No conflict
In your article about the conflicts of interest that are being created by the growing commercialisation of academic science, Sheldon Krimsky cites me as arguing that in the modern university “disinterestedness” is “no longer viable or necessary to protect scientific objectivity” (30 August, p 21).
In fact, I entirely agree with Krimsky that scientists must not dismiss the idea that financial and funding ties can distort their work. Indeed, this is exactly what I have been saying in lectures, books and articles for nearly 10 years.
Krimsky’s reading of my views appears to be based on the following sentence from my most recent work, Real Science: What it is and what it means (Cambridge, 2000): “The production of objective knowledge thus depends less on genuine personal ‘disinterestedness’ than on the effective operation of other norms, especially the norms of communalism, universalism and scepticism. So long as post-academic science abides by these norms its long-term objectivity is not in serious doubt.”
This sentence refers to the supposed philosophical objectivity of scientific knowledge. I do not believe this has much changed in the transition to “post-academic” science. As I explain in my book, the conventional notion that it is entirely independent of human thought and action is epistemological codswallop.
Throughout the book, however, I make it clear that the decline of disinterestedness in science gravely compromises its social objectivity 鈥� its hard-won reputation for a reasonable degree of impartiality, political neutrality and fairness. That’s the key point. That’s what Krimsky and I are trumpeting to New 杏吧原创 readers, the scientific community and all others who care about science.
Possessed by demons?
In her article on “fractured minds”, Rita Carter acknowledges briefly that “some psychiatrists consider the symptoms of the weirder dissociative states to be fictitious”, but she quickly dismisses such concerns, citing “recent evidence from brain scanning studies” to prove the reality of multiple personality disorder (13 September, p 36).
But the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study she cites is certainly not proof of the existence of MPD. Rather, it was a study of one 47-year-old woman whose brain pattern changed when she allegedly “switched” personalities. The finding is neither surprising nor enlightening. An actor asked to switch into character would be likely to exhibit nonspecific changes, too.
What Carter did not explain in her article was that MPD is almost always diagnosed by a small cadre of American mental health practitioners who believe that they can “spot” MPD and then proceed to cue their patients to believe in it, often through hypnosis.
It is possible that MPD is a real but extremely rare phenomenon, but that is doubtful, since prolonged trauma usually produces not amnesia but all-too-clear intrusive memories. Rather, MPD is the modern equivalent of the ancient belief in demonic possession. It is an artefact of a cultural belief system, usually produced by a folie 脿 deux between a credulous therapist and a disturbed, attention-seeking client.
But there are also plenty of people with purely self-diagnosed MPD, who have read books and educated themselves on this fictitious disorder, so beloved of novelists, screenwriters, sensation-seeking media, and lawyers defending murderers and rapists who say that they didn’t do it 鈥� it was their alter.
Slippery roads
My father taught me to drive in the late 1930s, and his warning of potential dangers included the consequences of rain on roads that had been dry for ages (13 September, p 9). I warned my own children about the same thing. Surely I cannot be alone?
The written part of the driving test in the UK should include this topic, and the penalty for not knowing should be failure. It’s a pity that “knowing” doesn’t necessarily result in drivers taking it seriously.
Letter
Daniel Eisenberg has stumbled across something that has been well known to motorcyclists in the UK for many years. According to the police training manual Motorcycle Roadcraft: “Few appreciate that a shower of rain after a long dry period can produce conditions where skidding may occur because the accumulation of rubber, dust and oil, together with water, creates a very slippery surface.”
Letter
Here in southern California, where it is sometimes six or seven months between rainstorms, freeway traffic often speeds up during said downpours. As a recent arrival I was puzzled by this behaviour, so I asked a long-time resident about the practice. The answer: rain-wary Californians think it’s dangerous driving in the rain, so they hurry home to get off the roads.
For the record
鈥� Our “In brief” item on Golgi bodies (23 August, p 22) referred to the “gut bacterium Giardi intestinalis”. In fact, it is spelled Giardia and the parasite is a single-celled eukaryote, not a bacterium.
鈥� In our feature “Written in the stars” (28 June, p 36) we incorrectly stated that the spectrum of star HE 0107-5240 was measured using the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Springs, New South Wales. It was actually studied with the smaller 2.3-metre telescope.
鈥� In “Global warming: the new battle” (13 September, p 6), we wrongly referred to Ilan Kelman as a researcher on the study led by Edmund Penning-Rowsell. Kelman is in fact part of a separate team, although his own flood work, downloadable from , supports the approach and results mentioned by Penning-Rowsell.
Happy to pay
Jonathan Wignall, chairman of the UK’s Data and Network Security Council, rubbishes the idea of paying a tiny amount per email in order to stop email worms from spreading, saying: “There is no way you would get people to start paying for something they are accustomed to having for free” (6 September, p 7).
However, we all already pay for email, because we pay for the lines, the servers and the time we have to spend looking at junk. Stopping spammers, and mail-out worms like SoBig, from generating email would not make the email and the internet more expensive, but much cheaper, by freeing the data lines and the servers from 95 per cent of junk email. The few cents “added” to your bill would be far outweighed by the huge positive effects.
A microscopic charge, even if it is only a hundredth of a cent, just hurts spammers, not ordinary users. I would bet that most people would be prepared to pay this for a junk and virus-free email service.
Physical infinity
I am always bemused when the concept of infinity is used in conjunction with the physical world (6 September, p 26). I can accept the mathematical convention of infinity and the convenient fiction of infinity in focusing a camera on subjects beyond a certain distance. But on reading in your article on black holes that an “event horizon鈥� concentrates an infinite amount of energy into a finite volume”, I must surely conclude that the black hole and its predecessors had infinite mass or energy. Does cosmological theory regard any galaxy to be infinite in any way? One might imagine an infinite energy density if a finite amount of energy were to occupy zero volume, but such an idea seems to me to have no physical meaning.
Further, we are told that on falling into a certain type of black hole you would have “a fighting chance of survival” even though “you would feel an infinite tidal force”, albeit “only for a short time”. It is not hard to think of very large but still finite forces that would be quite destructive to any human being, even if applied for only a nanosecond.
I accept that there would be unimaginably large amounts of energy and energy density in black holes (and even greater ones at the big bang) but calling them infinite seems to degrade the concept of infinity, or change our basic idea of cosmology.
Shortage of males
Surely polygamy or different migrational tendencies for the two sexes are not the only possible explanations for the greater diversity of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed exclusively through the female line, compared with Y-chromosome DNA from men (6 September, p 18).
Among humans in early historical times, as recorded in the Bible or the Homeric epics, it was reasonably common for one group to exterminate all the males of another group and enslave their women. This would generally terminate lines of Y-chromosome descent while preserving those of mitochondrial DNA. It seems reasonable to suppose that prehistoric communities could have done the same, and it would not need to happen very often to produce measurable results.
Letter
It’s such a relief to see an article that talks about a happy, functional, multiple household, instead of some out-of-control, hysterical therapy patient. We agree with John’s household that integration would be a completely unnatural way of life for us. Although our multiplicity is hidden from most people in our day-to-day life, we see no reason to think of it as a disorder in need of curing, since it causes us no impairment.
We personally think that a neurological, or even genetic, predisposition for multiplicity is likely (although we would hesitate to call it a vulnerability). Our problem with the idea of multiplicity being a response to childhood stress and trauma is that it never helped us forget any stressful events from our childhood 鈥� we have plenty of co-consciousness and can’t remember a time when the “others” suddenly showed up.
We would love to see more research done on the neurological basis of multiplicity, but unfortunately it is often viewed nowadays as something that patients are prodded into by overzealous therapists (which can and does happen, but it didn’t in our case), or else as a crippling disorder that absolutely has to be cured before one can live a happy life. Thank you for going against the tide of popular opinion and showing an angle that isn’t usually brought to light.
Wait and see
For a new technology there seems an undue haste to give mobile phones a clean bill of health (13 September, p 12 and p 46). The British MTHR (Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme) studies your article refers to are still a long way from reaching conclusions because great care has gone into formulating the studies, which takes time and consideration.
The article also mentions my 1999 finding that phones “increase reaction times”, or speed up cognition, and claims attempts to replicate it have failed. This is just not true. A Nokia-sponsored study in Finland generated almost identical results. The fact that the group later failed to replicate the work could be because, as some studies suggest, cognitive speeding is a permanent effect of phone use.
Couple this observation with the Zurich University studies on sleep alteration and the Swiss and Finnish studies on alteration of brain cortical blood flow shown by PET scanning, add in an as-yet unpublished study on (apparently) non-thermal expression of heat-shock protein by microwave-exposed brains that directly supports David de Pomerai’s work on nematodes, and I become suspicious that there may indeed be subtle effects.
Logic tells me that radio waves cannot produce these non-thermal events, but the evidence is that things do happen even when heating is insignificant. The positive studies are more associated with the old and higher-powered analogue phones. Ethically, I do not think we could now use these in human experiments. For GSM phones, however, “wait and see” would be a better clich茅 to apply than your headline, “Will we ever know?”.