Love it and leave it
Is it possible to fall in love with a place so profoundly that you vow never to return? For me, the answer is yes.
Two days after returning from a tour of Antarctica I read your article about the adverse impact of ecotourism on wildlife (6 March, p 6). I was relieved to see that this problem has been recognised.
Prior to my trip I had believed that ecotourism placed very little pressure on wildlife. From first-hand experience I can now say emphatically that this is not so. I saw (and videotaped) significant numbers of my fellow tourists blatantly flouting the rules about approaching penguins, seals and other wildlife. Not only did they approach close enough to, in one case, touch the beak of a moulting penguin, some actively pursued these creatures across the snow, causing them evident distress.
In extreme climates such as Antarctica animals need to conserve every scrap of energy. Even taking a few steps sideways to avoid a persistent photographer could make the difference between life and death.
I was horrified by the behaviour of selfish tourists, by the scum of oil spread on the pristine waters by the inflatable boats we were ferried around in, and by the expulsion of bilge water from our ship into the Southern Ocean.
Furthermore, on my tour at least, the rules for washing boots after every landing at a penguin colony were not followed properly. There were too few hoses available (two amongst 100 tourists), the procedure was not monitored, many people were confused about how to go about it, and on countless occasions those who wanted to get out of the cold and into their warm cabins as quickly as possible skipped the queues for boot-washing altogether. The cleansing of boots is intended to prevent cross-contamination between colonies.
Every summer 10,000 tourists pass through Antarctica. Far from being lonely and desolate, the place is alive with ships. I would guess that my recent trip has shown me an Antarctica that may not exist for very much longer. With tourism on the increase, the wildlife is surely doomed.
Slapstick getaway
It would indeed be dangerous to immobilise cars at speed (21 February, p 24). It would also miss the opportunity to use the power of software-controlled systems.
First, as Alan Wheeley suggests in his letter (13 March, p 31), it would be easy to smoothly reduce the speed at which the engine rev limiter cuts in until the car can go no faster than, say, 30 kilometres per hour. Meanwhile the lights would flash in an erratic and eye-catching manner, and the radio would be activated to subject to miscreant to unsilenceable music at high volume.
Once the vehicle has been slowed to a safe speed, the engine management unit can add comic backfires while the active suspension adds amusing lurches. Windows and boots open and close at random, while a strategic use of the screen washer adds public humiliation to the penalties of the law.
For the record
鈥� In “Derring-do in the high Antarctic” (24 January 2004, p 5), we made the rescue of a telescope sound rather more dangerous than it was. Thank you to Andy Young, who led the rescue mission, for pointing out that the telescope was stranded not on a mountain top, as we said, but on a high flat plateau. Also, we wrote that the engines of the rescuers’ aircraft might not restart if switched off in the extreme cold. This would have been the case if they had taken a Hercules, says Young, but they flew out in the more reliable Twin Otter.
鈥� In our Histories article “Pinnipeds on parade” (14 February, p 48), we inadvertently omitted to acknowledge one important source of information, a paper by David A. H. Wilson of the Cumbria Institute of the Arts. His paper “Sea lions, greasepaint and the U-boat threat: Admiralty scientists turn to the music hall in 1916” was published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, vol 55, p 425. You can find the paper online at
Ethical trials
Iain Chalmers makes the point that ethics committees have played a role in allowing drug companies to get away with the under-reporting of results from clinical trials (6 March, p 19). I would go one step further and say that they have 鈥� or should have 鈥� a central role in ensuring unbiased reporting of clinical trials.
All clinical trials must get approval from ethics committees, or institutional review boards, before they can enrol patients for the trials. It is up to these committees to seek guarantees that the results of the trials will be published in full before giving approval for the trial to go ahead.
They should also insist that the trial is registered with an accessible trials registry, such as the metaRegister of Controlled Trials, and, if it is a randomised controlled trial, have an International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number.
Painkiller overkill
In the Decade of Pain Control and Research, I was very disappointed to read your article on methadone (6 March, p 14). The “alarming rise” in deaths due to methadone overdose that you report is from 61 in 2001 to 123 in 2002 鈥� in the whole of the US. Your article also suggests that “around two-thirds of the people whose deaths were associated with methadone did not have a prescription for the drug”.
In other words, you are telling us that around 40 people who were prescribed methadone in the US in 2002 died from it. This surely has to make it one of the safest drugs in the world. And around 85 people who managed to obtain the drug illegally died from it. This surely has to make it one of the least dangerous abused drugs.
Compared with the hundreds of thousands who die because of alcohol and tobacco, which are legal, and the equally huge number of deaths caused by conventional medicines, the 40-odd deaths from prescribed methadone, while unfortunate and sad, do not seem to herald a public health crisis.
There is an important reason for keeping a sense of proportion in these matters. Not long ago there was a similar scare about OxyContin (the sustained release form of oxycodone), which is also used to treat chronic pain. The danger of illegal use was similarly exaggerated and the resulting media frenzy led to many genuine pain patients being refused further prescriptions by doctors who either believed the stories, or were afraid (with good reason) of the effect a crack-down on OxyContin prescribing could have on their practice and livelihood.
It seems that now the bogey of addiction in chronic pain patients has proved baseless, media attention has turned to the potential for abuse and “diversion”. The actual numbers are small, because few people who have been fortunate enough to find a doctor to prescribe these drugs for their terrible pain would be willing to sell them for any amount of money. But the result of such publicity can leave thousands in unrelieved agony.
I speak as a chronic pain patient who has taken methadone safely and effectively for over seven years.
Hairy cactus
To my eyes, Laura Cinti’s transgenic cactus looks unnatural (28 February, p 44). The photo shows human hair apparently sprouting from the areolas (the cactus buds). Here is exactly where one would expect to see spines grow from in a normal cactus. But a cactus areola and a mammal hair bulb are two quite specialised and basically different structures. It is impossible to simply turn one into the other.
Moreover, no plant produces keratin, the protein that builds human hair, while no animal produces lignin, the main constituent of cactus spines. So, which of the two substances is the cactus hair made of?
Genetic engineering can only insert single genes into cells, so this cannot be the technique used here. Is this a hybrid obtained in a cell culture? As far as I know, hybrid plant-animal cells never develop into fully grown individuals.
To cut a long story short, the human-cactus is, to me, an obvious fake.
Laura Cinti writes:
鈥� We created the transgenic cactus by germinating cactus seeds in a sterile medium. The tiny plants were cut to create a callus, or wound site. A natural plant pathogen, Agrobacterium tumifaciens, was modified to include keratin genes. This pathogen enters plants through sites of damage, such as a callus, thus inserting the keratin genes into the cactus. The cacti were then grown on, and expressed the keratin gene as fine hairs. Further details of the process are available at my website .
Letter
In your special issue on parapsychology, John McCrone reveals the “experimenter effect”, where a researcher who supports parapsychology may get more positive results than a colleague who considers it invalid (13 March, p 34).
Isn’t it possible there could be such an effect in many experiments? It is not uncommon for researchers to have an expectation on the result of an experiment, in some cases to support an opinion they have publicly voiced. Perhaps they too may unconsciously put the sort of micro-shading on results that seems to influence parapsychology experimenters.
Greenhouse clothes
The letters from Trevor Fenning, (6 March, p 32), Max Trevitt, (31 January, p 38) and Ceri Reid, (14 February, p 30) on the benefits of carbon fixation by trees remind me that there is a large group of consumer products that would benefit from the same type of analysis. These are the fabrics that make up our clothing and household furnishings.
At one time, these were all made from natural products such as plant and animal fibres and skins. Now, a large proportion contain substantial amounts of artificial materials made from petrochemicals.
If all our clothing and other fabrics were made from cotton, hemp, wool, leather, fur and feathers, we would be using materials made from renewable resources that would fix carbon instead of generating carbon dioxide release, and would give rise to much less pollution during manufacture.
UFOs and fairies
Your editorial describes the Royal Society of Arts debate as being on “the paranormal” (13 March, p 3). In fact, the topic was telepathy, and it was Rupert Sheldrake’s summary of the evidence for this that so impressed the audience.
Lewis Wolpert’s rejoinder, whilst entertaining, digressed to encompass ghosts, UFOs, angels, fairies at the bottom of the garden, the memory of water, a mathematical horse and, bizarrely, a conspiracy theory about the Queen being a Russian spy. The suggestion seemed to be that if you acknowledge the evidence for telepathy, then you have to accept the entire “paranormal”, including every bit of silliness spouted by the world’s weirdos.
It is this type of dismissal by association that has made serious researchers shy away from the term “paranormal”, to focus instead on specific, well-evidenced anomalies that seem to challenge our current models of the world.