I told you so
Paul Davies’s article about extraterrestrial messages embedded in DNA resonated with me, because on 29 October 1999 I sent a letter to New 杏吧原创 that covered the same idea from a slightly different viewpoint (7 August, p 30). Perhaps if I had spelled it out in more detail 鈥� especially the final paragraph 鈥� you might even have published it.
As it is, although chuffed that the eminent Professor Davies took five years to catch up, I would like my bit of glory. So here is the letter again:
Why not use the genetic code as the ultimate time capsule? As noted in your interview with Brian Durrans (30 October 1999, p 46), man-made recording systems suffer from degradation with time, as with paper, or become unreadable due to changing data standards, as with computer media. In contrast, the genetic coding scheme never alters, and the data is accurately copied over geological timescales.
If we could replace some junk DNA in a suitable organism with a section of DNA encoding 鈥� for example, the contents of the disc that recorded data on the Pioneer space probe 鈥� we would have a fantastically durable way of sending information into the future. Or, now that artificial chromosomes can be incorporated into an animal’s genome (23 October 1999, p 4), perhaps these could be used to embed the data.
Some animal species seem to have altered only slightly over millions of years. These would make ideal data-storage media and would ensure that vast numbers of copies would be on hand for longer than the human race is likely to last.
For that matter, has anyone thought of looking for messages already embedded in genetic code? Finding one there would not be in the same league as the discovery of a message embedded in p imagined by Carl Sagan in his novel Contact, but it would still give us cause for some very serious thought.
Stoop to conquer
Instead of spending millions fighting bootleggers, the movie industry could easily save the money and divert the bootleggers’ revenue to itself at the same time (14 August, p 22). People who buy bootleg movies clearly do not mind watching poor-quality films as long as they get them cheaply and as soon as they are out in the cinema. They are never going to wait for the official DVD or video release and pay top whack, so why not give them what they want: release a low-quality print with mono sound at the same time as the cinema release and charge a small but significant amount for it.
Movie buffs will still go to the cinema as it is the only way to get the best picture and sound experience. Home-cinema buffs will wait for the DVD as there is nothing worse than rubbish pictures and sound on your expensive equipment. The bootleggers won’t be able to compete and will go out of business, no legal action required.
Outfoxed
Rob Hawarth is right to point out that, thanks to Feedback’s article on googlewhackblatts, a search for alapacoid now brings up two results (31 July, p 24). On the other hand, when spelled correctly, alopecoid (meaning fox-like) brings up 1960 results.
Greedy solar tower
There is an attraction in the solar “power tower” in that it may be, at the moment, more cost-effective than conventional photovoltaics. However, it is considerably more expensive than wind power and likely to be overtaken by other solar technologies even before it is completed (31 July, p 42).
This would not be a problem if it were a small investment, but this project will potentially absorb the majority of all renewables expenditure in Australia for years, effectively displacing many much more worthwhile smaller efforts. The effect on public confidence of a failure of this magnitude should not be underestimated.
Isotopiary
Your description of what goes on in a fast breeder reactor is incorrect (7 August, p 26). Fissionable plutonium is not produced by reactions between plutonium, uranium-238 and other uranium isotopes. It is produced by irradiating uranium-238 with some of the fast neutrons released by uranium-235 and plutonium-239 as they undergo fission. This converts uranium-238, via a series of intermediates, into plutonium-239.
On our trolley
Your Feedback item about a supermarket placing 13 types of trolley at customers’ disposal, which I am sure to the initiated is quite amusing, is absolutely incomprehensible to me (7 August).
Say “trolley” and I think of an electric rail-car running along tracks, often set in a street, and obtaining power from overhead lines (and currently threatened with extinction in North America). Could you translate?
The editor writes:
鈥� Sorry! Our British trolley is your shopping cart, and your trolley is our tram.
Coffee digestif
I hope you will be interested to know that John Martinez, the US importer of kopi musang (the coffee made from beans that have passed through a civet cat’s digestive tract), was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for nutrition in 1995, so his contribution to relations between the common palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, and humans has been recognised for many years (7 August, p 24). More information can be culled from the Annals of Improbable Research or from its website .
For the record
鈥� We mistakenly attributed a comment in the article “Bug-based sensors raise the fire alarm” (7 August, p 20) to Dan Lang of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in Sacramento. We wrote: “Lang envisions hundreds of cheap ‘beetle-based’ sensors being deployed throughout forests, perhaps with wireless links to a central computer, to automatically monitor the outbreak of fires.” This was not Lang’s vision, but that of Helmut Schmitz, who designed the sensor.
Pets before kids
Your leader repeats the tired moral clich茅 that people will always pick a child over an animal (7 August, p 3). This simply isn’t so. In the UK this year, we will spend around 拢2 billion feeding, pampering and providing medical care for our pets while 10 million children will die across the world. According to the World Health Organization half of those deaths will be related to malnutrition.
While we remain content to let millions die of preventable and treatable illnesses, we can find no justification for inflicting suffering on a single animal in the name of health. How many of those 10 million lives could be saved if people really valued children over animals?
Mind drug failure
Why doesn’t Tam Dalyell tell the health minister that the UK’s medicines regulator and Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) have failed over SSRI drugs (14 August, p 45)? It took two expos茅s of the effects of Seroxat by BBC TV’s Panorama to force the current review.
In March, Richard Brook, the chief executive of the charity Mind, resigned from the CSM expert review panel over lack of openness. He believed the experts had had data for 10 years showing that patients were given high and potentially harmful doses of Seroxat, but failed to act ().
Yes, the UK has laws requiring a company to hand over data when asked, but regulators fall down in keeping it secret (New 杏吧原创, 1 May, p 3). Do we, as in the US, have to turn to the courts to ensure that health and people’s very lives take precedence over commercial confidentiality?
New York’s state attorney-general Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit in June against GlaxoSmithKline for “repeated and persistent fraud” in not releasing negative trial data on paroxetine (Seroxat or Paxil). It was data which indicated that the drug could be unsafe for children and adolescents with depression (New 杏吧原创, 12 June, p 4).
In June 2003, the UK medicines regulator advised that Seroxat should no longer be prescribed to under-18s. Dalyell talks of punishing companies, but omits to challenge the government.
Letter
You report that perhaps 3.5 per cent of US teenagers use steroids. You also suggest that the experiment you describe had very few adverse effects. What then is the fundamental problem with steroid use among ordinary people?
Perhaps rather than fighting it, it would be better to regularise the practice by authorising doctors to prescribe steroids in safe doses. That would combat the dangers of unregulated use more effectively than a ban, while still allowing the benefits that you describe. Obviously use by athletes requires more debate since it has the potential to affect fair competition.
Replace primates
It is extremely disappointing to read that the scientific community has responded to the perceived shortage of primates by focusing attention on how the supply to laboratories can be increased to satisfy demand (21 August, p 6).
The RSPCA believes that science, industry and regulators are too ready to take the view that primate experiments are unavoidable and that steps must be taken to ensure a steady supply of these animals at all costs. A more enlightened and constructive approach would be to try to avoid or replace primate use by increasing the commitment and effort to develop humane alternatives.
These remarkable animals pay a high price for their physiological and neurological similarity to humans. It is often claimed that these similarities make primates “useful models” for research into human diseases. However, they also mean that primates have the capacity to experience fear, distress, pain and suffering, not only during experiments but also as a result of the way they are bred and housed.
More tangible progress towards replacing laboratory primates is a moral necessity and should not be beyond the bounds of scientific endeavour in the 21st century.
Decades of doping
Your article about cheating in athletics (14 August, p 6) stated that no rigorous study of the effects of performance-enhancing drugs took place until 1996, but I can tell you that the first attempt of which I am aware was some 30 years earlier. It took place in Leeds General Infirmary in the late 1960s with students from a nearby college of physical education.
Some 50 volunteers were given an anabolic steroid for one term during the academic year, and a placebo for the other two terms. My contribution to the study involved the use of tritiated water to measure total body water.
The results were inconclusive for two good reasons. It proved very difficult to find enough volunteers, not because those cleaned-limbed youths were unwilling to submit themselves to the improper use of steroids, but because so few were willing to come off the pills they were already routinely popping. We learned about such things from the athletes themselves.
Secondly, it became apparent as the year progressed that we were not seeing any sort of obvious groupings of our results. Once this became known to the volunteers, a few of them sheepishly offered the explanation that many of them had secretly resumed their previous drug regimes, being unwilling, as they saw it, to prejudice their future careers just to prove what they already knew.
What I find astonishing is that what was common knowledge at that time has been strenuously denied by athletes and their organisations throughout the following decades. The problem has only been generally acknowledged since the 1990s. The other surprise is that apparently no further attempt has been made to run a controlled assessment until now.