Fine but costly art
Thank you for publishing the beautiful pictures of fungi and whetting our imaginations with “downy threads springing from pellets of peacock dung”, from the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1 July, p 52).
Your announcement that the contents of “one of the world’s most wonderful museums…long since sold off and scattered, are finally being reunited” is true only if one can afford the price of these volumes, categorised by the publishers as “fine art”. The project falls squarely in the art connoisseur world, and as for them being available to look at on the internet, a very stingy world it is (see )
If, however, the project were treated like, say, the massive collection of Picture Australia (), many works in the British Library () or material in the collections of the US National Institutes of Health (see, for example, the National Library of Medicine site, “Islamic Medical Manuscripts” 鈥� 鈥� which show art and science being considered indistinguishable hundreds of years before Federico Cesi’s time) 鈥� that would indeed, be something to announce.
As for these pictures being art or science, why can’t they be as they gloriously are: both?
Colour of coral
Your excellent article on damaged coral reefs had one minor error (8 July, p 28). The symbiotic zooxanthellae algae do not “lend coral its vivid colour”. The only colour they provide is a dingy brown 鈥� they contain orange peridinin and green chlorophyll.
The brilliant colours come from native pigments in the coral tissue. Right now they are arousing a lot of interest among cell biologists as they are proteins that can be used as expressible tags or markers.
Voice from the grave
You scoff at the idea of Richard Feynman writing new books after his death, but he’s actually been writing new ones at quite a rate (Feedback, 15 July). The most recent one is Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, published last year.
From Jesse Loggins
The great science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who died in 1988, will have a totally new novel called Variable Star published this September. Spider Robinson has completed the outline of a book that Heinlein dropped in the 1950s.
Nor is that the only example from this author: he was unable to sell his first novel, For Us The Living, and it was not published until 2004. Grumbles from the Grave was a memorial collection of his work and contained some commentary that was not published during his life.
An even more famous example would be J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which was published in 1977 鈥� four years after his death. Perhaps the record for posthumous books written by a single author goes to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Only the first volume of his 10-volume epic Mission Earth was published before his death.
Dacono, Colorado, US
For the record
鈥� In “Killer cough” (15 July, p 4) we said that babies “younger than 6 months…are too young to be immunised” against whooping cough. To avoid any misunderstanding, we meant that they are too young to have acquired full immunity. UK practice is to give vaccinations at 2, 3 and 4 months.
鈥� The font used by the University of Southampton in its physics exam paper was Comic Sans, not, as stated in Feedback, a non-existent font called Blechh (29 July).
Essential animals
Kathy Archibald of Europeans for Medical Progress accuses the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust of not telling the truth to the public about the contribution that experiments on non-human primates have made to medical advances (1 July, p 26). Such an accusation is not only ill-founded but profoundly offensive to those of us who devote our lives to improving human health and have needed to use animals to develop radical new treatments to alleviate the symptoms of previously untreatable diseases.
Without animal research, polio would still be claiming thousands of lives each year: Albert Sabin, its developer, told a reporter shortly before his death in 1993 that there could have been no oral polio vaccine without the use of animals.
As for my work and that of others in deep brain stimulation for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, the claim that primate studies were not necessary is totally untrue. All the surgery that we do has been based on an understanding of the neural mechanisms of the condition derived from studies of primates exposed to MPTP, an opiate-like chemical that causes symptoms similar to Parkinson’s. We were then able to demonstrate that low-frequency stimulation of the pedunculopontine nucleus of the brain alleviates these primates’ inability to move. This has now been performed successfully in humans.
Archibald also attacks the use of primates in HIV research, although infecting Asian macaques with SIV, which causes a disease indistinguishable from human AIDS, has yielded critical insights into AIDS. Most strikingly, the demonstration that cloned SIV caused AIDS helped counteract denial by Peter Duesberg of the HIV-AIDS relationship. This was instrumental in correcting the policy of the South African government and has thus been life-saving.
Listen for faults
One possible ploy to detect lethal faults in aircraft would be to equip each one with an array of contact microphones, distributed mostly in critical areas of an aircraft’s structure, and a suitable digital recorder (15 July, p 38).
Using the sophisticated spectrum analysis software now available, it would be possible to discern a characteristic acoustic signature in the audio records of each aircraft, which would change predictably under varying load, temperature, altitude and ageing conditions. When any significant or abrupt deviation in this signature was detected, it would prompt intense investigation.
With the same audio set, engineers could do a routine comparison between symmetrically located transducers 鈥� comparing wings or elevators, say. Significant departures from symmetry in the acoustic record of symmetrical assemblies would certainly indicate that all was not well.
Windmade water
Julie Rehmeyer’s article gave an interesting account of the emerging technology and economics of desalination by reverse osmosis (1 July, p 30). I was particularly intrigued by the suggestion that wind power be used to power the plants.
However, it seems to me that she missed a trick here. The implication of her article was that conventional wind turbines would provide electrical power to drive the desalination plants via the electricity grid. Surely the neater solution would be to house the desalination tubes in the towers of offshore windmills.
They would neatly fit in vertical arrays around the inside of the tower. Pumps at the top of the tower could be directly driven, mechanically, from the windmill shaft. The “fresh” water could then be pumped ashore, again using mechanical wind power. Electrical losses in the generator, transmission cables and pumps would be avoided, and, surely, laying and maintaining pipes must be cheaper and easier than cables.
Wind generation of electricity is often criticised because the product cannot be stored, and so spare capacity elsewhere is needed to cover for windless times. This criticism disappears if the product is fresh water, which is routinely stored in reservoirs.
Intuitively, it seems to me that the relatively high torque and low speed of wind generator sails would be ideal to drive suitably designed high-pressure desalination pumps directly.
Late allergy
After years of eating and enjoying sufficient quantities of pistachio nuts to be recognised by my friends as an aficionado, at the age of 40 I developed an allergy to them (24 June, p 40). In retrospect I recognise the “tingly, itchy feeling” at the back of the throat described by Anna Gosline. I certainly recognise the subsequent symptoms.
I therefore cannot agree with the hypothesis that childhood was the window of development of the allergy. Neither can I agree that slow build-up of exposure to the nuts can in any way inure me to their potentially lethal effects. I had already been eating more than enough for many years when the allergy hit me.
Bring back ether
In Alison Motluk’s article on less dangerous alternatives to alcohol, she missed out my favourite historical alcohol substitute, ether (15 July, p 30). This was popular in Ireland from the 1840s onwards until its classification as a poison in the 1890s limited its sale. It was promoted as a safe alternative to alcohol by one Father Mathew, a very successful temperance campaigner, and swiftly became popular “as a liquor on which a man might get drunk with a clear conscience”.
Apparently railway carriages and markets used to reek of the substance, such was the ubiquity of its use, and over 17,000 gallons of ether were consumed annually in Ireland during the period. Ether’s effect is similar to alcohol’s but only lasts about 15 minutes, after which the user “sobers up” with no significant after-effects (not that I would recommend consuming it).
As ether is not very soluble in water it was drunk neat in small shots preceded by a glass of water. This was necessary as ether vaporises at below body temperature and the water cooled the mouth sufficiently for the imbiber to get the ether down, although seasoned etheromaniacs could get away without it. There were a few side effects, such as profuse salivation, but the worst was “rather violent eructation” or “fetching” resulting from ether vaporisation further down the digestive tract. In 19th-century Ireland, where illumination was largely by naked flame, this sometimes had fatal results due to ether’s combustibility, and there are records from Russia, where ether drinking was also popular, of a related explosion killing six children and injuring 15 adults.
While restricting its sale to pharmacies brought the use of ether as a temperance drink to an end, in the early 20th century noted occultist Aleister Crowley was using it as an ingredient in one of his rather challenging cocktails, alongside alcohol (old brandy, old kirsch, absinthe, a few drops of Tabasco sauce, syrup of ether to taste), and claimed to drink half a pint as “a bracer” each morning, though presumably not for temperance reasons.
Darwin's finches
In his article on scientific myths, Henry Nicholls rejects the widespread belief that the study of the Galapagos finches had any significant bearing on Darwin’s development of the theory of natural selection, stating that “the words ‘Darwin’ and ‘finches’ [first] appeared alongside each other in print…in 1935” (15 July, p 21). The late juxtaposition of the terms “Darwin” and “finches” may be accurate, but this does not tell us whether the diversity in beak sizes and shapes among Galapagos finches may have influenced Darwin’s thinking about the origin of species.
In his account, The Voyage of the Beagle (second edition, published 1845), Darwin devoted a figure to depicting this bill diversity in four species of ground finch found in the Galapagos archipelago: Geospiza magnirostris, Geospiza fortis, Geospiza parvula and Certhidea olivasea. He commented: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”
It is true, as Nicholls states, that Darwin “made almost no mention of these iconic birds in his voluminous writings”, but the mention he does make is astonishingly prescient, concisely forecasting the idea of the mutability of species elaborated on in On the Origin of Species, published subsequently, in 1859.
Happy homeopaths
It is true that some vets are strongly opposed to homeopathy (1 July, p 6). There are, however, just as many, if not more, who are happy with the discipline. Many vets who incorporate homeopathy into their practices receive regular referrals from their purely orthodox colleagues.
We are not privy to the internal deliberations of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and hence cannot speak for them. However, from discussions with them it is clear that they did not decide to “quietly remove a list of vets that offer homeopathy” because of any clinical considerations.
The change reflects a redirection of the college’s information strategy towards an electronic form, and at the end of the day the information available may well be greater than at present. The college’s position is based on two considerations: firstly that only a qualified veterinary surgeon can legally treat an animal in the UK, and secondly that the choice of treatment is the preserve (and responsibility) of the individual practitioner.
Opponents of homeopathy also imply that because a treatment is used in orthodox medicine it has been proven to be effective, which is untrue. A website run by the medical journal BMJ and dedicated to evaluating treatments for humans () reveals that only 15 per cent of those investigated were rated as “beneficial” and 48 per cent were classed as of “unknown effectiveness”. The situation in the veterinary world will not be materially different.
How do they do it?
Mary Midgley decries calling consciousness “miraculous” on the grounds that it is just one of the interesting things that complex organisms do (15 July, p 22). Yet the problem is not that they do it but that no explanatory paradigm exists for the emergence of consciousness from brains. That remains true whether we look at physics, behaviour, modern philosophy or information theory: there is no objective description of consciousness at any level, and since we can’t describe it objectively it is hardly surprising that we have no objective explanation either.