Investing in the future
In your editorial you criticise the Copenhagen Consensus for presenting evidence that does not back up your stance on global warming (11 February, p 5). While it is tempting to want science to conform to preconceptions, the value of science is that the causality goes the other way: our understanding is shaped by the facts.
Bringing together some of the world’s top economists, including four Nobel prizewinners, the Copenhagen Consensus pointed out that large and early cuts in carbon emissions (such as Kyoto) are a very costly way of doing very little good far into the future (doing 2 pennies’ worth of good for each pound invested), and that there are many better investments to be made for humanity in disease, malnutrition, free trade and water (where each pound would do up to 拢40 of good). Wishing this was different does not make these facts go away.
Hwang's worst offence
Readers of Peter Aldhous’s article might draw the wrong conclusions about how seriously some of us take Woo Suk Hwang’s ethical misdeeds (4 February, p 22). It is sadly the case that a string of bioethical wrongs has been uncovered in that case. Some of the most serious ones 鈥� such as that Hwang coerced women to donate eggs 鈥� appeared last. Those late revelations occurred after Scientific American had already repudiated him. The lapses to which we gave the benefit of a doubt were more ethically ambiguous, and we had considered repudiating Hwang for those, too.
When Aldhous writes: “Data fabrication, it seems, is considered a worse crime than lax bioethics,” he is oversimplifying. The problem is that everyone agrees data fabrication is always wrong, but not everyone agrees that particular ethical choices always are. However, plenty of bioethical offences are worse than lying about data, and Hwang has committed some of these 鈥� as well as some less grievous.
Too wide awake
I read with interest that the person you call Yves takes modafinil to stay awake for a few days (18 February, p 34). He thinks it is a very safe super-drug with few side effects.
The British National Formulary (September 2005) lists a lot of side effects of this drug, many of which are experienced only after many years of drug taking. Two of the more serious are high blood pressure and high cholesterol, which can lead to serious heart problems. Depression is also listed.
Yves thinks that by staying awake for longer he has the perfect life. Yet sleeplessness is associated with many conditions, notably depression and obesity. Sleep is also the time body cells are repaired. So perhaps Yves will be awake for longer but alive and healthy for a shorter time.
From Robert Brayley-Hodgetts
This article was very interesting, but none of the research mentioned appeared to take into account the differences between individuals. Some, for example, are woken up by the slightest light, while others snooze late into the morning, irrespective of light levels. As a student, I found that a 30-hour cycle suited me much better than 24 鈥� physically, if not socially.
Before too many readers get excited at the prospect of having 4 more hours to play with whenever they want, the fruit flies mentioned in the article that needed a third less sleep also died much younger than their more normally somnolent cousins.
Hove, Sussex, UK
What clay?
You say that scientists attending the recent Royal Society meeting in London concluded that, because DNA and amino acids that form in warm volcanic puddles bind to clay particles and become unavailable for further reaction, Darwin’s suggestion that life originated in a warm prebiotic soup may be wrong (18 February, p 7).
However, if they had read the previous week’s New 杏吧原创, they would have learned that “before life spread on land, physical weathering broke down rocks, but the particles were not fine enough to form clay” (11 February, p 15).
From Boyd Williamson
You write that Darwin’s idea, that life emerged in the primordial soup in warm volcanic puddles, has been scuppered by recent experiments showing that any reactive molecules were immediately bound to clay particles in the puddles. But clay particles are formed by bacterial action, so how did clay arrive in prebiotic puddles?
North Queensferry, Fife, UK
The rabbit in the moon
You say that magma flooded onto the surface and “solidified into what we now see as the eyes, nose and mouth of the man in the moon” (18 February, p 22).
In fact until relatively recently what English speakers (at least) saw in the moon was the full figure of a man carrying a bundle of sticks.
Some fancifully believed this to be the Israelite who in the Pentateuch got into trouble for gathering sticks on the sabbath. Others saw an old fellow with a dog and a thorn bush.
It is not entirely clear when this was replaced by the jolly smiling face we now see 鈥� perhaps in the 18th or 19th century 鈥� but it now seems hard to make out the former figure.
I understand that according to some eastern cultures it’s a rabbit.
Solar panel care
The interview with Jesse Ausubel contains some inaccuracies about solar panels (28 January, p 44). They don’t need to be cleaned “every other weekend”, and they don’t take up too much land. Our panels live on our roof. I seem to remember cleaning them about a year ago while I was also cleaning gutters and the hot water panels. The batteries in our stand-alone system require a lot more maintenance, but this is not a huge sacrifice given we don’t pay power bills or need to maintain a power line easement through our forest.
Life extension
Harvard’s David Sinclair is wrong in thinking that resveratrol, an ingredient of red wine, is the first single molecule to have been demonstrated to extend lifespan in a vertebrate (11 February, p 14).
There are 12 studies showing that melatonin extends the lifespan of mice, which are much closer to humans genetically than a tiny fish with a 9-week average lifespan.
Also, three-quarters of epidemiological studies on the various health benefits of drinking alcohol in middle age show that more than one alcoholic drink per day is less beneficial to health than lower amounts. The ideal intake is one, not two drinks per day.
One cup of grape juice will give the same amount of resveratrol as two standard glasses of wine.
Steel's weakness
Your article proposes that the thermal expansion of steel, and the strain this puts on joints, might have played just as important a role in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 as the softening of the steel in the heat from the fire that followed the plane collisions (11 February, p 40).
This makes we wonder whether thermal contraction and its impact on joints that were perhaps already suffering cold-induced brittleness might have played a part in several recent and tragic roof collapses, such as that at the exhibition centre in Poland in January, in the extreme low temperatures in Europe this winter.
From Peter Gaffney
Like many people who spend too much time on the internet, I have come across some wild conspiracy theories that propose bizarre extra factors to account for the twin towers’ unexpected, unprecedented and rapid demise.
While there may never be total agreement about what exactly happened, at least the experts cited in the article do not seem to have any doubt that the planes’ impact and the resulting fires were responsible for the buildings’ collapse without the need to invoke any “help” from missiles or pre-placed demolition charges.
However, I have yet to hear or read any explanation of the fate of WTC 7, the building which was not hit but which caught fire and then collapsed abruptly later in the day.
Are the engineers and scientists studying the disaster confident that this building’s collapse is also explicable given the known facts?
Los Angeles, California, US
The editor writes:
鈥� The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has started a separate investigation into the collapse of WTC 7. Details can be found at
Streets with no name
Although you have asked for correspondence on the subject of No Name Street to be closed (Feedback, 11 February), there is a related point that needs to be made. In Italy, a Via Innominato is not necessarily not named after someone.
L’Innominato is a character in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed. On Lake Como, where the ferry boats tend to be named after Manzoni’s characters, I have seen a ferry called Innominato.
L’Innominato was based on a genuine historical Innominato, Francesco Bernardino Visconti, whose local reign of terror in the early 17th century apparently led people to refer to him as l’Innominato, the equivalent of “He-who-must-not-be-named”. Today, his castle at Chiuso is sometimes called La Rocca dell’Innominato (Innominato Fortress), for touristic reasons no doubt.
So a Via Innominato could be named in honour of a historical/fictional person, and not be genuinely nameless at all.
From Kristin Nielsen
Most streets in Japan have no name at all. A few large ones in big cities such as Kyoto and Tokyo have names, and some freeways do (if numbering counts as naming), but for the most part, the twisty maze of narrow roads that cover the country go completely unnamed. Instead, areas or “blocks” are named and then numbered, and people navigate and give directions based on landmarks: “Turn left at the 7-11, continue until you see the house with the big badger on its porch and…”
San Diego, California, US
From the Reverend Canon Alan Luff
The tune Sine Nomine was given its name by its composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in the first edition of The English Hymnal (1906) because he left it anonymous. Presumably, as editor he did not want people to think that he was filling the book with his own tunes.
Cardiff, Glamorgan, UK
From Charlotte Clark
Your search in Germany would have been more successful if you had searched for “Namenlose Stra脽e”, which exists in Gl眉ckstadt (“Lucky town”).
Harrogate, Yorkshire, UK
From Klaus Kratochwil
Though you (understandably) wish to end the topic, I have to disappoint you concerning our part of the world where everything (supposedly) has a proper name. In the state of Tyrol in Austria, there is a small village by the name “Namlos”.
Salzburg, Austria
From Tom Gray
A few years ago a Roman Catholic school was commissioned, built and opened in the village of Oakley, West Fife. The architect, assuming that this denominational school would be named by the local archbishop after an appropriate saint or member of the holy family, marked his drawings as “Holy Name R. C. Primary School”, a title under which, without further amendment, the school thrives to this day.
Glenrothes, Fife, UK
From John Shann
That theme you’re wanting to end: What’s it called?
Brighton, Sussex, UK
Genetics in the home
Freeman Dyson’s vision of a future in which a personal genome synthesiser allows children to play biotechnology games is frightening beyond belief (11 February, p 36).
I too remember the liberating days of the early personal computers, and the faltering efforts to make computer code that worked. I foresee similar problems with biotechnology, but at least unsuccessful computer code did not live in pain or get thrown down a drain to wreak havoc on the environment.
History shows us that the garage geeks turned into a force that was able to shut down multinational corporations by writing computer code that we now call viruses or malware. Over time this industry has become a weapon of criminality, against which every personal computer user must be perpetually on guard. There is no firewall to protect humanity against a similar campaign by genome hackers, and the present fears of bioweapons hint at such a future.
From Ian Clark
Does Dyson really imagine that his scenario of schoolkids breeding cuddly dinosaurs with freely available recombinant-DNA kits is one that will ever be tolerated for longer than a reckless year or so?
We’re talking about the wherewithal not just to breed pretty goldfish but covertly to sabotage the products of your rivals (as competitive vegetable growers regularly do), to tamper with the rivals themselves, or indeed their whole family or race.
The world is already trembling at the possibility of the H5N1 virus mutating to cause a human pandemic 鈥� something within the competence of any misanthrope to deliver, given relatively modest bioengineering tools of the sort Dyson envisages being openly sold. Such an act of terror would be hard to trace or even detect.
The first significant public demonstration of what is possible with recombinant DNA could trigger a worldwide social and legislative backlash. What price then the DNA revolution? Emergency legislation is typically unsubtle and panicky mobs so rarely hearken to reason. The mere possession of a Petri dish may be enough to send you to the stake.
Whitby, North Yorkshire, UK
From Adrian Bowyer, Bath University
Both your cover and Dyson proclaim the end of Darwinian evolution because genetic engineering will promote horizontal gene transfer between species. This will attenuate the distinction that the word “species” makes between one group of individuals and another, and so those individuals will be less in competition.
That may all come true, but it will not mean the end of evolution. For a start, the idea of a species only applies to that small group of organisms that reproduce sexually. More importantly, Darwinian selection does not operate on individuals, nor on species; it operates on genes.
Evolution requires three things: something that copies itself; a mechanism, usually mutation, for making changes in the copies; and an environment sufficiently harsh that not all the copies survive to reproduce successfully.
In this case, the things that copy themselves are genes, and the changes will be made by us as well as by mutation. But the replication is still there, and so is the competitive finite environment. Evolution will operate as ruthlessly as before.
Bath, Somerset, UK
From Glen Sturdee
So lateral are the concepts of horizontal gene transfer that I found myself squirming and tried to discern whether Dyson was altogether serious. I imagined school pupils creating a life for the sake of novelty, and after class coldly leaving it to die, or taking it home to set it free in the garden.
In Dyson’s world DNA tailoring would blur boundaries beyond the recognisable, dissolve conventional variety, and muck up the natural course of change. All sorts of uncomfortable ethical considerations flashed. What, for instance, would I do when my organic couch became unfashionable? Kill it? Eat it?
The most sobering point is that with the arrival of designer aquarium fish and rabbit-pollinated cotton, we are already there. The slow to evolve, like myself, will have a little trouble.
Burgess Hill, West Sussex, UK
From Pete Bleackley
“The final step of the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games,” predicts Freeman Dyson. “The winner could be the kid…whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be needed to ensure our kids do not endanger themselves and others”.
Dyson’s skills as a prognosticator must be called into doubt if he expects children with enquiring minds to play by the rules all the time.
Horsham, West Sussex, UK