Pain control
The claims for pain control made by Baroness Finlay were not my wife’s experience (28 May, p 26). She died recently after a 15-year battle with cancer and listened to many similar claims from the medical profession.
In practice she frequently preferred to suffer the pain rather than endure the side effects of the many drugs tried on her.
I think many objectors to assisted dying will change their view when they become sufferers. Whose business is it anyway?
Race-specific drugs
I enjoyed the article on BiDil (11 June, P 42). In the course of developing a specific tissue kallikrein inhibitor, I became aware of an essentially race-specific side effect of the ACE inhibitors. This is angioneurotic oedema in which various tissues swell once the drug is administered. If throat tissues are affected, this can cut off breathing and suffocate a patient. Most patients exhibiting this side effect are of relatively recent African origin. The oedema is probably due to increased levels of kinin. This is one effect of the ACE inhibitors.
The clinicians I spoke with said that the swelling was treated with steroids and that there was no economic reason to commercialise the specific tissue kallikrein inhibitor that would prevent kinin generation.
As you may know, the race of the patient is usually given in the CPCs (clinical pathological conferences) used as training exercises in hospitals and medical journals. My guess is that clinicians will continue to use race as one of many factors in developing the best therapeutic regimen for their patients.
Gooooooogle search
Here is another reduplicative Google search (Feedback, 4 June). Adding o’s to the word “Google” never results in zero hits. The word becomes too long for the search engine to handle at 125 o’s. At 124 o’s, there are 60 hits. Interestingly, “Gooooogle” will lead you to google.com, which is handy for those with heavy fingers.
From Mike Forbes
Seeing some of the previous examples got me wondering about that 1980s pop band known as Bananarama, so I quickly googled for examples of this one, and found: bananaramaramanana.
Boiling Springs, South Carolina, US
Dying differently
Your thought-provoking feature on animals and humans (4 June, p 42) reminded me that there is one area in which we treat animals and humans very differently. It is the case of terminal illness.
If I am responsible for the well being of an animal and it develops terminal cancer, I am required by law to see that it is killed painlessly before it can suffer pain from the cancer. If a human being I am close to develops terminal cancer I am forbidden by law to end their suffering and must watch them endure whatever pain cannot be relieved by analgesics, until the cancer kills them.
Does this mean we are more concerned over animal suffering, or do we regard human life in a totally different way from the lives of other animals?
Two moons in June?
David Chandler’s article on the threat of an asteroid colliding with the Earth is an example of determined pessimism (25 June, p 34). An alternative to a “killer asteroid” causing devastation could be that an asteroid passing close by is captured by the Earth, giving us an extra moon.
In devising a strategy to protect ourselves, let’s not ignore the possibilities another moon would bring for the quality of life as exemplified by poetry and music. Science must occasionally think optimistically, and of art and beauty.
Blame the brain
I think Michael S. Gazzaniga gets off a bit too easily suggesting simply that neuroscience should have nothing to do with the “my brain made me do it” defence (11 June, p 48).
There have been cases in which someone developed serious and violent antisocial tendencies which ended completely when a brain tumour was discovered and removed. Surely we are compelled to agree, in these cases, that “their brain made them do it”.
But then the problems really start. If we accept that a brain fault can make someone do something their “real” self would not, how can we then make a clear distinction between faults that can be fixed with a knife and those that cannot? And how should courts judge cases in which defendants claim they suffer from a brain fault caused by maternal drug use, malnutrition or some other excuse?
The answers are difficult, but the question cannot be brushed aside.
Autistic strengths
I am autistic, and I have severe self-injury and self-care issues (18 June, p 36). I’m also a researcher affiliated with a well-respected autism research group in Montreal. We have, in the course of trying to locate the supposed cognitive “deficit” in autism, repeatedly unearthed strengths. These strengths are not confined to aspies [people with Asperger’s syndrome]. Autistic strengths go right across the spectrum, as does our pervasive susceptibility to savant abilities.
To claim that being “more” autistic is bad, while being “less” autistic is good, is the same as saying that autism is inherently and intrinsically bad or wrong. It is an apartheid idea. In a society where being black is judged inherently and intrinsically bad or wrong, being “less” black is better, and being not black at all is ideal.
No doubt a bioethicist in such a society could trot out statistics proving it is better to be less black (so you can pass as white), or not black at all.
Autistics must be given the assistance we need in order to learn and succeed as autistics.
From Ben Haller
Once a firmer genetic basis for autism has been established, what will happen if an autistic couple undergo IVF and deliberately select an autistic child over one who does not carry whatever gene or genes are responsible for autism? Would this simply be a matter of personal preference, or would it constitute child abuse?
Menlo Park, California, US
From Bob Seymour
There is no doubt that severely autistic people have difficulty surviving on their own and that some degree of medical intervention might sometimes be justified in the same way as might be the case for other equally severe divergences from the neurotypical. But for people with Asperger, a book of rules for how they are expected to behave would be more useful. The best I have seen so far is by Marc Segar (), who left such a set of rules after his early death. But they are, for that reason, incomplete for older people like me.
Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, UK
From Dinah Murray, Autism & Computing, and Mike Lesser and Wendy Lawson
It is good to see your coverage of “Autistic pride”, but a pity it had such a US focus. Autism Network International (ANI) which initiated Autreat has been involved in encouraging similar European events this year, including Autscape in the UK (see ), at which Jim Sinclair, autistic cofounder of ANI and author of the first known public statement of autistic pride, Don’t Mourn for Us (1993), will be speaking.
Also in the UK, our paper “Attention, monotropism, and the diagnostic criteria for autism” in the May issue of Autism proposes a non-medical model of autism 鈥� the view that it stems from a type of attentional distribution which is part of the natural human range. See also . Viewing autism as a terrible dysfunction is responsible for “cure hysteria”, and for a variety of treatments, including dangerous medications, which may not be in the slightest bit beneficial.
London, UK
Changing the past
Mark Buchanan asks what physical principle must we sacrifice to make Einstein consistent with our view of reality (18 June, p 32). He provides some interesting options but, unfortunately, doesn’t mention the correct one. Quantum mechanics can be made completely plausible and consistent if we give up something that is very simple but so ingrained in our way of thinking that it is hard to recognise that we are even making the assumption.
What we must give up is the idea that actions in the present only change things in the future. Indeed, if we look at the mathematics, it seems entirely plausible that actions can travel both ways. Once we allow this possibility, the concept of entangled states becomes easy to understand. Indeed, the very word “entangled states” means connected in the past.
From Tony Fowler
Rather than supposing that the message that appears to pass between entangled particles travels faster than light (18 June, p 35), it seems to me to be more logical to suppose that this message travels back in time to the point at which the particles originally divided, then forward again to the present frame of reference for the other particle.
Reading, Berkshire, UK
From Roger Schafir
Mark Buchanan promulgates one common misconception about quantum entanglement. He says we can escape from the conclusion that there is some mysterious faster-than-light influence between distant observers if we drop the assumption that the properties of quantum objects are “out there” and the results of measurements are predetermined although unknown in advance.
It is true that Bell’s original paper did include this assumption, known technically as “hidden variables”. But it was soon shown that even if it is dropped we reach the same conclusion about the choice made by one observer affecting the results of another, distant, observer, provided we assume that if the observers had made different choices they would still have got definite results that were just as much in accordance with the laws of nature as the ones they did get.
This assumption seems impossible to deny if you accept that free will exists-and if you do accept it, then the mysterious faster-than-light influence is an effect at the human-scale level, and to the extent that it has been verified by experiment, it is completely independent of whatever theory you may have about what is going on at the microscopic level. Quantum mechanics successfully predicts it, but any rival or successor theory that explained the same observational facts about the world would also have to predict it.
London, UK
God's intelligence
You report that the Smithsonian has cancelled the screening of a film that “ponders ‘purpose within cosmic evolution'” 鈥� the idea that has become known as “intelligent design” (11 June, p 4). One interesting question that no one seems to ask is why people feel a need to adopt this viewpoint.
An engineer who builds a plane that travels from London to New York without a pilot is more intelligent than an engineer whose plane needs a pilot. Yet passengers may feel better in the second type of plane. Similarly a God who creates evolution, which needs no further intervention, is more intelligent than a God whose creation needs constant supervision and directives. Perhaps some people feel better and more cared for by the second type of God, and then out of gratitude declare this to be the more intelligent.
This psychological problem is at the root of a lot of the hostility shown by advocates of intelligent design (ID) towards those who argue for evolution. This gratitude can become so compulsive, vehement, “holier-than-thou” and even neurotic that the ID-ists start vilifying those who reject ID. When the evolutionists refuse to buckle under, the ID-ists become even more angry and hate-filled, and wish to take over the state and enforce this “gratitudinal” behaviour and related “holiness” by means of laws or other threats. “How dare you deny or be ungrateful to a caring God?” 鈥� that is their bitter-angry question. They are 110 per cent sure that a God who intervenes every half an hour is more caring than a God who intervenes only at infinity. In the depth of their psychology this is what motivates the ID-ists and drives them to ridicule or demonise the evolutionists.
Much nuisance has emanated from those who wish to enforce gratitude towards their God.
See “A battle for science’s soul” for more on this topic
Wind and weather
Another slant on the energy problem: lots of people are lauding wind power as the way forward, but if we shift a major part of our energy requirement to wind, what effects will we have on weather systems? If you take energy out of the wind, you must alter that wind and this must eventually have an effect on the wind patterns that drive our weather. Why is no one studying this before we make a bad mess even worse?
Incompatible units
Having read Ben Bowie’s article on the Airbus A380 (11 June, p 34), I am very worried that this giant airliner may suffer from a similar problem to NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. The space probe infamously came to grief because of confusion between the metric units used by one part of the project team and the imperial units used by another.
With components of the A380 being manufactured at sites all over the world, it is obviously essential for the project managers to ensure that all parties are using compatible units of measurement. Yet it is seems from your article that the engineers working on the Rolls-Royce engines are still using the old British industrial unit of weight, the “railway locomotive”, whereas the engineers at Goodrich, manufacturers of the main landing gear, are using the Canadian organic unit, the “adult blue whale”.
For the record
鈥� Feedback has been reminded by well-informed readers that the Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom (18 June) but an internally self-governing dependency of the British Crown.
鈥� There was a bit of over-revving in the 11 June issue when we stated (p 25) that an electric motor invented by IMP of Neath, UK, produces 400 times more torque, size for size, than any existing motor. It should have read 400 per cent, or 4 times the torque.
Nuclear disarray
The strategies being adopted in the US for disposing of nuclear waste offer less comfort for the UK’s nuclear industry than you imply (18 June, p 3). The Carlsbad waste isolation pilot plant in New Mexico, supposedly safe for 10,000 years, is unsecured against our remote successors, who may be greedy, vengeful, curious or just unable to decipher warning markers decayed into unintelligible babble.
So high is the risk of wilful or inadvertent intrusion into the stored radionuclides that the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that it can see no way in which it can discharge its responsibility to prevent this. “We can do little more than guess about how best to protect our descendants, or even ourselves,” wrote EPA analyst Martin Pasqualetti in 1997. “Attempts to develop permanent landscape warnings for long-lived hazardous waste only underscore the futility of the exercise.”
Plans for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, which was finally approved by Congress for waste burial in 2002, are in utter disarray. On top of anxiety over site safety, transport risks and geological uncertainties came email leaks this year that showed water infiltration rates had been falsified to make the mountain look good. As The New York Times reported (6 April 2005), a US Geological Survey employee admitted keeping “two sets of files, the ones that will keep QA [Quality Assurance] happy and the ones that were actually used”.
With its planned opening delayed from 1998 to 2010 and now way beyond, Yucca Mountain may be too gravely compromised to survive at all. A federal claims court in April 2005 judged it unlikely that the site would ever be licensed. Then there is the cost. On top of the $6 billion so far spent in site searching, there are damage suits from utilities that contracted to have their wastes taken, which will likely cost billions more. Yet the US Department of Energy, along with the industry itself, has termed Yucca Mountain essential to the future of the nation’s nuclear energy.
Radioactive waste remains dangerous not just for a few years but for hundreds of thousands of years. The long half-life of many residues means that leaks into groundwater or air may be lethal for over a million years.
A US federal court in 2004, in a case brought by the state of Nevada and a number of environmental groups, upheld the view of the US National Academy of Sciences that the period of guaranteed security of the Yucca Mountain strata and containers should be lengthened from 10,000 to 300,000 years.
Meanwhile, as long ago as 1995 the US Department of Energy required that assessments of the viability of container security should be based on radiation doses over a million years. A government geologist later commented that this requirement “effectively negates high level waste storage or disposal at any site, above or below ground”.
Nuclear energy everywhere must come to terms with these hard truths. Burying waste out of sight, whether at Sellafield or at Yucca Mountain, only puts it out of mind. Sooner or later it will come back into view as our era’s most accursed legacy to our hapless heirs.