Realities of death
I have often been disturbed and even disgusted with attitudes towards death in our culture (13 October, p 40). Many people avoid talking about the realities of death when it happens and readily change the conversation. Others try to make light of it. They are so quick to make jokes about those who have only recently died. Instead of honouring their lives, some prefer to turn them into entertainment and the reality of death fades into the background.
I think it is sad that so many people die alone in a hospital attached to machines. In the past, more people died at home in familiar surroundings. Their final moments were spent in the midst of their loved ones and possessions, things that were deeply connected with their life. Death is too clinical and sterilised now, disconnected from the life they lived and the person they are.
A verse in the Bible says: “Better is it to go to the house of mourning than to go to the banquet house, because that is the end of all mankind; and the one alive should take it to his heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:2) By taking death to heart rather than softening it or avoiding it altogether, we can put our lives in perspective. We can avoid the futility of materialism and appreciate the value of spirituality. The time we spend with our loved ones becomes more precious. We also need to learn how to mourn properly. Our aversion to the harsh realities of death and a “let’s get on with it” attitude are very damaging. We need to mourn fully 鈥� to express the total loss we feel when our loved ones are torn away from us. Then we can heal more deeply.
I appreciate the fact that you publish articles like these because they touch on other important aspects of our human experience.
Ghetto isolation
Dimitry Volchenkov’s surprise in discovering that the ancient Ghetto area “was the most isolated district” in Venice is as nothing compared to that of those who actually know the city (3 November, p 8).
At a little over a kilometre, the Ghetto is a trivial distance from the city’s heart at the Rialto Bridge. A few days ago it took my wife and I just 10 minutes, walking at a leisurely pace, to make the trip.
The Ghetto’s isolation was juridical, not geographic: it was probably the world’s first open prison, its population locked up at night and forced to wear a distinguishing uniform. Their “crime”: being Jewish.
Isolation is clearly a major factor in social well being but there are many examples demonstrating that this is a complex issue: for example, the most notorious criminal ghetto in Victorian London, the St Giles Rookery, was but a stone’s throw from opulent Oxford Street (the slum was knocked down to create New Oxford Street).
However, Volchenkov and Philippe Blanchard argue that “Geographical isolation is the prime cause of social deprivation, economic inactivity and crime” and had developed their algorithm to “capture a neighbourhood’s inaccessibility” with the aim of exposing hidden islands of future deprivation. The fact that their equations showed that the ghetto was inaccessible, was therefore offered as somehow “proving” their starting point.
For this to be so, one has to implicitly accept both that their method is valid (it isn’t, as you can discover for yourself if you visit this wonderful city) and that the Ghetto was socially deprived, economically inactive and prone to criminality. Despite problems due to severe overcrowding, the evidence for the latter is quite the reverse.
The Ghetto probably derived its name from the Italian word for the metal foundries that originally stood there. That the generic term ghetto has become, when describing some of the world’s most deprived city districts, a term with more and more negative connotations should not be used as an excuse to rewrite history.
Large Hadron Font
The debate as to whether or not a science magazine should cover religion is rearing its head again (for example, 20 October, p 27). As a friend of mine put it: “That one was won when churches began to put up lightning conductors”.
Until the Large Hadron Collider needs a blessing in order to function properly, I think religion need only trouble your pages in terms of understanding the God delusion.
Milk of human…
You list 10 ways to avoid cancer (3 November, p 10). I would be very grateful if you could help this 51-year-old university academic understand how, after I have slimmed, given up bacon sandwiches and Guinness, I might follow the advice to “try to breastfeed for six months”.
鈥� The recommendation is that mothers should breastfeed infants for up to six months. The evidence that breastfeeding protects the mother against breast cancer is convincing. It may also protect the mother against ovarian cancer. Children who are breastfed are less likely to be obese, so it may also protect them against cancers for which obesity is a risk factor.
Speliong misteakes
Since my original message to Feedback (20 October) I have been doing further research on misspellings, using a famous web search engine. As Feedback has already noted (3 November) some words have been misspelled so often that they have elided into new words in their own right (or rigth). Two obvious examples are “pwn” for “own” and “teh” for “the”. It is clear from both that the constant misspelling eventually gave rise to a new word in its own right, so neither now counts in the quest for the most commonly misspelt word.
If language is evolving on the internet (and we already have an abundance of “lol”s, “rofl”s and “imao”s) will there come a time when online English is classifiable as a language in its own right?
And as an afterword, I now see that the top hit for “becuase” in the famous web search engine is a blog article quoting your article about my original email. How’s that for a circular reference?
Feedback glosses over some important distinctions between different kinds of error.
“Becuase” is definitely a typo, as virtually anybody spotting it would agree. By contrast “accomodate” is not necessarily a typo. Many people believe it is spelled with only one m. The same holds for “definately” and “seperate”. These errors are in the mind of the authors and would therefore not be corrected by them, so it’s not surprising that they outnumber “becuase”. What they have in common with true typos is that they can be spotted by a spellchecker.
Then we come to “from” and “form”: a spellchecker would fail to spot “the human from”. A good grammar checker should, however, find an anomaly in “The human from has inspired generations of artists.”
The next item in Feedback has another nugget: “…become a competent an defective member of a HAZOP team”. There is definitely a grammatical mistake here, but if this were picked up by a grammar checker and changed to “become a competent and defective member of a HAZOP team”, the result would pass both spelling and grammar checks. To spot that competent and defective are not usually goals one would simultaneously try for requires a semantic check.
More resaerch is perhaps needed, but Feedback should have accomodated these different error types in seperate categories.
For the record
鈥� A picture captioned “synthetic dyes in the making” (27 October, p 56) was in fact of a carbon-black factory in Romania.
鈥� Feedback’s devotion to Pastafarianism failed to prevent us misspelling its website, which is (10 November)
鈥� The uncrewed aerial vehicle pictured in our story about the Predator B UAV (27 October, p 29) was in fact the Hermes 450 made by Elbit.
鈥� In a story on oil production (27 October, p 5) we said it was predicted to fall by 7 per cent a year. In fact, the Energy Watch Group report said oil production would fall several per cent a year.
Fluoride flayed
Your report on fluoride in tea includes the sentence: “In places where people ingest too little fluoride, it is added to water supplies to strengthen tooth enamel and prevent cavities” (6 October, p 21).
This is surprising, given that in Europe the battle against fluoridation is largely won. Fluoride (in the generic sense) is not a nutrient; there is no “too little”. It does not strengthen enamel or prevent cavities except for a slight topical effect.
There is now ample evidence that the reduction in tooth decay (caries) in industrialised countries in recent decades has occurred as much 鈥� or more 鈥� in non-fluoridated areas as in fluoridated ones, and that cessation of fluoridation is not followed by any increase in the incidence of caries. There is, however, much evidence associating fluoridation with bone cancer, suppressed thyroid function, lowered IQ, bone fracture, increased levels of lead and other intoxicants in body tissues, and bad effects on other body systems. All these associations hold for concentrations of fluoride comparable to those imposed in fluoridated water supplies in North America.
Aside from efficacy and toxicity, it is unethical, if not illegal, to administer a substance that has not been approved by a proper authority, that is not controlled in dosage, that is not consented to by the recipient after informed consultation, and the effects of which are not monitored by competent professionals. In North America fluoridation fails on all counts, being unapproved, unevaluated, not consented to, not controlled and not subject to refusal.
Question for Watson
Why did Peter Aldhous not ask James Watson about Rosalind Franklin (20 October, p 58)? He saw fit to question Craig Venter about the size of his ego and gene patenting 鈥� but not to ask Watson about the woman without whose work he and Francis Crick could not have deduced DNA’s structure. Watson says he wishes to “encourage younger people to want to go into science”. The way Franklin’s crucial contribution to the discovery of DNA’s structure has been overlooked hardly encourages young people, especially women.
Pollution link
Your story about “double diabetes” taunts readers with the possibility that “we might have understood it completely” (27 October, p 48) and then misses some of the most important new science on diabetes in the past two years, which suggests that environmental contaminants increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Analysis by Duk-Hee Lee and colleagues of data from the US Centers for Disease Control’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey indicates that within the general US population 鈥� excluding occupational exposure 鈥� people in the highest exposure group to a mixture of persistent organic pollutants are 38 times more likely to have type 2 diabetes.
Treating schizophrenia
David Kingdon argues that trying to “unpick the biological basis of schizophrenia… has been utterly unhelpful to patients” (13 October, p 22).
We would be interested to see him explain this to the thousands of people who have benefited from the fruits of 50 years of research into antipsychotic drugs, beginning with the discovery of chlorpromazine. What’s more, understanding potential causative mechanisms has led to the development of the first non-dopaminergic antipsychotic drug. Studies of the impact of environmental stressors on individuals with certain neurotransmitter genotypes has, likewise, massively advanced our understanding of psychotic illness.
Development of the new “atypical” antipsychotics with fewer side effects has greatly benefited patients, as has clozapine for those with treatment-resistant schizophrenia. As a consequence of these developments, patients are discharged from hospital much more quickly. Has cognitive behavioural therapy had any role in this? No.
Psychotherapies have no role in the treatment of people who are acutely ill. Even their ability to help schizophrenic patients in remission is highly questionable and has minimal evidence to support it. Kingdon suggests that changing diagnostic terms may help. Possibly, but it won’t make people better.
Kingdon favours replacement of the name “schizophrenia” (13 October). Incredible success has been achieved in the treatment of this disease since I entered medical school in 1953. Before this I visited Stockton State Hospital 鈥� and I will never forget the anxious and fearful faces of the majority of the hundred or so I saw of the 5000 inmates there.
A bubbly psychiatrist told us of a recently started study on the effect of chlorpromazine on schizophrenia, the major disease of the patients there. By the time my training was completed, state mental hospitals began to close. The population of the California State Mental Hospitals fell from 37,000 in 1955 to 2500 in 1980. This drug and its successors have changed the character of mental disease. I believe that schizophrenia is the most treatable of all mental illnesses. Behaviour problems still develop when administration of medication is disrupted.
I make it clear to the schizophrenics that I follow that their disease can be well controlled only if they continue to take their medicine. I have not heard them complain about the name of their disease. I hope that others who follow them will recall or learn of the remarkable change in mental health wrought by the red cell membrane-bending chlorpromazine. The three hospitals I visited are all now gone, their plants converted to other uses. Like the tuberculosis hospitals of the same era. I don’t miss them at all.
Lip-hearing
I thoroughly enjoyed your article on mind tricks (22 September, p 34), and appreciate your inclusion of the McGurk effect and . As you say, the McGurk effect demonstrates the “fights” or compromises that occur when what we see is different to what we hear. It has also been crucial to recent proposals that the majority of the perceptual brain is designed for multi-sensory input. This idea is supported by the McGurk effect’s ubiquity: it works in all languages, with pre-verbal infants, and even when touching, rather than seeing, a face.
Study of audiovisual speech has been central to the emerging realisation that many brain areas once considered specific to a single sense, in fact process input from multiple senses. Imaging evidence shows that regardless of whether one can hear, lip-reading visual speech information alone can affect activity in the supposed “auditory” parts of the brain.
Researching race
Robert Sternberg asserts that race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one (27 October, p 24). Such politically correct assertions serve only to inhibit potentially useful research into the various manifestations of humanity.
Certain human groups have obviously different biological attributes, such as skin colour, eye shape, ability to metabolise ethanol, susceptibility to malaria and athletic performance. No doubt there are many others that we have not yet discovered 鈥� and may never discover if researchers are put off by fear of being tainted racist when trying to investigate these differences.
Sternberg says that we do not refer to differently coloured moths as races because “we are less interested in creating social classes for moths than for people”. 杏吧原创s may not call the moths races, but they might call them subspecies. He repeats the oft-heard point that there are more genetic differences within a race than between them, and that race therefore has no biological meaning.
Have any comparative studies been done among animal subspecies? Is there more genetic difference, for example, among Bengal tigers than between Bengal and Siberian tigers? And, if there is, will we stop calling them different subspecies? If not, then why shouldn’t we classify humans this way? The problem, I fear, is not biology, but that “differences” equate to “inequalities”. Different just means different.
Ever since Charles Darwin wrote, we know that words like species, subspecies, varieties and races have no definite meaning, but are used to describe a spectrum of variations in living creatures. You can decide not to use any of those words, if you don’t like the consequences of using them. However, it is certainly not wrong to use them as they are a useful way of describing this biological variation.
Sternberg, however, mentions that there is more difference within the so-called races than between them and concludes that the word “race” is inappropriate.
Saint Genest Lachamp, Ard猫che, France
Graviton conundrum
Michael Lemonick describes a black hole as “a spinning point of infinite density surrounded by an event horizon from which nothing can escape, not even light” (6 October, p 36). I have been reading this description for about 30 years. It has been repeated so often in all sorts of media that in has become ingrained into our psyche, so much so, that the phrase itself now seems beyond question.
And yet it does seem obvious that something may, in fact, escape from the black hole. If it does exist, the graviton must be able to perform this feat 鈥� otherwise how else can the hole further accumulate mass?
And if a passing body is accelerated by the spin of the hole, surely in accordance with Einstein’s theory of the equivalence of mass and energy that body must gain mass equivalent to that the hole must lose?