As sweet as can be
So aspartame has been “let off the hook” (6 May, p 40, and 13 May, p 5). Maybe it will not cause lymphomas and leukaemia, but do we really want or need it? Apart from its vile taste (quite unlike the subtle flavours of nature’s sugars), the one allegation we can hold strongly against this chemical concerns its extraordinary sweetness. Aspartame has now found its way into almost all soft drinks and many foodstuffs 鈥� particularly those intended to appeal to children.
Products that have no artificial sweeteners are also much sweeter than they used to be. Do the manufacturers of these feel compelled to compete for consumers from among those whose tastes have been conditioned by aspartame?
I for one do not want soft drinks sweeter than fudge or sugar cane. Keep saccharin and aspartame for diabetics, but please can we have this contaminant removed from the diet of the rest of us.
The right to die
The article on enhanced humans states that “death will never be optional” (13 May, p 35). Nonsense. It is simply an option most people choose not to exercise every day. It is also not legal to exercise it. Until the right to choose euthanasia 鈥� to end one’s life gracefully 鈥� is accepted, the extension of human lifespan is a moral, social, medical and personal disaster waiting to happen.
The right to live must be accompanied by the right to die when one chooses. I can think of nothing worse than being forced to live beyond my means, and I suspect that many of this generation’s centenarians may be facing such a terrible fate right now.
Missing persons
Vilayanur Ramachandran and Lindsay Oberman are hot on the trail of why autistic people aren’t, well, people (13 May, p 48). They are not the only researchers who are sure that autistics have no personhood. We are simply not there. They are frantically searching for our missing persons.
Other researchers and parent-advocates have gone beyond removing our personhood to declaring us more or less dead. The respected epidemiologist Walter Spitzer has described autistic people as being dead souls in live bodies, and autism as a terminal disease 鈥� we just don’t know we are dead yet. The massively popular parent author Catherine Maurice calls autism a “death in life”, and Bryna Seigel, an influential autism expert, informs us that autism is a “living death”.
Does it take electro and magnetoencephalography to discover that interacting or conversing with people who see you as not there, or not having personhood, or in fact being dead, can be difficult, if not impossible?
Mighty chimps
The article on aggression in chimpanzees describes how adult chimps attacked and overpowered humans with ease (6 May, p 14). I have read that chimps can be six times stronger than humans, though I am unclear what exactly is meant by this quantification: is it weight-for-weight, for example? Are they bigger, more muscular, fitter, or is there something intrinsically different about their muscles?
Given the similarity of our genomes it would be interesting if small changes in genes or how they are expressed could create such a difference.
Upper Beeding, West Sussex, UK
The editor replies:
Chimpanzees are different from humans in several obvious ways, one of which is their sheer physical strength. But why are they so much stronger than us?
The answer is not just greater muscle bulk. It’s also to do with that fact that their muscles work five to seven times more efficiently than ours. Studies of human and other primates’ jaw muscles show that our muscle fibres are far smaller and weaker than those of our cousins 鈥� roughly one-eighth the size of those seen in macaques, for example.
The reasons for this remain poorly understood, but one contributing factor is in the genes that encode myosin, the protein from which muscle fibres are made. Comparison of human and ape sequences for a myosin gene called MYH16 show that all humans have a mutant version of this gene. Some have even credited the more diminutive muscles in human jaws for our larger intelligence. One theory says that these smaller muscles gave our skulls the room to grow rounder, allowing for a bigger brain cavity.
Empty promise
You report that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes along with the American Beverage Association have volunteered to phase out their sugar-laden drinks from school vending machines by 2010 (13 May, p 4). The president of the American Heart Association pronounces this agreement “ground-breaking”. Sadly, there is no cause for celebration nor for the positive press this announcement has received. The agreement is completely voluntary and therefore unenforceable. In fact, it does not even include an actual implementation plan. These soft drink companies have not volunteered anything that is not already available to the school districts as well as to private schools, which in any case have always had the power to decide whether to have vending machines or not.
Save oil not money
Francis Slakey states that a national speed limit of 55 mph in the US would save 50 million gallons of gasoline per day (13 May, p 21). At $3 per gallon, this amounts to $150 million per day.
How does Slakey know that the Americans will spend this extra money on consumables that do not use oil? “We are saving $150 million per day! That means we can afford to turn the air conditioning up and book a flight to see aunt Alice,” is an equally likely response.
From Ian Chapple
Slakey fails to take into account many Americans’ predilection for heavy cars with hopelessly thirsty engines. SUVs are large, inefficient and dangerous, but remain popular in the US because of their favourable tax status. I suspect that if this were changed, their sales would drop, as would the amount of petrol consumed by the US as a whole.
It seems to me that the best solution to the looming fuel crisis facing the country might be to allow the price of petrol to continue to rise to a more “realistic” level. This might force people to rethink their choice of car, and opt for one of the more efficient models. While the average American’s petrol bill would remain more or less the same, the quantity consumed would drop considerably. This would, in the long term, be far better for the environment.
Den Haag, the Netherlands
Extremists retreat
In response to your article on the clampdown on animal rights activists in the UK, I would like to point out the almost monotonous regularity with which the leaders of “lawful” animal rights groups are found to have been responsible for orchestrating and even participating in campaigns of harassment, intimidation and violence (13 May, p 6). The conviction of six activists from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty in the US and four from the group Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs in the UK are only the most recent examples of this phenomenon, one that existed long before the allegedly repressive new laws came into effect. Animal rights campaigners have the right to peaceful protest, but while the links to extremism remain the police must continue to monitor their activities and where necessary curtail them.
Your article did not mention that in recent months the UK has witnessed the emergence for the first time of a grass-roots movement in support of the use of animals in biomedical research, exemplified by the Pro-Test campaign in Oxford and The People’s Petition organised by the Coalition for Medical Progress (). This is a new development that Mel Broughton and other animal rights activists are finding it difficult to come to terms with. Perhaps they fear that popular resistance to extremism is about to become the UK’s next “finest export”.
Image explained
Feedback wonders about picture captions that say “Image for illustration purposes only” (13 May). I work for a large office automation firm in South Africa and we have similar notes on for pictures of our products. This is because it is not feasible to take a picture of each and every small hardware upgrade to our existing range of products. The product in the photo might differ slightly from the actual machine our clients receive.
For the record
鈥� The law requiring US car makers to establish an average fuel efficiency in their cars was passed by Congress in 1975 when President Ford was in office, not President Carter as stated in Comment and Analysis (13 May, p 21). Also the standard was known as CAFE, which stood for Corporate Average Fuel Economy, not Efficiency as stated. Finally, the article implied that the policy of a 55 miles per hour limit was dropped when Carter, who supported it, left office in 1981. In fact, it survived until 1986.
Reading minds
In the article on using fMRI to determine a person’s thoughts, Douglas Fox wrote: “Until recently, mind reading was the preserve of quacks” (6 May, p 32). Not so! Over 30 years ago, long before fMRI was developed, Lawrence Pinneo of the Stanford Research Institute claimed that he could recognise words that volunteers were thinking of by using EEG and EMG data.
Gravity's ugly duckling
An often-observed characteristic of a good scientific theory is that its governing equations have some aesthetic structure. This is certainly not the case for the relativistic theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND (29 April, p 52), where agreement with observations is only obtained after fiddling and adding enough fields. Will yet another field be added next time a discrepancy between MOND and observations is found? Even if the “Pioneer effect” is real, it is certainly no proof that MOND is the correct explanation. It just means that a force of some kind is missing from our calculations.
And vice versa…?
I found Alison Motluk’s article on subliminal advertising quite interesting (29 April, p 16), but it is a shame the study wasn’t repeated using Spa Rood in the subliminal message instead of Lipton Tea. If the majority of thirsty volunteers claimed preference for the subliminally suggested mineral water in such a reversed study, I would have been much more impressed with Karremans’s results.
Nuclear subsidy
Michael Brooks’s article on nuclear power was ridiculously biased and illogical (22 April, p 33). First, nuclear power is a real alternative to current renewable energy sources, so it has the same right to public subsidies. Secondly, the graphs were chosen to promote renewables. Natural gas is categorised as a “low-carbon energy source” in order to weaken the claims of nuclear power.
While Brooks cites the Royal Academy of Engineering on the cost of several energy sources, he doesn’t mention that the RAE predicts nuclear power to cost just over 2 pence per kilowatt-hour with plant decomissioning costs included. Clearly, the article was never meant to give anything near a balanced view of the subject.
From Larry Hughes
Achieving energy security with intermittent renewables, notably wind, requires some form of rapid-response back-up energy source, typically hydroelectricity or natural gas-fired turbines. To espouse renewables without explaining how the back-up will be achieved does little to further the cause of renewable energy. This is especially true in countries such as the UK, where natural gas production is unable to meet demand. In the UK, North Sea natural gas peaked in 2000, and demand is once again exceeding production. With the decline in North Sea supply, the UK will be forced to import more natural gas.
Russia’s retaliatory actions against Ukraine in January show how difficult it is for a country to achieve energy security using imported energy. If renewables are to make a difference, it will be necessary to develop technologies and policies that minimise reliance on non-indigenous energy sources.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada