Amoral advances
The oft-expressed idea that science is somehow morally and ethically neutral (10 January, p 29) shows that scientists are just as prone to woolly thinking as the critics of their activities. To hold such an idea necessarily implies that science is some kind of independent entity, separate from the human beings engaged in scientific activities.
Science is itself an activity and set of practices, performed by human beings or resulting from human behaviour, and has no existence apart from this. It is no less subject to moral and ethical judgement and strictures than other human activities.
From Deborah Webster
In response to Dan Jones’s concern about “barriers to progress” that flow from moral forces, I offer the following: the introduction of cane toads to Australia; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the on untreated syphilis in African American sharecroppers; the drug Thalidomide; Agent Orange in Vietnam; medical experiments and drug testing performed without consent on people deemed mentally ill; the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine; and the forced sterilisation of women judged by men to be “feeble-minded”.
All these government-backed policies or projects were invented by scientists considered forward-thinking by their contemporaries. There probably were opponents of each who were, for political purposes, ignored at the time.
Only science that suits the purposes of government or other powerful interests will ever reach the attention of the public, and only science that attracts funding will be developed. Only by examining every proposed scientific “advance”, the motivation behind it and the interests it serves, can the wider public protect itself, and in particular the most vulnerable members of our world.
Meadowbank, New South Wales, Australia
From David Bruce-Steer
It is disappointing that Dan Jones did not get Lewis Wolpert to explain further what he meant by “direct contact with small groups of people” in influencing the recent public vote on a proposal to restrict the use of genetically modified organisms in Switzerland. Who were these people? Politicians? Newspaper editors? Lobbyists? People randomly chosen off the street?
Artarmon, New South Wales, Australia
From Stephen Wood
When heart transplants were first done, many were uneasy about someone having a heart from someone else, but over time we have learned to accept the idea.
杏吧原创s need to hire marketing people. The crazy people are already spending millions to promote crazy ideas. 杏吧原创s need to counter this and promote sanity.
Orlando, Florida, US
Control carbon
I agree with Simon Reynolds that it makes good sense to apply controls on fossil carbon as near as possible to the point where it is extracted from the ground (3 January, p 16). In the proposals at , funds raised from the auction of extraction permits would be invested to tackle both the causes and the consequences of climate change, with an emphasis on addressing the needs of the poor and those most adversely affected by climate change.
This sidesteps the illogicality of trying to assign carbon emissions to countries. As Oliver Tickell, who set up Kyoto2, writes: “If a product is made in China by a company based in Singapore, using Australian coal, for a company in the UK, and exported to end users in the US, then which country should ‘own’ the emissions?”
Energy, and food too
Aria Pearson highlights the importance of upwelling in bringing nutrients from deep ocean to the surface (3 January, p 32). On the other hand you describe the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) concept (22 November 2008, p 28), in which water from the deep ocean is used as a cooling agent in electricity generation and then sent back to the sea floor.
When I first encountered OTEC at the University of Hawaii in 1980, its value as a means of introducing fertile water into the nutrient-depleted but warm Hawaiian surface waters seemed to be more important to the scientist educating me on it than was energy production. Using this fertility could be even more relevant today.
Magic moment
May I share a “magic moment”? A girl of about 10 was standing at a supermarket news-stand with a copy of New 杏吧原创 open at the lead story, “Resurrection Park” (10 January, p 24). She was explaining to her younger brother, in some depth, how extinct beasts might be resurrected. I felt hope for an intellectual future.
From Donald Windsor
If an extinct mammal were resurrected, what about its symbionts? These often-ignored organisms are essential to its digestion, nutrition, and protection from opportunistic pathogens. Would resurrected mammals be intentionally infected with symbionts from their closest living relatives?
Norwich, New York, US
Cannabis and crime
Andy Coghlan correctly identified minimising the harms caused by cannabis use as the focus for the Beckley Foundation Cannabis Commission’s report “Moving beyond stalemate” (3 January, p 6). It is important to stress that the legalisation option mentioned in the article is only one of many alternatives to prohibition put forward in our report for governments to consider.
Under a decriminalisation regime, cannabis use and possession remain illegal but those who break the law are not subjected to arrest and prosecution, thereby alleviating some of the social harms that can result from treating users as criminals.
By contrast, legalisation would allow a legitimate cannabis market to be established. The authors do suggest that in looking beyond decriminalisation governments should consider a regulated cannabis market as one option, for the reasons Coghlan highlighted. They point out, however, that it is not known what the consequences of such a market would be for levels of cannabis use and the resulting harms, because it has never been tried. They accordingly recommended that if this policy were introduced it would have to be subject to an ongoing process of review and evaluation.
The evidence from the Dutch experience 鈥� an imperfect example of such a market, as cannabis production there is still illegal and therefore unregulated 鈥� is mixed, although it does not appear to be associated with higher levels of use and harm than other European countries.
The commissioners of the Beckley report are world-renowned experts in drugs and drugs policy. Their report recognises that the UN convention governing cannabis control is almost 50 years old and long overdue for reform. The Beckley Foundation and the commission support an evidence-based, evolutionary process to changing cannabis law.
If only
Like the subject of your article on postponing puberty in transsexual children, I recognised my gender as female very early (13 December 2008, p 5 and p 8). That was in the first half of the 1930s, at 4 years old, as soon as I knew there was a difference.
My continual assertion that I was a girl horrified my parents and educators. A consultant paediatrician advised them to “make a man of him or he will turn out queer”. Fortunately, in spite of attempts at suicide, I managed a career in research, and my problems remained in check.
Yet the gender anomaly became ever more intense: eventually a supportive trauma consultant and loving marriage partner concluded I could wait no longer. That was 16 years ago now, and life has been complete and productive professionally and socially.
Would my life have been better, had the techniques for delaying puberty been available in the late 1980s? Without doubt. As for the question of how patients should be selected, there is for me only one answer, and that is an early childhood recognition of the external physical gender being wrong. I find it difficult to understand how gender dysphoria can arise later in life.
Domestic beer
I am surprised that anyone should be surprised to discover that “A good night out began at home in ancient Greece” (10 January, p 10). The term “pub” derives from “public house” 鈥� a private house opened to the public to enjoy beer, originally brewed on site. The 1830 Beer Act re-established the tradition in the UK, to stem the tide of gin-drinking, by encouraging homeowners to pay 2 guineas per annum for a licence to sell home-brewed beer on their domestic premises.
As well as the pubs and brothels mentioned in the article, there were doubtless cooks, cobblers, and hairdressers who plied their trade from home without the need for dedicated premises or official permits.
Emma Young writes:
鈥� While it was known from ancient Greek plays that public houses or taverns existed in ancient Greece, the mystery was why the archaeological evidence did not show this. Kelly Blazeby re-evaluated the evidence and reached the conclusion that homes must indeed have doubled up as pubs, contrary to traditional thinking among archaeologists studying ancient Greece.
Anaesthetic function
Ian Rubenstein comments on the proposal by Hans Meyer and Charles Overton 鈥� whose work on the subject was actually published in 1899 and 1901 鈥� that the effectiveness of inhaled anaesthetics is proportional to their solubility in lipids (20/27 December 2008, p 18).
However, the reason he suggests for this is incorrect. General anaesthetics are now known to work by binding to more or less specific receptors, especially certain potassium channels and receptors for the neurotransmitter GABA, that happen to have lipophilic pockets. Other drugs cross membranes via protein carriers, and not directly as a result of lipophilicity 鈥� see the paper by Paul Dobson and myself in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery ().
For the record
鈥� We incorrectly placed Francesco Sylos Labini at La Sapienza University in Rome (24 January, p 50). He is at the .
Amoral advances
Is science morally and ethically neutral (10 January, p 29)? I live in a country whose rivers are degraded and whose land is increasingly salinated because farmers in the past followed the advice of accredited scientists about how to increase yield. The arguments for genetically modified organisms are very similar, it seems to me, to the arguments for land clearance, pesticides, superphosphates, irrigation and so on. The scientists were giving the best advice available at the time, but it was the wrong advice for a sustainable future.
Much resistance to scientific innovation is based on rational caution rooted in the knowledge of past mistakes. 杏吧原创s need to accept that their work may have serious unintended consequences.
From Robert Clements
Dan Jones claims that genetically modified organisms are seen as unnatural and therefore morally unacceptable”. That is only partially true, and the key to the argument may be in the detail that he misses. GMOs are not just seen to be unnatural: they are seen to be unnecessary to the consumers who are being asked to pay for them.
This would be a problem on its own, but when consumers try to exercise their right not to purchase products derived from GMOs, it appears that laws are modified to eliminate this right. In effect, consumers are being forced to subsidise technology companies for what they perceive to be valueless experiments.
I doubt that this misconception is specific to the GMO debate. The arguments against the Large Hadron Collider may have been silly (but see 24 January, p 32). They may, though, have gained much of their traction from taxpayers’ frustration with the machine’s price tag. Are consumers required to believe all of science’s press releases?
Is cloning really about improving common life 鈥� or just duplicating rich people’s pets? Is economic modelling about making the world more financially secure 鈥� or justifying an unsustainable status quo?
These are not naturalist fallacies 鈥� they are plausible caveat emptor warnings, sometimes phrased in naturalist terms. Science ignores this difference at its peril. Despite the clich茅, science is not and never has been morally neutral. It has consequences, and the choice to accept 鈥� or reject 鈥� those consequences is a moral decision that needs to be respected.
Prestons, New South Wales, Australia
What's God got to do with it?
Helen Logan asks whether in a universe with different conditions another conscious being might appear and assume in turn that those conditions were finely tuned for its existence (10 January, p 16) and you reply that “most of the universes we can imagine would not support any sort of complex structures, which we assume are necessary for any sort of life”. This seems to miss the point.
Even if many of the possible universes we can imagine couldn’t support life, each would still represent a specific set of universal laws and principles, which from a certain perspective would appear fine-tuned for something. Such an alternate universe may be “fine-tuned” for a certain type of black hole for example, or for particular formations of galaxy or stars. In other words, every conceivable universe is “fine-tuned” for whatever exists within it, so it is no surprise that ours is too.
I think there is a more interesting problem with the views espoused in the article to which Logan was responding (6 December 2008, p 48). Amanda Gefter mentions Steven Weinberg evoking the idea of a god (or a creator-being of some kind) in response to perceived evidence for this being’s existence (even if, as I think, this evidence is misinterpreted). Gefter says that to evoke such an idea is “to abandon science itself”. Science is about deducing facts based on the evidence, so if evidence points to the possible existence of a creator-being, then such a being becomes possible in a scientific sense and should not be dismissed as “a supernatural explanation”. Contrary to what Gefter says, to refute the possibility of a creator-being, whatever the evidence may suggest, is an act of prejudice, and distinctly unscientific.
Three degrees of contagion
The “Three Degrees of Contagion” article (3 January, p 24) was timely and intriguing. Unfortunately, the suggestions put forward to help people “detox” their lives didn’t seem to follow logically from the findings. Indeed, they could conceivably help reinforce an individualist spirit that makes the situation worse.
While distancing oneself from unhappy people might sound like good advice, it could increase social marginalisation. The suggestion that people should strive to be happy when they are in the company of unhappy people in order to cultivate more happiness in society is just as plausibly derivable from the findings reported. The suggestion that we uncover the root causes of unhappiness (economic or other social exclusion or inadequate healthcare for example) might also be mentioned.
Finally, although I acknowledge the importance of happiness, it is certainly not the only viable emotional state.
We need useless technology
Responding to your questioning why early and promising Greek technology was not further developed for so long (13 December 2008, p 5), Nicholas Dore points out that Rome absorbed and continued much of Greek thought, rather than supplanted it (17 January, p 17).
It may be that the Greeks were distracted by internecine rivalries, as Dore proposes, but why then did early technological leads such as clockwork and the steam engine not develop even faster and get put to immediate practical use when transferred from the squabbling Greek city-states to the inclusive, centrally administered Roman realm?
Perhaps it was the Roman mind’s very practicality which stifled further development. I imagine a Roman owner of something like the Antikythera mechanism regarding it as a marvel of Greek ingenuity, but hardly relevant to the practicalities of developing trade or administering empire. Certainly my sensible imaginary Roman wouldn’t invest the time, effort and money to further develop such fascinating trivia… and so the industrial revolution would need to be postponed a millennium or so.
Having seen how many of the key technologies of today were more stumbled-upon than sought-for, we should surely avoid making that same mistake today. To focus research and development on technologies that are practical and marketable, neglecting fundamental “impractical” research, might cost us another millennium.
Status trap
Niels R枚ling is the first commentator on the environment I have seen who seems anywhere near appreciating the root of the problem (17 January, p 40). He refers to the prisoner’s dilemma of game theory, avoidance of which involves adjusting pay-offs until they rank in a different order. But that requires an authority with the power to impose rules that apply universally. The paradox is that setting up such authorities can itself lead to a prisoner’s dilemma conflict.
People compete to consume resources beyond their basic needs in the pursuit of status. As status is thought to affect both morbidity and mortality, this is not entirely vacuous, but it’s the zero-sum nature of status-seeking that fuels an escalation of the consumption that’s so environmentally destructive, since no amount of consumption makes the Smiths and the Joneses content with their status at the same time.
Without more research into the psychology of status-seeking, I think that we will continue competing for consumer goods on the back of either fossil or renewable energy until resources run out, and civilisation collapses.
Galileo vs Darwin
Discussing which of Darwin or Galileo had more impact, Michael Brooks argues for Galileo because 80 per cent of Americans believe the Earth goes round the sun compared with only 50 per cent who believe in natural selection (20/27 December 2008, p 70).
Surely the scary thing here is the 20 per cent who don’t believe the earth goes round the sun.
From James Fradgley
Clive Ruggles makes the frequently asserted point that it’s 400 years since “Galileo’s first use of a telescope” (17 January, p 14). I think not. Lenses had been around for centuries: for example Roger Bacon described them in 1249. It seems most unlikely that nobody put two convex lenses together and discovered their function in that enormous stretch of time.
The problem is much more likely to be cultural 鈥� and Christian theological 鈥� inhibition. Those with the glasses would have been monks, and if they understood and made public things that Galileo publicised, their personal situation would have become untenable.
Galileo’s contribution was to be sufficiently self-confident to be prepared to make a fuss about it. I very much doubt whether his work was original, even if he did not know of others who may have preceded him. He just happened to be the man of the time.
Trying to rank Galileo against Darwin seem specious. Darwin’s contribution was truly original. One might add that the evidence available from the global reach of biological observation meant that he too was the man of his time 鈥� eclipsing Alfred Russel Wallace 鈥� but that does not detract from the originality of his achievement.
Wimborne, Dorset, UK