Secret DNA
About a tenth of the human genome “remains impossible to sequence with existing methods”, Anna Gosline writes (5 July, p 36). I thought the whole thing had been sequenced; this is the first I’ve heard of this.
Surely DNA is DNA, so if some can be done all can be done. What’s the problem?
The editor writes:
鈥� All existing methods work by breaking genomes into tiny pieces, sequencing those pieces and reassembling the resulting “jigsaw”. The trouble is that the human genome is highly repetitive. Some parts 鈥� mainly the middle and ends of chromosomes 鈥� are so repetitive that it’s impossible to reassemble the jigsaw. Nanopore sequencing, in which a DNA sequence is read off as a strand passes through a pore, might overcome this problem but this technology is still at a very early stage.
Survival of the nastiest
I was surprised to read Mason Inman’s article reporting that “bad is good as a mating strategy” (21 June, p 12). The study seemed to be entirely based on self reports. Those who displayed narcissistic characteristics reported more sexual exploits.
So? The conjunction between personality and reported exploits may be part of the personality complex. Schizophrenics report hearing more voices and religious fanatics report more sightings of devils and saints; but it doesn’t mean their impressions are empirically verifiable. The data certainly doesn’t convince me.
Miraculous moo
You report a research finding that giving cows a genetically engineered hormone called recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) “cuts their emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane by 7 per cent per litre of milk” (5 July, p 6).
I understand that the average Holstein cow produces 21 litres of milk and 280 litres of methane each day. Such a cow, when given rBST, would appear to start absorbing methane at tea-time on the first day of milk production. After only a year it would be absorbing more than 150,000 litres of methane per day, though the barns would get windy. Fewer than 8 million such cows could absorb the total global production of methane from all sources.
The editor writes:
鈥� Yes, it would have been more precise to say “by 7 per cent for a given daily milk production”. But it didn’t fit.
Nu-food redux
Your article about vat-grown meat (5 July, p 18) prompted a thought: “How about a milk machine?” Put grass and water in at one end and get milk 鈥� guaranteed free of tuberculosis 鈥� out of the other.
The problems of making an acceptable product would appear, to an ignoramus like me, to be far less than those of animal-free meat production.
Diamond whisky
The Grimbledon Down cartoon by Bill Tidy that used to appear in New 杏吧原创 answered Rudolf Pfeiffer’s question over whether anyone has previously tried making diamonds out of drinks (21 June, p 29). In 1986 it was found that ethanol vapour would form a thin layer of diamond under certain conditions. Shortly thereafter Treem, director of the Grimbledon Down research complex, confronted a member of staff for requisitioning a bottle of the best malt from the social club (20 March 1986, p 65).
For the record
鈥� Feedback said that Darren Wright, of the project to beam biscuit adverts to aliens, is an astronomer (5 July). He is a lecturer in radio and space plasma physics who .
鈥� We said that Australian companies “forecast spending $800 between 2002 and 2013 on geothermal exploration” (19 July, p 24). That should have been $800 million.
鈥� The food business may well be “bad for the plant and your health”, but the subtitle of the book Eat Your Heart Out, by Felicity Lawrence (reviewed 5 July, p 47) refers to the planet.
Deciduous delight
The demise of the pine forests of British Columbia may not be the unmitigated disaster that many people predict (5 July, p 32) and conservationists do not need to reconstruct the ecosystem. It is happening already without their help. In among the red-brown swathes of dead and dying pines, the light green of deciduous trees is appearing, mainly poplars. Evergreen forests are sterile places with not much living in them and with sour soils from the decaying pine needles.
Deciduous forests have a much wider variety of shrubs and grasses in the understorey and this supports a far richer variety of animals. Deciduous forests have rich, deep, sweet soils from the yearly leaf fall.
Better still, at present, beavers are spread thinly through the province, mainly living in existing water bodies. In many places a lack of building materials prevents serious dam-building. They hate chewing on evergreen trees. While BC may lose a portion of its logging industry, it is likely that a whole new set of industries will spring up based on a far richer environment and that the fisheries industry will be significantly improved.
Oil prudence
Tom Radford describes the prudence required in reporting of oil reserves (12 July, p 22). His view reflects almost exactly the introduction to . The main thrust of that paper, however, was that the very conservatism of regulatory reporting was leading to a misunderstanding over the true magnitude of global proven oil reserves, which are required for longer-term international energy and environmental planning (14 June, p 4).
Although defined statutorily in terms of “reasonable certainty”, the proven reserves of each reservoir in an oil field are now seen increasingly, in practical terms, as that quantity that has a 90 per cent probability of being recovered during the lifetime of the field. Summing this worst-case yield from the thousands of reservoirs around the world gives a total of 1.2 trillion barrels. The chance of the outcome being this low, like throwing a thousand successive ones in a game of dice, is vanishingly small. Reserves based on the above 90 per cent confidence criterion will be around twice the conventionally reported figure, and this requires probabilistic rather than arithmetic aggregation.
The most likely yield will be still higher, while other oil not yet presently meeting the three criteria for defining reserves (known, recoverable and economic) may ultimately contribute significantly more.
Strange inheritance
Emma Young’s summary of Lamarckism missed a component that helps elucidate the historical reluctance of many scientists to seriously consider it (12 July, p 28). Trofim Lysenko, whose view on the inheritance of acquired characteristics was enforced in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin from the 1920s until its abandonment in 1964, took what little scientific foundation he had from Lamarckism. The large-scale application of Lamarckian ideas to agriculture led to widespread famines across the USSR. While this was perceived as the final scientific deathblow to Lamarckism (wrongly, as Young points out), the executions and murders of Russian geneticists in the name of Lysenkoism made it also (arguably wrongly, but understandably) a socially most awkward theory.
From David Marjot
A powerful argument for “intelligent design” is that it seems inconceivable that witless natural selection of random variation could lead to evolution. If natural selection is such a powerful mechanism for evolution then a feedback mechanism from the environment to an organism’s genetic apparatus must surely have evolved. This would close the loop and make the argument for intelligent design unnecessary. If such a feedback mechanism exists, it needs to include both short-term changes that pass away after variable periods of time 鈥� that we could liken to short-term memory 鈥� and longer-term changes to the DNA, that we could liken to long-term memory. The changes described in your article could be one type of “short term” genetic memory.
Weybridge, Surrey, UK
From Jay Willis
“Strange inheritance”, which explains how eating habits can have an impact on an offspring’s genetic expression, outlined evidence for a mechanism behind astrology. Astrology suggests people’s mental characteristics vary predictably with the time of the year they are born.
In higher latitudes in ancient times food abundance and quality would have varied considerably throughout the year, as would sunlight, day length and warmth. Furthermore, storage was inadequate by modern standards and may have lead to the ingestion of all manner of exotic bacteria, fungi and other organisms. Thus it is clear that the diet and physical condition at time of conception would have varied considerably during the year and, as your article states, this may impact both the physical and mental characteristics of the offspring in a predictable way.
The stars are a clock which may have highlighted alternate temporal cycles. Although I am loath to lend any support to modern astrologers, so often the peddlers of utter claptrap (although fun, and grist to Feedback’s mill), it is incumbent on scientists to remain objective and accept that there may be some truth in those old beliefs, although modern storage, transport and farming are likely to make confirmation difficult now.
Oxford, UK
Nu-food redux
Anna Olsson says in-vitro meat is at “an early stage” of development (5 July, p 18), but barely mentions a product that has been available commercially for years. Mycoprotein, made by fermentation of hydrolysed vegetable starch with a Fusarium mould, was developed by Rank Hovis McDougall in the UK (3 November 1990, p 24).
The mould is processed into a fibrous mass with the same texture as chicken, ham or veal. Mycoprotein fermentation produces several times as much protein from each kilogram of carbohydrate used to make it than if that carbohydrate was fed to chickens, pigs or cattle.
I visited the RHM pilot plant and tasted several samples, produced as small chunks for meat pies or casseroles, and found the product indistinguishable in texture and taste from chicken.
Mycoprotein has been sold in vegetarian burgers and other products in Europe and the US since the mid-1990s, but has struggled to overcome a stigma as “fungus food”. Of course, people have been eating moulds for millennia as mushrooms and as a component of yoghurt, cheese, leavened bread and fermented beverages. It seems to me that mycoprotein offers an effective means to convert grain into high-protein meat substitute, without the moral dilemma of raising animals in intensive feedlots.
Flash failure
I have worked for the past 20 years in the “professional audio and lighting” industry, designing moving, flashing, sequencing, colour-changing and stroboscopic lighting for use in discotheques and night clubs. In that time, neither my colleagues nor I have discovered any lighting effect which has anywhere near as much ability to incapacitate as has the alcohol served in such establishments (10 May, p 38). The only people inconvenienced by two decades of endeavour are the poor photosensitive epileptics.
Advertising ethics
I think A. C. Grayling is confusing two different issues when he discusses whether a scientific magazine should accept various kinds of advertisement (12 July, p 48).
He is surely correct in suggesting that a scientific magazine should not advertise things such as creationism and astrology, which put forward claims that we know from science itself are not true. But that is very different from the science-religion debate, which is about whether the whole corpus of scientific knowledge can be incorporated within a broader narrative beyond science, a very different kind of discussion.
Science continually throws up big questions, not least ethical questions, which science itself cannot answer. We should be thankful to the Templeton Foundation for funding solid academic research in this area.
A science magazine which aims to explain science to a wider public should surely also aim to explore the wider implications of science, whether social, political, philosophical or religious.
From Roy Wallace
I agree with A. C. Grayling that New 杏吧原创 should not be running advertisements from the Templeton Foundation.
I was shocked when I saw the advert and initially thought it was a spoof.
Your articles (12 July, p 5 and p 8) on the worrying recent legislation in Louisiana show that science has enough problems at present without you muddying the waters.
You should not compromise your integrity and high standards by indiscriminately accepting revenue from any source.
Please do not run further advertisements from the Templeton Foundation.
London, UK
From Gary Rosen,
It is a shame that A. C. Grayling is so eager to banish the advertisements of the Templeton Foundation from the pages of New 杏吧原创.
His own forceful rejection of religious belief would have been right at home in our most recent “advertorial” campaign, which asked “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”
His voice would have been added to the sceptical views of other contributors like Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer and Victor Stenger.
But Grayling wants the discussion to end there, with his own dogmatic certainty. What he finds objectionable is a place at the table for scientists who believe in God, like the physicist William Phillips, the evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller, and Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School.
Unlike Grayling, these contributors to our advertorial see no necessary incompatibility between modern science and religious belief. In fact, they find intimations of the divine in their own scientific work and in personal experiences.
Perhaps these scientists are naive and benighted, as Grayling seems to think of anyone who takes religion seriously, but that is a debate worth having in the pages of New 杏吧原创, and debate requires opposing views.
West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, US
Spottings staus
Maxim Pospelov of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, invokes negatively charged supersymmetric particles 鈥� “staus” 鈥� to explain anomalies in the abundances of primordial lithium isotopes (5 July, p 28).
You also say that staus had their main effects 3 hours after the big bang, so the half-life of the stau must be of the order of hours, or at least minutes.
If such a relatively long-lived and heavy particle existed, surely we would have found one produced in our atmosphere by the reactions of very energetic cosmic rays.
God wills the weather?
Merle Arrowsmith is appalled at Lawrence Krauss’s assertion that faith prevents religious people from tackling climate change and states: “The proof of human-induced climate change is so very obvious that no Christian would dare deny it” (5 July, p 21). While I am sure this is a common position for Christians it is by no means universal among them.
As one example, the newspaper here in Australia’s Victoria state published an opinion piece on 13 July entitled “God and Climate Change”, by our local Presbyterian minister, David Schulz. After dismissing predicted temperature and sea-level changes, Schulz goes on to claim that the weather comes from God and that man can have no control over the weather or the future. Droughts and flooding rains come from the Almighty. God can bring the current Australian drought to an end tomorrow if He so wills it and “render our current secular prophets a laughing stock”.
This church leader has also recently gone into print expressing dismay that creationism is not being taught in mainstream Australian schools. Each case has led to a series of letters, mostly in rebuttal.
Strange inheritance
Emma Young reports mild food restriction affecting the health of offspring (12 July, p 28). Research carried out by colleagues at La Trobe University shows that it also dramatically improves maternal behaviour in rats and that the young show a number of behavioural differences, including greater sexual activity 鈥� see, , .
One striking finding is that while the mothers showed lower testosterone, the offspring showed higher testosterone and, in most cases, lower anxiety. This gives a curious twist to the finding that fetuses that experienced lower testosterone-to-oestrogen ratios in the womb, as measured by relative finger lengths, are more likely to grow up to be scientists and engineers (24 June 2000, p 32).
It follows that people who eat more moderately or restrict sexual activity as a result of religious beliefs, both likely to reduce testosterone, should be more likely to raise scientists and engineers. If this is correct, encouraging the teaching of intelligent design in schools may, ironically, be an effective way to increase scientific thinking in future generations, though direct biochemical intervention would probably work better.
We have found that even the smell of calorie-restricted rats has a similar effect to calorie restriction itself, although milder.
From Gill Wakley
The current obesity epidemic in the developed world should not be attributed to our parents or grandparents having gone through periods of having too little food. Our history shows that episodes of famine have been common and were not succeeded by epidemics of obesity. Obesity is due to behaviour 鈥� that of eating too much food compared with the expenditure of energy. It cannot be explained away by complaining that “My mother didn’t have enough to eat”.
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, UK