Anaesthetists' interest
It is not befitting of a journal of your high standard to open this article by describing anaesthetists of having a somewhat boring reputation and accusing a group of them (and by implication the rest of the profession) of attempting to derail the global arms treaty (20 October, p 50).
The attitude betrayed in this article is somewhat simplistic and the author obviously has no concept of the enormous positive impact that the science and art of anaesthesia has had on humankind. Modern surgery has only become possible thanks to the ability of anaesthetists to render someone unconscious, protect their physiology while in this state of “suspended animation”, defend them from the insult of the surgery and then return them to a conscious state shortly thereafter. It has been a long road from the early attempts to remove carious teeth in the 17th century though to the modern age where organs can be transplanted, the heart and lungs can be bypassed and countless other operations performed on humans. If one looks at the average distribution of patients in any hospital, 85% of them have been admitted for a surgical procedure, usually performed under anaesthesia. To accuse anaesthetists of having a reputation of being boring, displays complete ignorance of this situation.
Furthermore, it is unfair to vaguely imply that a group of individuals who are engaged in some questionable research are representative of the profession. The anaesthetic profession is a well organized group of medical professionals that adhere to the highest ethical standards. To imply otherwise is an insult.
Spooky socks
Many have puzzled over entangled quantum socks (Letters since 22 September, p 25). Interestingly, the very instant I put a sock on my right foot its partner becomes a left sock.
For the record
鈥� We mentioned the “Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania” (3 November, p 30): the centre is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse Electric Company.
鈥� Simon Goodman does not work in Munich as we stated in the article on Germany’s biotech industry (17 November, p 62, UK edition), but for Merck KGaA at its headquarters in Darmstadt.
Reason or religion
You say that trying to tell people how they should think is likely to alienate them (10 November, p 3). I’ll respond with a quote from a popular bumper sticker: “Minds are like parachutes, they only work when they are open”. After a lengthy and absurd paragraph on how religion does not engender hatred and terrorism, you conclude by saying “Religious education is rarely a key radicalising factor.” For that banality, I’ll answer with another bumper sticker quote 鈥� taken from Voltaire: “If they can make you believe in absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities.”
It is really not complicated: science is applied reason while religion is institutionalised superstition. For three centuries the two have been locked in mortal combat, the forces of superstition in constant retreat to those of the enlightenment and reason. It takes courage to walk away from the religion you learned at your mother’s knee. Obviously, the editors of New 杏吧原创 are lacking in that department.
From Peter Scott, North Walsham, Norfolk, UK
I must take issue with your editorial. Contrary to the last paragraph, there is a problem with religion. It is in the word “belief”. A belief is something that is held without the need for proof. Religions require people to accept ideas that contradict common sense, experience and evidence. They enforce this at best by fear and guilt and at worst by torture and death.
Why is belief so dangerous? If someone allows him or herself to be persuaded to accept one absurd idea, it is then much easier to move them on to others, such as a statement that Muslims, blacks or Jews are inferior or damned. Another small step demands and decriminalises their destruction. The suspension of critical thought is very dangerous. Mark Twain said, “Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.”
The world would be far better place without religion. With the present revival of fundamental Christianity and Islam, this is not the time for rational people to appear to accept their existence as desirable. Fight the good fight!
Total recycling
Will all waste be recycled in the future, “down to the last gram” (20 October, p 30)? As a founder (in 1974) and former CEO of Zero Waste Systems in Oakland, California, I have some experience here. Our motto was “there is no away to throw things to” and we were very idealistic while trying to make a profit. We mostly worked with hazardous industrial and laboratory waste, much of it from Silicon Valley. We nearly went broke accepting surplus chemicals which were potentially usable but could not be economically purified, sold and distributed, or even given away. The more one tries to recycle a higher proportion of a mixed waste stream the greater the waste in the form of energy consumption, labour, wear and tear on equipment and capital. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees energy waste. Entropy makes mixing in toxic or problematic components free, yet their separation is very expensive in energy and other inputs.
We found that the key was to segregate the different wastes as close to their point of generation as possible. A mixed urban waste stream is a lousy candidate for very high percentages of recycling for these reasons. Only reasonably pure separated components are economically and energetically efficient to reuse. There is no way to prevent any of a huge variety of toxins from appearing in a mixed municipal waste stream.
In fact, the very idea of zero waste is nonsensical. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen wrote a book called The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. He concluded that in the very long term, the final product of all human activity was “waste, and a flux of human satisfaction”. The right goal is to realistically minimise waste, including all aspects of a process, while maximising the flux of human satisfaction that is the driving force of activity and indeed its purpose. Utopian notions of environmental perfection are themselves wasteful and dangerous to effective programs.
If you're so smart…
To win $25,000 for proving that a “universal computer” 鈥� one that could solve any problem in mathematics given enough time and memory 鈥� could be built from biological molecules such as DNA, seems a rather easy earn (27 October, p 29). There already are biological, DNA-based computing systems that are smart enough to create electronic and mechanical devices to assist them in their mathematical calculations. I just wish, as one of them, that I had been smart enough to pull such a $25,000 boondoggle myself.
Altruism's limits
In your editorial about multi-level selection, you suggest that altruism might replace “unrestrained” market forces (3 November, p 3). This hope ignores the fact that the groups competing to be “selected” in the ecosystem of a global marketplace are corporations and economic areas. Within these groups, cooperation and altruism do indeed improve their fitness, but cooperation between them too often serves only to monopolise markets and restrict access to them.
Regulating this finite ecosystem to guarantee access and competitive variety is the only form of restraint that can improve fairness and efficiency at the same time. Altruistic behaviour between the players is unlikely to do either.
Disallowed time
I have often read of the time-travel paradox, in which you go back in time and kill your grandparents, thus deleting your existence. But what makes people think that nature would allow them to kill their grandparents? Wouldn’t every opportunity you took to kill them likely be thwarted? The very fact that you exist means you could not do anything that would jeopardise your future birth.
Second-hand smoke
Your editorial and article highlight the dangers of exaggerating the health impact of exposure to second-hand smoke (10 November, p 3 and p 8). ASH (UK) endorses your conclusion that bad science can never be justified. ASH, unlike some organisations, has never asserted that a single 30-minute exposure to second-hand smoke is enough to trigger a heart attack, and we are not aware of any UK health advocates who have done so. What we do say, based on a growing body of evidence, is that repeated exposure to second-hand smoke can damage coronary arteries, which in turn can trigger heart disease.
As a matter of course, we aim to ensure that our work is evidence-based and we would never deliberately distort science to justify a particular campaign. The evidence of the harm to non-smokers exposed to tobacco smoke is so robust that there is no need to exaggerate it to justify tobacco control measures.
鈥� ASH (UK) has no connection with ASH (US), which is mentioned in our article.
Reason or religion
You nobly resist the temptation to give science the victory over religion, but I dispute your overly generous concessions (10 November, p 3). In making the practical point that trying to change how people think is likely to alienate them, you abdicate the scientific responsibility to distinguish truth from falsehood. It is not a question of purging religion, rather one of promoting critical thought.
You say the problem is not with religion per se. Politically, this may be true, but intellectually, yes, religion is a problem. Religion lays down in advance what is to be believed, and thus represents a betrayal of the intellect. Science, on the other hand, starts from a position of ignorance and gradually builds a secure network of interlocking ideas. From this emerges a world view incompatible with religion. The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, for example, defeats competing religious accounts.
We do indeed stand in need of tools other than reason for a complete understanding of the world, but we don’t have them. Our species has survived and prospered by evolving the practical intelligence needed to manipulate the environment.
Our systems of belief need to be useful, but need not be true. We live in pursuit of interests, not truth; we are at liberty to believe any old rubbish, and most people do. A scientific way of thinking can free us from this ignorance.
Science greatly extends the power of reason by linking it to observation and technology.
Fairness and morality are skills that help us to live well, not paths to knowledge. Religion cannot be considered in the same light, because it involves false belief.
Faith certainly isn’t an extra tool for understanding. Public truths cannot be divined from private experience, any more than I can judge my own height by placing my hand on my head.
Shame on you for a cowardly editorial that fails to defend reason and rationality. You say: “We need many tools to make sense of the world besides the strictly rational.” Human societies construct all sorts of ideologies to explain the world, but rational thought is not one among equals 鈥� rather, it is the only method we have of sorting sense from nonsense, of getting closer to a true understanding of how the world works.
You add: “Trying to tell people how they should think is likely to alienate them.” We must state clearly and boldly what we believe to be the case, with every tolerance for people but zero tolerance for wrong thinking.
Finally you say, “The problem is not with religion per se,” meaning, presumably, that it isn’t the “ism” that’s wrong, just the people who misapply it. Not so. Religion is a social construct 鈥� one person on their own cannot make a religion. To survive, a religion has to have authority, and for it to have authority it has to promote faith in the authority. Religion has to defend faith against reason and that is its problem per se.
We look to New 杏吧原创 to advance reason and rational thought, not duck away in search of some kind of “conciliation”.
Builth Wells, Powys, UK
Is it rational to believe that the people around us are conscious, or that they have aims and feelings much like our own? This can certainly not be proved. Nor can we prove that the physical world will go on working in the way that it has done so far.
We have to make tacit, background assumptions before any reasoning or proof can get off the ground. They come to us from our social nature, which also gives us a complex structure of emotion and imagination, out of which grow our ethics, our sciences, our arts and our religions.
We work out the details of these various kinds of insight with experience and we use reasoning to resolve the conflicts among them. This is rationality: a soundly organised way of relating these various elements, not a single cast-iron source of knowledge that competes with them and ought to replace them. The idea that we should believe only what can be proved is thus rather wildly irrational.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Bug vs superbug
Clearly we need a winning strategy to nip the “superbug” problem in the bud before it becomes too prevalent in the community (29 September, p 37). Am I the only one to have maintained an interest in the development of phages as our best defence against antibiotic-resistant bacteria? They have long been used to treat infections in the republic of Georgia (5 April 2003, p 36).
As I understand it, phages can be found in the microbial soup in hospital outflow where everything, including superbugs, is food for something else. You just have to find them. So why are they not in use already?
Lighting the deep
Answering the phone one day early in my career researching marine bioluminescence (27 October, p 30), I found myself talking to a distraught physicist. He explained his part in the Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detection (DUMAND) project, attempting to detect Cerenkov radiation using sensitive light detectors deep in the ocean, far away from ambient light.
The problem was that the project’s detectors were seeing way too much light. He wanted to know whether this might be biological in origin. Was there some place in the ocean where bioluminescence didn’t occur? I quoted a 1973 review article by Paul Tett and Mahlon Kelly: “Marine bioluminescence has undoubtedly been noticed ever since man lived near the ocean, but the occurrence of luminescent organisms in nearly every cubic meter of the ocean, from coast to coast and surface to bottom, was not realized until photomultiplier radiometers were lowered into the ocean and the flashing recorded.”
There was then a very long silence after which he thanked me and hung up. Apparently he did not pass the information along.
Now you breathlessly announce that physicists have discovered bioluminescence 鈥� yet again.
It is wonderful that other members of the scientific community are getting to share the thrill of learning about the amazing creatures living in the oceans, and their phenomenal adaptations for using light to help them find food, attract mates and defend against predators.
Give it a few more decades, and the next generation of researchers will be able to rediscover them, and enjoy the thrill all over again.
From Peter Herring,
Your article continues to promulgate the false idea that bacterial symbionts are responsible for most deep-sea bioluminescence. They are not.
Some bioluminescent fish and a few shallow-water squid do harbour luminous bacteria. Most do not. Shrimp, jellyfish and almost all other invertebrates have their own luminous systems.
Fertility possibility
We should not be surprised that the over-the-counter “food supplement” DHEA may improve the response of the ovaries during IVF treatment (27 October, p 12). It has androgenic (testosterone-like) effects, which are known to increase the sensitivity of receptors in the ovary to FSH 鈥� the hormone injected to stimulate egg production in IVF treatment.
A number of other compounds that may do the same, such as Letrazole or Danazol, are available on prescription in the UK (unlike DHEA), and are already used by many fertility clinics.
Sadly we will probably never know how DHEA compares. A trial that may establish its advantages or drawbacks seems unlikely in the UK, due to the ever-increasing difficulty of overcoming ethical and other hurdles, in particular the need to obtain indemnity insurance against possible adverse effects. This means that trials of inexpensive treatments with so little potential financial return rarely take place.