Letters archive

A "reactor that eats nuclear waste" indeed (21 October, p 24) ! The proposed reactor splits "atoms of plutonium and other radionuclides that last (sic) hundreds of thousands of years into isotopes that only last hundreds of years. After 30 years of operation, more than 96 per cent of the radioactivity would vanish." This is …

Charles Medawar raises legitimate concerns with regard to proposed changes to the law allowing "direct-to-consumer advertising" by pharmaceuticals companies (28 October, p 45) . Another possible outcome would be an unprecedented increase in patients demanding antibiotics from their doctors. Antibiotics are already woefully over-prescribed for self-limiting viral disorders, such as colds and flu. Surely the …

It may not only be female weevils who need to beware of injury during mating (21 October, p 27) . Many animals, including some mammals, have mysterious spines and hooks on the penis. Could these be for the same purpose as those of the bean weevil—to encourage females to have fewer partners? If females risk …

The concept of cloning Jesus (Feedback 21 October) is not original to Feral House but to that celebrated media terrorist Chris Morris, creator of Radio One's Blue Jam and Channel Four's Brass Eye. Morris intended to use the idea in On The Hour, a Radio Four satirical program, in 1992. It was not used there, …

Well done Peter Hadfield (21 October, p 69) for exposing the duplicity behind the "food culture" and "fish conservation" arguments currently touted by Japanese pro-whaling interests. The Japanese, like the British, ate whale meat during the early post-war decades. Then, albeit more slowly than the British, most Japanese abandoned the practice as supplies shrank and …

Congratulations to Humphrey Maris in his quest to split the electron (14 October, p 25) . Ever since Sheldon Glashow and Murray Gell-Mann invented the picture of baryons and mesons consisting of quarks with fractional electric charges, it has been difficult to accept that the electron is indivisible. Composite particles like nucleons and mesons exhibit …

Joanna Marchant's report of using EDTA, a simple chelating agent, to offset the effects of hypothermia (21 October, p 4) may not be as straightforward as it seems. The idea of using EDTA to mop up excess calcium ions in the blood as they arise during hypothermia is novel, but needs to be treated with …

Surely Cohen (4 November, p 16) is wrong to say that all the descendants of women with different mitochondria have died out. Their descendants must still be with us, albeit through lines of descent which at some stage have passed through a male. Just because we all share, in Eve, a common ancestor through the …

Philip Cohen reports that Peter Oefner of Stanford University has traced humankind's founding father (4 November, p 16) . I suspect Oefner would not have been so surprised that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam never really met if he had read Steve Jones's In the Blood. Under the title of "Did Adam meet Eve?", Jones …

It is clear from Netropolitan's recent final paragraph that someone failed to do their homework before commenting on the fuss over the recent theft of an Enigma machine (28 October, p 19) . From the outset, the codebreaking work of Bletchley Park had the backing of Winston Churchill. He drew on his association with espionage …

I read your news piece on making spider webs more resistant to "supercontraction" by replacing certain amino acids in their structure (28 October, p 22) . Couldn't the supercontraction effect be used to create synthetic muscle fibres? I know that robotics groups have tried using various materials to create artificial muscle with varying success. Some …

Why is so little attention being given to the possibility of developing an effective treatment for the human form of BSE (4 November, p 4) ? Faced with the prospect of a future epidemic affecting thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people in Britain alone, we seem to have adopted the fatalistic attitude that …

Your coverage of BSE and vCJD (4 November, p 3 to p 9) did not assess the crucial scientific question for human health: is eating BSE-infected meat the cause of vCJD? Instead you make bald statements that it does. The Phillips report contains good coverage of the question, so far as it can be answered …

In your Editorial you blame only the politicians and experts for the problem and conclude that all they have to do is provide the public with information and then magically everything will be fine. Sadly, this approach has a number of shortcomings. It only works if people are well educated, sensible and reasonably intelligent. European …

The report of Lord Phillips into the events leading to the tragedy of BSE suggests that an unwillingness to "alarm the public" exacerbated the vCJD problem. In your editorial (4 November, p 3) , you implore scientists to make their voices heard when they have the expertise on important issues that confront us. Yes, perhaps …