973.