Mind or body?
It is unfortunate that Simon Wessely, interviewed in the article “Mind over body?” (14 March, p 26), attaches a psychosomatic label to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and, by implication, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). This inaccurate label not only creates practical problems for patients, such as inappropriate or harmful treatments and refusal of state benefits, it also discourages biomedical research into the underlying cause.
Fortunately, there are clinicians and researchers who believe that ME/CFS has a solid physical basis involving infection, immunology, endocrinology and neurology. As a result, the UK Medical Research Council has recently set up an expert group to look at these areas of causation.
In the UK, the ME Association has just collated results from the largest ever survey of patient opinion, with over 4000 respondents. Over 50 per cent reported that behavioural treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise therapy were either ineffective or made their condition worse.
New 杏吧原创 has previously reported on ME/CFS; one such example was your news report of abnormalities in gene expression in white blood cells (23 July 2005, p 9), which could not be caused by abnormal thought processes. I hope New 杏吧原创 will soon regain an objective position on the subject.
From John H. Greensmith,
I suspect that a large proportion of the “hate mail” you report Wessely as receiving is about the quality of his science, rather than being a personal attack. The science, he says, is what one stands by and it is what many think he falls by.
One result of ME being lumped together with CFS is that it has become more difficult to diagnose. It is also bundled in with several other illnesses, some of which may have a psychiatric origin.
I wonder what Wessely thinks of equally qualified doctors and professors who call for the re-adoption of the name myalgic encephalomyelitis. They recognise it as a discrete neurological illness with a physiological origin that needs further research, and see no particular need for his speciality.
Hacking the planet
Catherine Brahic’s article on geoengineering (28 February, p 8) includes an account by James Fleming of a meeting I attended at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California in November 2006. To clarify, at that meeting I advocated working through the Arctic Council to carry out field experiments, not the UN 鈥� and as an experiment only, to develop techniques and diagnose impacts.
From Roy Tindle
Why do we spend vast sums on bailing out our banking industry rather than spending the money on bailing out climate change? What use will banks be if the world is in the midst of total instability caused by vast numbers of refugees migrating to cooler climes?
Though it may be simplistic to equate jobs for bankers with jobs that could be created in renewables, the balance does seem very skewed. There are exciting technological advances in renewable energy generation that deserve serious support, yet I still see no evidence of tidal generation when crossing London Bridge.
Geoengineering may be, as Brahic reported, the only remaining solution. But governments must first replace rhetoric with action to invest in renewables and reduce energy waste. The Club of Rome’s Desertec solar power project is worth examining, as is the Seawater Greenhouse project, which uses sunlight to distil seawater for irrigation. Combining the latter with charcoal sequestration could become a low-cost method of bringing together desalination and carbon sequestration, thereby tackling two problems simultaneously.
London, UK
Back to Lagrange
Reading your article on the possibility of observing the contents of Lagrangian points (21 February, p 30) reminded me of work I carried out in the mid-1970s.
At that time, I initiated what is now termed the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project. It was the first search to use computer-controlled telescopes, television (and later, charge-coupled devices), low-light-level sensors, optimal search theory, and video hardware and software automated to perform the detection function. Each of these was a major innovation.
The observatory consisted of two identical telescopes a hundred metres or so apart. We could detect meteors and directly measure the parallax. We too looked at the Lagrangian points, but we found nothing.
Time flies
Unlike Tony Johnson (14 March, p 25), I can’t accept that approximate number sense influences our perception that time accelerates as we get older. Rather, it seems to me, it has to do with the flow of information.
Have you ever noticed how the first few days of a holiday go really slowly, and then it’s suddenly time to go home? Or when visiting a new place, the journey out seems endless while the return is far quicker. I’d suggest there is a close relation between perceived time and perceived information: a personal take on the relation of time and entropy on the macrocosmic scale.
The red ape paradox
Elaine Morgan reminds us that orang-utans are phenotypically more similar to humans than other apes, even though chimpanzees are genetically closest (7 March, p 26).
The explanation for this lies in the resource allocation paradigm of quantitative genetics, and the idea that it is not genes that are naturally selected in each generation, but the phenotype that the genes have produced. A phenotype is selected if it utilises the resources of the environment efficiently and meets environmental challenges successfully.
Considering natural selection as selection of appropriate phenotypes is very different from evolution through gene selection. In gene-based evolution, changes can occur only through genetic mutations, which implies that genetically close relatives should have similar phenotypes.
Sexual recombination means there is always a range of phenotypes produced in every generation. This allows quick adaptation to changing environments, certainly much faster than with cloning. So if two species live in similar environments the successful phenotypes in each species will be similar even when the genes creating the phenotypic changes are not the same.
Reliable evidence
Linda Geddes’s sobering report about the reliability of forensic evidence highlights an important scientific issue: the need to establish error rates for any putative source of evidence (28 February, p 6). Evidential weight depends on more than just the false negative rate 鈥� that is, the proportion of cases where the test fails to detect a genuine positive result. It also relies on a low value for the false positive rate.
DNA evidence has low false negative and false positive rates. Geddes points out that the corresponding rates for other sources of forensic evidence, such as hair analysis, are unknown, but the same is also true in many other applications of science, from earthquake prediction systems to the use of animal models in toxicity testing. Until we establish their error rates, it is impossible to know how much faith we can place in them.
En fin
Caroline Williams’s article on the worldwide decline in commercial fish stocks (7 March, p 40) made for depressing, if not surprising reading.
One aspect she neglected to address, however, was the likelihood that we will over-exploit substitute fish species. Rather than simply switching from one to the next as fisheries crash, we need to find ways of managing fisheries sustainably.
Imposing moratoriums when fisheries are already on their last legs is simply not good enough; we need to ensure that fishing efforts and methods are matched to what is truly sustainable, rather than just to what is politically expedient. If we do not, then it is unlikely that the sea will be able to provide much of our food in the long term.
Dam solutions
Kate Ravilious reports on the Norwegian company Statkraft’s proposal to build a football-stadium-sized plant along a Norwegian fjord that would produce, at best, 25 megawatts of electricity by a process based on osmosis (28 February, p 40).
Such a gigantic plant would be expensive, and the scheme requires a large block of land and a substantial amount of building materials. A small nuclear plant capable of producing 200 to 400 megawatts could be built on the same amount of land closer to urban electrical markets. Alternatively, if the river from which they would draw the fresh water is suitable for damming, for less money a small dam and a hydropower plant could produce at least 25 megawatts.
Stimulating smells
With reference to the article “Fart molecule could be next Viagra” (7 March, p 14), does hydrogen sulphide only work when you inject it, or could the nightly accumulation of H2S from wind trapped under the bedclothes be related to the phenomenon of nocturnal penile tumescence?
For the record
鈥� Victoria Todd, whose research we reported in the news story “Oil rigs may be fit for porpoise” (21 March, p 8), is at Ocean Science Consulting, not as we stated.
鈥� We mangled the name of the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement when we referred to it in our Histories piece about the Vikings (21 March, p 42).