Forensic cuts
I share Niels Morling’s concerns about the UK government’s decision to close the Forensic Science Service (8 January, p 5). We will lose our forensic science flagship, with its legacy of excellence spanning decades, particularly in the DNA field where it has contributed so much. The UK will be left with no clear focus for forensic research and development, and no ability to conduct investigations beyond routine analyses provided by the private sector.
This decision cannot be in the interests of justice. Who will provide the expertise for complex and interdisciplinary investigations? Who will develop and refine new technologies? The private sector is unlikely to fill this void. The government’s statement that “the continued provision of effective forensics is our priority” simply does not square with closing the FSS.
The UK will be the only major country without a central forensic service. The decision has astonished the global forensic community, as witnessed by the signatories to Morling’s recent letter to The Times newspaper (28 December 2010) and significant press coverage outside the UK.
The logic justifying the closure remains opaque. Providing access to the best forensic expertise will always be a drain on the public purse. Government comments that the FSS is losing money reveal an unimaginative bean-counting mentality and an inability to understand how forensic science progresses.
Morling has called for the establishment of a national institute of forensic science. The organisation he describes is very much like the present FSS, suggesting that the necessary reduction in costs could be better achieved by restructuring and refocusing the existing body rather than closing it.
Spot the placebo
Irving Kirsch warns that in double-blind drug trials the ability of doctors and participants to correctly guess whether a placebo has been administered may invalidate the results of the studies (11 December 2010, p 30).
What is not clear to me is how this affects the placebo effect. Surely the participant’s level of uncertainty plays a major role, not just whether they guess right or wrong. This would not be revealed by the surveys Kirsch suggests.
It could, however, be tested by giving a placebo to a large group of participants, some of whom are told the truth, some told they have a real drug, and some told they have a 50 per cent chance of having the drug. It is reasonable to expect that some participants will show the placebo effect even if they are told they only have a 5 per cent chance of receiving the real drug.
From Phillip Gething
As part of my training to join a medical research ethics committee, I attended lectures on drug trials. We were told of a trial in which a patient spotted when her drugs had been switched, even though great efforts had been made to make the capsules appear identical. When asked by her GP why she thought the drugs had been changed, the patient replied, “I always put them down the loo. Until recently they always floated, now they always sink.”
Fleet, Hampshire, UK
Ether misconception
Michael Brooks lends credence to the story that Einstein’s theory of relativity was a response to the alleged failure of the physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley to measure the ether drift (23 October, p 32). The physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, in his book Personal Knowledge, exposes this as a myth, quoting Einstein’s autobiography and a reply to Polanyi explicitly denying influence by Michelson and Morley. Einstein had already developed the theory by reflecting, from the age of 16, on paradoxes such as the view of a light wave for an observer travelling at the speed of light.
Polanyi believed that the true story undermines the “positivist” view that science is restricted to a dispassionate search for formal systems that make predictions testable against experience. He argues that science depends on a conviction that there are rational structures in nature. “Verification of a scientific statement,” he wrote, “requires the same powers for recognising rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery [though] at a lower level.” He suggests that philosophers of science confuse demonstration with critical verification.
I'm boiling
Steven Sherwood and Matthew Huber predict that global temperature increases will cause heatwaves that will make regions that already have high heat stress uninhabitable (23 October, p 36).The implications of their conclusions are particularly dire for those of us inhabiting temperate regions.
Heat exchange between an organism and the environment is complex, consisting of conduction, convection, radiation and evaporation. Each process relies on different characteristics of the environment. Survivable conditions, or the “prescriptive zone”, are defined as the combination of these factors within which a human can regulate their body temperature.
The limit of this thermoregulation has not been defined for people at rest, but for an adult female walking slowly on a treadmill it occurs at a wet-bulb temperature of about 33 掳C when the relative humidity is 70 per cent, but at a wet-bulb temperature of only 27 掳C when the relative humidity is 20 per cent (). Therefore, when the humidity is low, the upper limit of the prescriptive zone occurs at a lower wet-bulb temperature than at high humidity.
All of this means that if your article’s projections for wet-bulb temperature increases are accurate, the temperate zone will become uninhabitable long before the tropics, and the temperate zone is where most of our food is grown today.
Steven Sherwood writes:
鈥� As noted in our study, our limits were simplistically based on absolute requirements for heat transfer. In reality, the body will not be fully wetted, and so for a given wet-bulb temperature, a person will run into trouble sooner in hotter, drier conditions.
This will indeed move the mid-latitude zones forward in terms of the seriousness of the problem, but the effect will be fairly small, since the wet-bulb temperatures naturally tend to be lower in less humid areas. The main result would be that the intolerable conditions spread a bit more rapidly once they begin.
Sunstenance
The article “Dawn of the plantimals” by Debora MacKenzie and Michael Le Page (11 December, p 32) points to a biotechnology that could have awesome potential. Equipping humans with photosynthetic ability would create a race of people who were fully independent of conventional agriculture for sustenance. Since Homo chlorensis would have to sunbathe au naturel for nutrition, it would be a good idea to encode a magnificent physique into the genome of both male and female forms for maximum effect.
Hairy-knuckled god?
I would take issue with Douglas Fox’s suggestion that when chimps exhibit hostile behaviour to thunderstorms they may be confronting a “hairy-knuckled Zeus” (27 November 2010, p 32).
In the mythology of most religions, any challenge to the gods was likely to result in the challenger being frizzled by the next thunderbolt. The chimps’ behaviour would be more in line with belief in a thunder-deity if they had been making placatory gestures or offering fruit to the clouds. Surely the “rain dance” Fox describes is more likely to be analogous to the behaviour of my dog, who barks at thunder, clearly viewing it as an undefined but worrying threat.
Natural beauty
Referring to the possibility that natural selection may work at the level of entire ecosystems, your editorial described as “bleakly reductionist” the prevailing neo-Darwinian view that selection occurs principally at the level of individuals or even genes (9 October 2010, p 5). This phrase might not be out of place in a religious publication but is surely inappropriate in a science magazine.
Science will continue to shed light on how evolution occurs and at what level selection takes place. Whatever the outcome, it is foolish to suggest that one view is bleaker than another. The notion that an ecosystem might have emerged from individuals following simple rules to maximise their fitness in no way detracts from nature’s wonder.
Exercise your eyes
I am writing to add a little depth, as it were, to Jeff Hecht’s article on 3D film (18 December 2010, p 42). Bad 3D footage can be painful to watch, but nausea and eye strain are not inevitable.
The single most common mistake I see in 3D production happens at the edit points. One shot may have its main area of interest well back in the screen only for it to be well forward in the next shot. Shifting your focus from one depth to the next takes a lot of physical work and causes strain.
But watching 3D footage gets easier with practice, as your eyes become used to the movements required to resolve the images. It may even turn out to be good exercise for the eyes. One of the 3D editors with whom I work has clocked up 4 hours or more of 3D every day for more than three years. His yearly eye tests show that his vision has begun improving, not getting worse.
Our eyes’ ability to adapt is an interesting phenomenon and might be a better focus for research than our transient physical reactions to 3D film.
Sticky problem
Concerning the graphical approach developed for quantum mechanics to enable computers to make sense of sentences (11 December 2010, p 10), I would be impressed if the software could make sense of Groucho Marx’s statement: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
Could the software be evaluated so that we knew it had not got hold of the wrong end of the stick? And would the software go into an endless loop pondering which is the correct end of a stick? Come to that, can anybody tell me which are the incorrect ends of sticks?
For the record
鈥� A sponsored feature on street lighting (25 December 2010, p 11) asked for entries to a “Livable Cities Award”, a competition that, as the article said, had closed on 28 October 2010. Our apologies for the mistake.