Friday, October 9th, 2009
In announcing that Barack Obama has won the 2009 Peace prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee referred to the president's April speech in Prague, in
which he outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. There is, alas, no peace in the world. The first priority of those who seek
peace is prevention of nuclear war. The first step must be for the United States Senate to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The
president has also proposed a new treaty to halt production of fissile materials. The biggest obstacle to a nuclear-free world may be the
"reliable warhead" legislation favored by defense secretary Gates.
Charles Kao figured out how to confine light to an optical fiber, while Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled detector (CCD)
that captures a digital image from the light. Boyle and Smith did their work at Bell Labs. It was the seventh Nobel discovery at Bell, a reminder
that the great industrial labs of the last century are gone. In effect, Boyle and Smith ended the profession of photography; an eight-year-old
child can pull out a personal cell phone, point it, and capture an image superior to anything professional photographers can do with armloads of
paraphernalia and hours in the darkroom.
Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak studied telomeres, which cap the chromosome like a knot in the end of a rope to keep it from
unraveling. Actually, an enzyme, telomerase, ties a lot of knots. One is snipped off every time a cell divides; when they're used up you're at
the end of your rope.
Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist, received the highest honor of the California Academy of Sciences for her tireless and remarkably
effective defense of Darwin against creationism and intelligent design. Just four months ago WN pointed out that she had won the inaugural Stephen
Jay Gould award of the AAAS http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN09/wn060509.html .
The movement takes its name from Psalm 127, "As arrows are in the hands of a warrior, so are children. Happy is the man that has his quiver full
of them." Children in a Quiverfull family often number in the teens. Without large families, they fear, Christianity might die out. Their
fertility rate is matched by Hasidic jews.
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