Alcohol hurts for a reason
The bar chart accompanying the article on making alcohol safer seems to suggest the importance of this effort (and therefore presumably the research investment) is related to a “global burden” of disease and disability attributed to alchohol consumption (15 July, p 30). I find this chart misleading. Most of the article concerns developing drugs for the reduction of hangover effects: clumsiness; drowsiness (perhaps preventing the drinker from passing out?); sobering up after getting drunk; and so on. From the bar chart accompanying the article, it seems to me that even if all these goals are met, the health cost of alcohol consumption will not appreciably decline, because the bulk of it is due to the damage that alcohol does to the body 鈥� for example epilepsy, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Most of the drugs being developed are not intended to make alchohol safer at all, but to allow its consumption without experiencing the associated unpleasantness 鈥� they are totally recreational goals, as opposed to health goals. They might even encourage people to drink more, which would increase health risks, given that drinkers would no longer need to worry about being sufficiently recovered for a work presentation the next day, or could continue drinking when they might have passed out if they were drinking normal alcohol. This means the health costs and “global burden” of alcohol consumption would be about the same or even increase, even if costs related to accidents were reduced or eliminated.
More body electric
Andy Coghlan reports on the application of electric currents to the body to speed up healing as research in its infancy (29 July, p 15). The Soviet Union developed as part of its space programme an instrument resembling a TV remote control, called Skanna, to treat astronauts in a non-polluting way in space. My local health practitioner has been using this system for a few years after training in Bulgaria. He successfully treated me after I tore a tendon and sprained my ankle.
Pain and pity
Henry Greely seems to imply that the prospect of ending human suffering through biological enhancement is unlikely to be a bad thing (5 August, p 19). I observe that people are usually unable to empathise with problems they have not themselves experienced. People who have not suffered would likely be even less inhibited about inflicting suffering on other creatures, human or otherwise. Of course, for some, too much suffering deadens empathy and causes them to delight in tormenting others. As usual, a balance is needed.
Evolved simplicity
The letter from John Hind was very good in pointing out that just because genes are “selfish” does not mean animals are too, since cooperation is often in their interest (19 August, p 20). I must take issue, however, with his definition of evolution as being “the generation of complexity through mutation and selection”.
Evolution just means change. Organisms are as likely to become less complex, if it helps their survival, as they are to become more complex: consider parasites and viruses.
Given enough time, some animals will become more complex through chance, but the vast majority will not. Sometimes you get movement in a particular direction, like running faster, but this does not necessarily entail more complexity. Evolution has no foresight, it is not heading anywhere and it is not tied up with the Victorian notion of “progress”. It is not a ladder leading up to humans at the top, it is a bush. Whatever works survives. That’s all there is to it.
The selfish meme
Ian Gilbert no doubt has a balanced view of the overall shape of Richard Dawkins’s thinking (19 August, p 20). But Elaine Morgan is still right to deplore the impact of The Selfish Gene on “millions of non-academic readers”.
Hardly any have read his more scientific work, and many who have not read even that one book have concluded that it has been “scientifically proven” that “we are born selfish”, as Dawkins says in his first chapter, confusing his technical sense of the word “selfish” and its everyday meaning.
Coming in 1976, when the world was about to plunge into three decades of unbridled market economics, his celebrated book can be said to have helped to prepare the intellectual ground in which the growing inequalities of the last 30 years could take root.
Security and the state
Your editorial of 19 August states that 54,000 box cutters and 1500 guns have been intercepted in 18 months at US airports (p 5). From this comes the conclusion, “it is hard to argue that flying was not safer without them”. This is the “if it saves just one child” argument and it tells us nothing. What percentage were these confiscations of the total screenings? How many items were being carried maliciously? Given this information we might be able to argue about the risk.
This is no trivial point. Over the later 20th century we faced the very real threat of nuclear war. You may recall the “megadeath”, usually pluralised: several million scorched and irradiated corpses were thought “acceptable” by some. Yet we needed none of the current “security” hysteria to carry on with our lives.
To defend against that threat, we did need a corporate state. The threat of terrorism, in contrast, puts us each as individuals at risk of being arbitrarily killed by these criminals and the corporate state can offer little protection against such a small, if vicious, threat.
What is needed, as you say, is intelligence 鈥� but what kind? Like the tiny hair roots that draw nutrients to sustain a tree, the intelligence can only come from us. For that, however, we need a police force that is trusted, can be gossiped to, and which listens, collates and advises level-headed leaders. Very sadly, while our police are so bureaucratic and isolated, our politicians so given to “glorifying” terrorism by their relentless panicking, and our media so anxious to give free publicity, criminals will continue to kill us as the fancy takes them.
Very small Raquel
Feedback’s item about the headline “What do Raquel Welch and quantum physics have in common?” puzzled me too (19 August). I think the answer may be that she was in Fantastic Voyage (1966), where apparently (I have never seen it) a surgical team is miniaturised and inserted into a dying man. I suppose this fits with the references to the Virtual Microscopy Centre and the Nanoscale Interfaces Centre at the University of Leicester.
Maybe that’s one way they can get more pupils studying science.
A bit of what you hate…
I agree with Richard Simpson-Birks that allergies can be acquired late in life (5 August, p 21). When my 6-year-old stepdaughter required an eardrum graft following a school bus accident, the surgeon tested her for allergies to various items that would have prevented the graft being successful. At the same time he tested my wife and me.
All three of us were to varying degrees allergic to different foods, and the surgeon explained that allergies could be acquired in later life if one suffered a prolonged infection. The immune system may then develop an inability to distinguish between the offending virus and some protein molecules in foods.
Naturally, when you feel ill for a long period you tend to cosset yourself and eat your favourite foods. The implication of the surgeon’s explanation is that when sick you should eat only foods you don’t like.
For the record
鈥� In the 12 August issue we stated that crinoids, or sea lilies, appeared 300 million years ago and pre-dated fish (p 49). Both have actually been around for a lot longer than that, coexisting in the Ordovician period between 490 and 443 million years ago, with the first fish possibly coming earlier than crinoids. Also, the subclass of crinoids with the ability to move appeared 200 million years ago, not a mere 200,000 years ago.
鈥� Hone Harawira is a member of the New Zealand parliament for the Maori Party, not a “Maori minister” as we described him (19 August, p 12).
Proof and reproof
Your coverage of the International Congress of Mathematicians and its award of the Fields medals is welcome, and no self-respecting journalist could possibly pass up the bizarre human-interest story of Grigori Perelman (26 August, p 41). However, your coverage paints an unduly pessimistic picture of the state of mathematics, and occasionally comes unhinged altogether.
Perelman’s new ideas are a major cause for celebration. They have already opened up a new and exciting area of mathematics 鈥� the geometry of Ricci flows. They may well crack two open questions of outstanding importance, the Poincar茅 Conjecture and Thurston’s geometrisation conjecture. It is hardly surprising that ideas of such potential significance are being checked very carefully for subtle logical errors, and in this case the originality of thought and the breadth of techniques employed makes this process unusually difficult. It is a big strength of today’s mathematics that it can successfully tackle problems that have baffled previous generations.
Do you have the slightest evidence for your statement that “eccentricity is almost de rigueur” for mathematicians? This is naive stereotyping. The subject certainly boasts some notable eccentrics, and Perelman is the latest, but these are a tiny exception, and eccentricity is not confined to mathematics.
Perelman may well be “disillusioned” about mathematics, but that seems to be because he is becoming disillusioned with everything, rather than because of some systematic failure of the subject itself. Over the last few years he has become increasingly reclusive, and his views ever more idiosyncratic. Having solved 鈥� to his own satisfaction, and probably to that of the rest of us 鈥� one of the subject’s biggest open problems, he probably feels a deep sense of anticlimax. But the mathematical community can now move ahead, building on his ideas, which is an exciting prospect.
Computer proofs, far from opening up cracks in the foundations of mathematics, have been a standard technique in the subject since the 1970s, and are generally viewed pragmatically by research mathematicians. They provide a powerful method for handling vast but routine calculations quickly and accurately. They do not change the nature of “proof” in any fundamental way, but they do raise technical issues about verification. These issues are already present in pencil-and-paper proofs, but are sharper in the context of the computer.
Most new proofs still have the rapier-like character of Euclid’s theorem on primes, but major open questions are unlikely to yield to such simple insights, because if they did, they wouldn’t have remained open.
Often the solution to these big problems requires the invention of entire new areas of mathematics, a lengthy and complex process. Examples are Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem, and Perelman’s own work. These new techniques represent important advances that enrich mathematics and increase its power. It makes no more sense to complain about the length or complexity of the solutions than it does to complain that Mount Everest is rather high, making it difficult to climb. What you should be doing is to celebrate the conquest of the peak.
The worst part of your coverage is the editorial, with its “truths… closer to home” (p 5). A home truth is something you tell someone who is in denial. However, the mathematical community is well aware of the issues that you belatedly raise, and has been making strenuous efforts to deal with them for decades. You state that “many maths meetings do not have a single woman present”. This may still be true of a few small specialist meetings, but the proportion of women in mathematics is increasing steadily. Since the early 1990s, in the US, women have received around 45 per cent of all first degrees in mathematics, and they received almost one-third of all doctorates in the mathematical sciences in the academic year 2003-2004.
You call for more “cross-pollination” between mathematics and other fields, “not restricting themselves to physics”. I don’t know why you think that current applications of mathematics are exclusively to physics, since this has not been the case for at least 60 years. Applications to biology are an especially fertile field nowadays, but areas like engineering, economics and business have long been a happy hunting-ground for applied mathematicians. The mathematics department at the University of Warwick has run a research programme in interdisciplinary mathematics for 15 years. It now has a mathematics in medicine initiative, and is about to start up interdisciplinary centres in systems biology (with the biology department and medical school), discrete mathematics (with computer science and business studies), and complex systems (with too many departments to list).
You refer to the project to digitise the mathematical archives as “bogged down by petty disputes”, a rather simplistic characterisation of a very complex series of issues. However, a huge amount of mathematics is now available online, and the mathematical community has been at the forefront of the push for public access to scientific journals, the growth of online resources, and web-based access such as MathSciNet.
Too little poetry
In discussing the links between poetry and science, Simon Armitage concludes that what opened the bomb hatch over Hiroshima was “a poetic nightmare vision of hellfire” (26 August, p 20). I would suggest it was the absence of such a vision that allowed it to be opened; it was only after reports of the carnage came back that Robert Oppenheimer and the majority of his team realised they had “blood on their hands” and discontinued work on the project.
Drugs, fans and parents
The call for drug use in sport to be legalised ignores two factors critical for any sport: fans and parents (19 August, p 18). The fans who watch sport expect the participants to be “clean”. As a German TV station said of the Tour de France, people expect a “sporting event, not a show demonstrating the performances of the pharmaceutical industry”.
I suspect that most sane parents would do all they could to keep their children away from sports in which future success would ultimately depend even on supposedly “safe” drugs. The runner Sebastian Coe recently blamed the worldwide decline of athletics on an “exodus of parents and their children” following drug scandals.
The perfect riposte to these proposals came from the British comedian Paul Merton, who quoted one campaigner saying that athletes should be allowed to use all possible means to improve their performance. “Fine,” said Merton, “I’ll have a motorbike.”
From Thom Drane
Michael Le Page is wrong to claim that there is a “lack of any safety limit on the concentration of red blood cells…doping authorities allow athletes to compete no matter how high their blood cell concentration, as long as it is not due to doping”.
National and international doping agencies may not engage in random blood testing themselves, but in cycling the International Cycling Union (UCI) can and does test riders’ haematocrit (concentration of red blood cells) before racing. Those with a haematocrit greater than 50 per cent are prevented from competing regardless of the cause, be it blood doping or innocent pre-testing dehydration, which elevates a naturally high haematocrit. This procedure takes up the bulk of the UCI’s rules on “sporting safety and conditions”, suggesting that the organisation does have the health and safety of its charges in mind.
Portland, Oregon, US
Fate of marine bacteria
Your article on the impact of ocean acidification on the global ecosystem did an excellent job of casting light on a neglected aspect of climate change (5 August, p 29). It failed, however, to cover one of the most environmentally important groups of marine organisms 鈥� the bacteria. These drive the carbon and nitrogen cycles and those of a whole range of trace gases of environmental significance, such as methane and dimethyl sulphide.
We do not know what effects a drop in pH will have on the physiology of these organisms, or their diversity or community structure. We do know that acidifying seawater increases the concentration of the ammonium ion whilst decreasing availability of ammonia, and that ammonia-oxidising bacteria are central to the nitrogen cycle and cannot oxidise the ammonium ion. Couple knock-on effects of this with potential detrimental effects to denitrifying, nitrifying and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and you have an intricate web of interactions that need to be investigated 鈥� in the nitrogen cycle alone.
Though another reason for drastic cuts in carbon emissions was hardly required, we have one. It is just as complex as the others and is likely to have as profound an impact on the planet.
The editor writes:
鈥� Several readers have asked about details of the chemistry involved in ocean acidification. A full account can be found in chapter 2 of a Royal Society report, available free from .