News in 1975

The passing of the old year next week will be celebrated with no little fervour by the UK computer industry. The economic recession triggered by the oil crisis really hit hard during 1975, so much so that survival rather than growth became the priority, and the short-term objectives of maintaining profitability and, even more important, good cash-flow, tended to override all other considerations. Nicholas Enticknap reviews the state of the industry.

No newspaper columnist would expect to claim that ‘spiders are insects’ or that ‘Mars is a star’ without attracting a regular deluge of indignant correspondence. Yet even our most respected publications can state that typhoid is caused ‘by a virus’ and emerge unscathed. Brian Ford comments.

Recent publicity concerning new claims for the existence of the Loch Ness monster has focused on the evidence offered by Sir Peter Scott and Robert Rines. Here, in an article planned to coincide with the now-cancelled symposium in Edinburgh at which the whole issue was due to be discussed, they point out that recent British legislation makes provision for protection to be given to endangered species; to be granted protection, however, an animal should first be given a proper scientific name. Better, they argue, to be safe than sorry; a name for a species whose existence is still a matter of controversy among many scientists is preferable to none if its protection is to be assured. The name suggested is Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

In the United States, as in the rest of the developed world, the twin-headed international monster of simultaneous inflation and recession has, by threatening an era of no growth, loosened the financial adhesive that has until now made technology and progress virtually synonymous. It may be time for innovation itself to take a new form. Wil Lepkowski reports.

As world resources are turned increasingly towards ameliorating environmental problems and improving the health of the population, the growth of electronic technology in medicine is well under way. But one of the crucial factors that will determine the advance is finance. Bernard Watson reports on a trend now represented most popularly by the EMI scanner.

Modern agriculture threatens to destroy the very means by which it developed. The recent establishment of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources will help to coordinate international efforts to conserve the rapidly diminishing genetic resource represented by traditional varieties of crops grown for generations. Eleanor Lawrence looks at some of the projects now under way.

Many breeds of livestock and innumerable varieties of crops which have arisen in the course of man's agricultural history are now in grave danger of being supplanted by the comparatively fewer highly-bred animals and plants of modern agriculture. A priceless and irreplaceable reservoir of genetic raw material is threatened. Peter Collins looks at efforts now underway to preserve some of the rapidly vanishing breeds of livestock. Next week Eleanor Lawrence reviews international efforts to conserve crop genetic resources.

THE UK Government recently accepted a Convention and a Recommendation, drawn up at last year's International Labour Conference, on ‘international standards concerning the protection of workers against carcinogenic substances or agents’. Both documents will play their part in establishing some useful principles and eliminating past abuses. But the practical achievement will fall short of what is usually understood by ‘international standards’, and the proportion of actual cancers prevented is likely to be only a fraction of the potential number. Laura Swaffield reports.

Any country aspiring to an industrial and technological competence must have an underlying strength in basic science. The North Vietnamese know this, and taking their characteristic long view, have been organising their war-depleted scientific cadres into a versatile research nucleus. Their effort proceeded all through the war at whatever pace was possible, but wholesale evacuation of educational and research institutes to the countryside prevented rapid progress. As American participation in the war diminished and then ceased altogether, the pace of Vietnamese scientific organisation quickened. In June 1975, a scant six weeks after the formal end of hostilities, there were already strong indications that the Vietnamese will soon have high competence in the basic physical and biological sciences, as well as in the related applied fields of engineering, medicine and agriculture.—Arthur W. Galston reports.

Peter Hodgson assesses the achievemevent of the physics Nobel prizewinners Bohr, Mottelson and Rainwater; and overleaf, Michael Stoker writes about the winners of the prize for medicine, Dulbecco, Temin and Baltimore.

By anyone's standards, the revelation of the molecular mechanism of life must be considered one of the highlights of the history of natural science. To make this revelation more meaningful and beneficial to mankind, those engaged in research on biological molecules must begin to think of possible practical applications of the molecular mechanism of life. For this purpose, a committee was formed in Japan about a year ago to examine and explore industrial applications of biological molecules with special emphasis on enzymes and other functional biopolymers. This is one of the projects under the auspices of the Council of Science and Technology in Japan for the promotion of life science. The committee is still carrying out its work, but wishes to present an interim report on the general image of what these applications might be, in the hope that it will stimulate a response from those who are engaged in biopolymer research.