Friday, November 5, 2010
I was appalled to read in this week's Nature that the Juno mission to study
how Jupiter's powerful magnetic field is generated, will carry a fragment
of bone from Galileos earthly remains. Do the instigators of this
foolishness imagine that relics of scientific martyrs, like bones of
saints, will somehow confer protection on the spacecraft in the harrowing
Jovian environment? To compound my irritation, the information was in a
Nature editorial applauding the plan as, "a gesture that would add
emotional energy to the mission and remind the public that science is
fundamentally a human endeavor." All too human, it would seem; belief in
miraculous cures wrought by fragments of the remains of saints has
persisted for 2000 years. The editors confusion of metaphor and fact
continues to the end. "The Juno mission will skim just 4,800 kilometres
above Jupiter. Galileo just might enjoy a closer look."
I would expect to find relatively few smokers among the readers of What's
New, but many must have smoked before the scientific evidence became
unmistakable. Lung cancer will claim about 157,000 lives this year, more
than the deaths from colorectal, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancers
combined, according to Gartner Harriss article in yesterday's New York
Times. The high death rate compared to other cancers was attributed to the
lack of a means to detect lung cancer at an early stage. The results of a
huge double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 53,000 heavy smokers age 55
to 74. Lori Fenton, president of the lung Cancer alliance, which has
lobbied for widespread CT lung screening, said the debate about the
advisability of such scans is now over. Annual CT scans of current and
former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20%.
Good comment by Simon L Lewis in Nature on the page opposite the
editorials. His article deals specifically with what he calls, "the climate
street fight." His advice is that when the media gets it wrong we should
call them on it, and stick with it. As Lewis points out, the hacking of e-
mail at the University of East Anglia broke into the public almost a year
ago "http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN09/wn120409.html
. Looking back, I reacted just about right. Today, it's the cell phone/cancer issue. Perhaps
I overestimate the knowledge of reporters, but the physics has been clear
since Einstein was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics. All known
cancer agents create mutant strands of DNA. Photons with wavelengths
longer than ultraviolet (which begins at (the blue end of the visible
spectrum) cant create mutant strands of DNA, and hence do not lead to
cancer.
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