Supernatural politics
I could not agree more with Lawrence Krauss on the dismaying extent of religiosity shown by Republican candidates for US president (28 July, p 21). Unfortunately, the candidates are a reflection of the electorate.
After decades of doing a terrible job in science education we have produced a vast majority of voters who are increasingly ignorant of the world of science, and hence increasingly reliant on supernatural or religious guidance in decision-making.
If a politician, running for any office in our country, were to admit to being a nonbeliever, they would be assured of a resounding defeat 鈥� no matter how well qualified they might be.
Screening screening
Thank you for your report on chlamydia screening (4 August, p 7). May I correct a few misunderstandings about our work?
The intervention that we evaluated is not being “piloted in England” and we did not invite people to attend clinics for screening.
We evaluated proactive chlamydia screening, in which people were sent testing kits through the post and invited to return specimens collected at home to a laboratory. Only people with positive test results were asked to attend their GP’s surgery for treatment and partner notification. See for further details of the ClaSS project.
Opportunistic chlamydia screening is, however, being rolled out across England. This focuses on people who are already attending health services for other reasons. It is not possible to say whether opportunistic screening is “cheaper” than proactive screening because the economic outcomes used in the two studies differed and cannot be directly compared.
My role was to build the mathematical model to predict the impact of proactive chlamydia screening, not to be project leader.
Data consent
Robert Matthews cites the Academy of Medical Sciences’ 2006 report Personal Data for Public Good, but muddles two very important issues in reaching his conclusions (4 August, p 18). The first concerns the important distinction between large, prospective cohort studies, such as Biobank, and research involving the “secondary” use of health information originally gathered for other purposes, usually clinical care.
Explicit informed consent is quite rightly the cornerstone of projects such as Biobank. It should also be sought for secondary data research, wherever possible. However, for several reasons, some of which Matthews cites, seeking consent for secondary data research may compromise effective population coverage and lead to biased conclusions. In any case, it may be impossible to obtain consent in large studies using data collected for another purpose years before.
Secondly, Matthews confuses consent with privacy, which leads him to quote misleadingly from our report. We do not suggest that there is “undue emphasis” on the need for explicit consent in the secondary use of data. Rather, we highlight the challenge that policies emphasising privacy and autonomy present for this form of medical research, which is undertaken for public, rather than individual, benefit. Ethics committees and other bodies must set the risks for an individual in terms of privacy and autonomy against the public benefit from the research.
A large and detailed study of public attitudes by Barret et al (2006) showed that, as long as confidentiality and security were assured, the great majority of participants supported the use of personal data for cancer research and . Most supported making such registration a legal requirement in the UK, as it is in many European countries.
Building standards
Incorporating energy efficiency into new buildings is indeed an effective method of cutting carbon emissions. It also uses existing technology and is not excessively expensive (28 July, p 8). But China is not the only country to have a problem conforming to existing national standards.
In the UK, where energy conservation measures have been included in building regulations since the 1960s, albeit initially at minimal levels, research by the in 2004 found that only 40 per cent of new homes met the legal requirements for energy efficiency. A subsequent study by the concluded that energy efficiency was viewed with “a feeling of triviality” and was put “low in the priority ranking” 鈥� not by architects and developers, but by building control officers responsible for ensuring that buildings comply with the legislation, who were also found to be “unlikely to take steps to ensure enforcement”.
It seems clear that there is a need for education, training and cultural change to accompany legislation, if nations are serious about cutting carbon emissions.
Drought re-doubt
It is a pity that Steve Short of Ecoengineers didn’t look a little further north when assuring readers that the drought in Australia is a thing of the past (4 August, p 21). It may well have broken in the southern half of the continent in recent months, but unfortunately that fizzled out about halfway up the New South Wales coast.
The north coast and most of eastern Queensland are still getting only about a third of the average annual rainfall and have had no appreciable rain for two months. Our annual bush fire season has started several weeks early because the bush is so dry. There are no indications that this is likely to change, and optimistic predictions from the Weather Bureau of a La Ni帽a developing seem to be slipping away.
Cloning humans
David Shaw claims that there are some concerns with cloning that go beyond the risks we already know about and accept in other forms of reproduction (4 August, p 20). But his examples are themselves concerns that are already known and accepted in other forms of reproduction.
He suggests that if a man and a woman fall in love, their cloned children, although brought up as brother and sister, might also fall in love (or a parent might fall in love with a clone of their partner). But families are normally protected from this by the Westermarck effect, in which unrelated children raised together seem to be in a “brother/sister” mental category and so do not fall in love. Israeli kibbutzim and Taiwanese Shim pua marriages provide the best-studied examples of this phenomenon.
Conversely, genetically related individuals may fall in love with close relatives if they have been separated from birth. Attraction to a very close relative is a danger independent of cloning and is usually prevented by the appropriate family context.
Although people do want to create babies together, when that is impossible, an identical twin may be better than nothing.
From Frank Fahy
David Shaw says, “It is obviously true that it is better to be born a clone than never to exist.” I was puzzled and asked a number of friends, who unanimously consider it rather less than self-evident. In the context of Shaw’s letter, one can only make a valid statement about the relative desirabilities of human states.
Not existing does not logically qualify for inclusion in this, or any other, meaningful category.
Stockbridge, Hampshire, UK
Must print this
You report Antoine Suarez saying that, if Gerard ‘t Hooft is right and everything is determined, then ‘t Hooft didn’t do his Nobel-prizewinning work, the big bang did (4 August, p 10). This is a variation on the empty argument that, if there is no “free” will, we should not be locking up criminals in prison for acts that they cannot help.
Such arguments are empty because they contain a hidden asymmetry. Symmetrically, if the criminal (or ‘t Hooft) has no free will, then neither does the judge (or the Nobel committee). In a world without free will crime still leads to jail, and brilliant physics still leads to Stockholm.
Sibling saviours
It is excellent news that parents in the UK will probably be allowed to have sibling saviours to save children with “serious”, rather than merely life-threatening diseases (4 August, p 6). Perhaps legislators should now seize the opportunity not only to permit this far-sighted approach, but also to solve the donor organ crisis.
It should be possible to ensure that all children born to a couple are immunologically compatible so that, were one of the family to suffer a catastrophic organ failure, siblings would be on hand to provide another. Naturally, the elected saviour sibling would be required to provide the organ, although since the issue of consent does not arise with saviours at present, there is no need to suppose that this will be a problem in the future.
The scheme would, of course, work best for kidneys, as the saviours could rely on their spare to see them through; half a liver could also be donated without too much worry. A heart and/or lungs would be trickier, but it does not stretch the imagination to suppose that our brave scientists and legislators will be able to see a way around this inconvenience.
Inheriting autism
Your article on explaining autism’s capriciousness seems to yell out that the condition is sex-linked and on the X chromosome (28 July, p 18).
If men, who inherit only one of their mother’s X chromosomes, have a 50 per cent chance of inheriting it, while the odds are much lower for women, who have two X chromosomes, does this not suggest autism is caused by a recessive gene or genes and only appears dominant in men because they don’t have a second X chromosome?
The editor writes:
鈥� The X chromosome may indeed be involved in some cases of autism inheritance, but statistical analysis revealed that it cannot explain most cases. In a true X-linked disease, you would expect affected brothers to have inherited the same one of their mother’s two X chromosomes, the faulty one. But in families with several autistic boys, these brothers often don’t share the same X chromosome, suggesting that other chromosomes must be involved.
For the snark was…
You correctly attributed “boojum” to the great Lewis Carroll (11 August, p 50). But Carroll’s boojum did not “softly and suddenly vanish away”; rather, it mysteriously caused anyone observing it to do so.
Researchers studying single-point topological defects should be warned of their mistake before it is too late, or we may all have to manage somehow without them.
Mathematically inexact
I am horrified and appalled by Gregory Chaitin’s review of How Mathematicians Think by William Byers (28 July, p 49). To say that Euler had “never heard of the notion of mathematical rigour” suggests he had never heard of Euclid. Equally, you cannot say that Ramanujan never comprehended the idea of proof: he had many wonderful insights but he also made many equally wonderful mistakes. And without rigour, how can we tell which is which? Also, Chaitin grossly underestimates the amount of imagination and creativity that goes into “normal” mathematics.
Mathematics is not dying. Many modern mathematicians have been siphoned off into physics and computer science, where they continue to do excellent mathematics under different names. Questions of convergence and the infinite are very much alive in quantum field theory.
Anatomical error
In describing evolution’s greatest mistakes you omit what for me is its biggest blunder (11 August, p 36). It relates to the male waterworks. Whoever designed a system that involves a collapsible pipe that passes through an organ that expands with age deserves to be sued for every last penny he has.