Some young scientists claim that the tenure system is working against
their interests, because it is limiting the turnover of permanent staff
positions.

At a meeting organised by the Royal Society to discuss its preliminary
findings, universities were urged to do something to provide decent career
prospects for the swelling ranks of research workers who are employed on
short-term contracts.

The number of full-time university staff employed on short-term contracts
in science increased by 137 per cent between 1977 and 1988, while the number
of tenured academic staff decreased by 9 per cent.

The increase in the number of contract researchers reflects the success
universities have had in winning funds from nongovernment sources. These
are needed to make up for cutbacks in government support, said Den Davies,
vice-chancellor of Loughborough University of Technology and a member of
the Royal Society committee.

‘In terms of the health of research, that is very good news; the figures
are continuing to grow, and we should be pleased about it,’ said Davies.
‘But it has produced some difficult problems. In particular, whereas previously
research assistants expected to be eventually appointed to academic staff
the rapid expansion of their numbers . . . means that most of those expectations
cannot be met.’

Universities are understandably attracted by the idea of maintaining
a pool of short-term research workers who can be moved from one research
project to another, said Davies. But on the downside, without decent career
prospects the researchers tend to lose their motivation.

‘We think that this trend is going to get worse,’ said Davies. ‘We need
a more flexible system, and to be able to develop different expectations
and routes for people to move into other fields. For example, industrial
bodies have pointed out that there is not nearly enough movement between
the academic world and senior posts in government and industry.’

Peter Campbell, a biochemist at University College London and chairman
of the Association of Researchers in Medicine and Science, told the BA that
many science graduates were seeking research assistantships because other
jobs were hard to find. Others take on assistantships because the pay is
so much higher than a PhD grant.

But money is not the biggest problem facing research workers on short-term
contracts, said Campbell. ‘The major problem is that these people do not
see any future, and no one seems to care a damn about them.

According to the working group which prepared the report, the loss of
young trained scientists after 1992 ‘could represent a major problem for
the UK in the near future’. The Department of Education and Science is urged
to take ‘urgent action’ to address this possibility.

The report points out that the declining number of young people entering
the job market across the European Community means that there will be increasing
competition for the most able. It lists a number of reasons why British
undergraduates in particular are likely to be attractive to European employers.

Because degree courses are often shorter in Britain, graduates ‘become
available when the motivation and freedom to travel is highest’. Some prospective
employers may also see the English language as a positive advantage. The
report also points out that ‘salaries in the UK are relatively low, increasing
the incentive to seek employment elsewhere’.

The ACOST working group, chaired by John Robertson, professor of electrical
engineering at the University of Edinburgh, says that the problems the drain
of graduates could cause are serious enough to merit preparing a strategy
to make good the loss.

Overall, the working party says, positive steps must be taken to make
careers in Britain more attractive. In particular, it suggests developing
career opportunities in multinational organisations. This would mean ‘integration
of opportunity irrespective of nationality’, removing one of the main driving
forces of migration.

The government has reacted sceptically to the warning. The DES argues
that the increased mobility of qualified scientists and engineers ‘is likely
to be beneficial both from a national and a European viewpoint’.

ACOST’s conclusions are not yet borne out by data on the destination
of graduates, says the DES. As a result, it says, it is ‘not convinced’
that 1992 will bring a net loss of new graduates from the country.

The ACOST report also says that 1992 provides a ‘decisive one-off opportunity’
to strengthen the country’s capability in strategic research and manufacturing
by persuading international companies to establish research and development
facilities in Britain. It urges the government to ‘seize the opportunity’.

‘We are here to convince you by our presence that conversion is going
on,’ said Efremov. He and Kiselov came to the AAAS session after meetings
with executives from Boeing, TRW and Lockheed, where they discussed joint
commercial projects. Efremov suggested that Soviet satellites could contribute
remote-sensing data to a joint US-Soviet enterprise that would take the
combined data and analyse it.

Kiselov said his enterprise was devoting 40 per cent of its work to
civilian projects this year, compared to 7 per cent in 1988. The civilian
share would grow to 60 per cent by 1993, he said. The transition was ‘heavy,
difficult, and painful’, but the Krunichev establishment has prospered:
‘We’re looking for 500 more workers.’

Not every enterprise is faring so well. According to Albert Trifonov,
a member of a Soviet commission on conversion from military to civilian
production, military cutbacks have already cost 300 000 workers their jobs.

Defence cuts are far more difficult for the Soviet Union to cope with
than for the US or Europe, said Andrei Kokoshin, deputy director of the
Soviet Academy of Science’s Institute on the USA and Canada. In the Soviet
Union, entire cities were built for the purposes of military production,
and it is impossible to tell everyone there to move somewhere else. Under
an earlier ‘naive’ conversion plan, military enterprises were simply ordered
to produce large quantities of consumer goods, but that did not work, said
Kokoshin.

‘We didn’t want to lose skills, we wanted to redirect them,’ he said.
His enterprise is now working on equipment to treat waste water and filter
pollution from smokestacks. Working with the medical radiology department
of a Moscow hospital, engineers at the Krunichev centre solved technical
problems in thermal treatment of cancers of the larynx. Kiselov also said
that his centre was in the process of adapting space robots for use in disaster
areas such as Chernobyl. The regional Russian government would like more
control over what happens to military establishments on its territory, said
Vitali Shlikov, an official of the Russian Federation who accompanied Efremov
and Kiselov. Shlikov said that the Soviet Union’s conversion plan has been
worked out in secret, and is still based on planning, not the market. The
Soviet plan calls for spending 60 billion roubles (Pounds sterling 60 billion)
over five years to promote civilian production at existing military facilities.

Traweek lived in Tsukuba, Japan, a new city that is home to the country’s
high-energy physics facility, from April 1986 to July 1987. She plans to
return for another eight months in 1991. She has also observed physicists
working at Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the US and at
CERN in Geneva.

Most Japanese regard a career of research abroad as selfish, because
the scientists never bring the knowledge home, says Traweek. She heard physicists
discuss how long one could live abroad and still keep a ‘Japanese soul’
or lead a group in a Japanese style. The physicists generally felt that
a Japanese soul would survive a foreign sojourn of three to five years,
but not seven or eight years. Japanese researchers who are comfortable with
foreign languages and mannerisms are a source of consternation for their
colleagues.

International contacts are particularly important for women physicists
in Japan, who are denied access to funding and status at home, according
to Traweek. Japanese women who enter physics, like their American counterparts,
generally come from higher social classes than their male colleagues, says
Traweek. The confidence that comes from a more privileged background may
allow these women to cope with discrimination better. In contrast to the
US, where the proportion of women in science and engineering is steadily
rising, women scientists in Japan continue to be rare.

Researchers from the US and Europe had trouble comprehending how little
prestige Japan’s high-energy physicists enjoy, says Traweek. When nuclear
physicists proposed to turn the country’s most modern high-energy physics
facility into a ‘photon factory’, foreign physicists in Japan thought it
was a joke, says Traweek. Where they come from, nuclear physicists get hand-me-down
laboratories from high-energy physicists, not the other way around.

In Japan, however, high-energy physicists occupy a marginal position.
They struggle to be taken seriously by their colleagues in the US and Europe,
and they wield little power within the Japanese scientific establishment,
says Traweek.

Working with Susan Sheridan and Sandra Karhu, Van Gerven, an anthropologist
from the University of Colorado, found that individuals who lived in the
Christian village of Kulubnarti between AD 550 and AD 700 showed signs of
physical stress and nutritional deficiencies. As a result, the average life
expectancy at birth in this medieval period was only 11 years.

Van Gerven suspects that the Kulubnarti people suffered because of tributes
and taxes they were forced to pay to the Christian church and the vassal
kings who ruled at that time.

Later, the political organisation of the region collapsed, and the Kulubnartians
reverted to a feudal system. Although the individuals from this period,
AD 1300 to AD 1500, showed evidence of some cyclical food deficiencies,
which correlate with annual cropping cycles, overall the population fared
far better. There was less evidence of chronic malnutrition, and a boost
in average life expectancy at birth, up from 11 years to 19 years.

‘This study indicates these people were probably better off when left
to their own political devices,’ observes Van Gerven. ‘It’s an indication
that the medieval period may have been predatory on the peasantry.’ With
the tax season soon to descend, many Americans will recognise the notion
of predatory politicians.

Researchers in the West tend to analyse primates’ behaviour as a consequence
of genetic traits and reproductive advantage. Their Japanese colleagues
are more likely to explain it as a product of human-like emotions and social
pressures, says Asquith.

The fascination of Japanese researchers with status and social relationships
in primate society allowed them to see things that Western science ignored.
Japanese primatologists studied the influence of kinship, for example, revealing
that primates avoid mating with close blood relatives.

Different religious beliefs in Japan and the West helped to shape the
conduct of primatology in both worlds, says Asquith. In Christianity, only
humans have souls, and Westerners reject as unscientific assumptions that
animals think and feel like humans. But in Japanese culture, there is no
sharp, hierarchical distinction between God, humans and animals. Animal
memorial services, in which laboratory and field workers pray for the souls
of animals that have been sacrificed to research, are increasingly common
in Japanese research centres.

Insights from Japanese primatology have influenced Western primatology
in recent years. But according to Asquith, Japanese scientists still include
material in their Japanese publications that they remove from articles submitted
to journals in the US and Europe. These include what one Japanese scientist
called ‘living things’; subjective descriptions of mental and personality
traits of their research subjects.

Despite a growing body of scientific evid ence that a man’s exposure
to damaging substances can affect his offspring, pregnant women are still
charged with the responsibility of keeping their fetus healthy, said Gladys
Friedler, of the Boston University School of Medicine. ‘This is puzzling,’
she said. ‘Most of the workforce is still male, so why do we still spend
so much time looking at women? The health of men as well as women should
be of concern.’

In the US, 250 000 children are born with birth defects each year. In
60 per cent of cases the origin of the defect is not known. These figures
do not include less obvious problems that appear later in development, such
as biochemical malfunctions and behavioural problems.

‘Paternal exposure to drugs, alcohol, radiation and workplace toxins
has been reported to produce a wide spectrum of problems, including stillbirths,
spontaneous abortion, growth retardation before and after birth, childhood
leukaemia, brain tumours and behavioural changes,’ says Friedler. ‘And there
is no reason to suppose that male-mediated effects are limited to the ones
studied so far.’

In her own studies in mice, Friedler found that opiate drugs, nitrous
oxide and alcohol all had some effect on the growth and development of the
offspring. Landmark events, such as the unfolding of the ear and the opening
of the eye, were delayed in the offspring of male mice given short doses
of a toxin.

The learning power of mice whose fathers had been treated with morphine
some time before mating was impaired.

Many researchers still seem reluctant to contemplate that a man’s environment
can influence the health of children he fathers. But, said Friedler, it
was only after the horror of thalidomide that people admitted that an agent
can cross the placenta and affect the fetus. ‘If the effects had not been
so obvious, we might still be reluctant to acknowledge the effect of environmental
agents on women.’ Despite this, ‘there is a reluctance to accept the accumulated
evidence of male-mediated effects on development’, she said.

Another fallacy exploded at the AAAS was that the female reproductive
tract is efficient at screening out damaged sperm. ‘Would that it were true,’
said Leonard Nelson of the Medical College of Ohio. A normally fertile man,
according to the WHO, is one who has 50 per cent undamaged sperm. Whether
damaged sperm ever fertilise eggs is not known, but about half of all embryos
never implant and are aborted. Fertilisation by poor-quality sperm might
have something to do with this.

The male gonad is extremely sensitive, and sperm can be influenced by
damaging chemicals or radiation at many stages during their production and
their journey through the reproductive tract.

Nelson listed dozens of toxic substances that have the potential to
result in a damaged fetus. They ranged from steroids to tobacco, industrial
chemicals such as flame retardants and plasticisers, common drugs such as
analgesics and antihistamines and more radical treatments for cancer and
Parkinson’s disease. Pesticides are of particular concern because they accumulate
in the food chain.

Nelson experimented with the sperm of sea urchins, testing the effects
of various treatments on their motility, a good indicator of their health.
He found that many pesticides affect the function of sperm markedly.

Some companies have already taken steps to ‘protect the unborn child’
by excluding women from jobs where they might be exposed to hazardous substances.
This has led to some bitter disputes between the women and their employers
in the US.

The most famous case, now before the Supreme Court, pits a group of
women and their union against Johnson Controls, a company which makes batteries.
The company transferred women from higher-paying jobs where they were exposed
to lead on the grounds that it had to protect unborn fetuses (This Week,
10 November 1990). The irony is that children born to men working in the
factory are probably just as much at risk.

Paul Vanden Bout of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville,
Virginia, warned that satellite-based navigation systems are already causing
problems. Observations at one particular frequency, 1612 megahertz, had
been ‘virtually lost’ because of interference from a Soviet military navigation
system called GLONAS.

In the future, however, the biggest threat is likely to come from the
use of satellites for personal communication.

At present, most cellular telephone systems are ground-based. They are
concentrated in densely populated areas, so they are ‘not a big headache’,
said Vanden Bout. But moves towards large satellite-based systems would
put heavy demands on the radio spectrum.

Radio astronomers would have to work hard at finding remote sites for
their facilities and convincing regulatory bodies to take their needs into
account.

‘No one is challenging the fact that many people need access to satellite-based
radio communications,’ said Vanden Bout. ‘For example, we need to be able
to run proper airline businesses. But radio astronomers feel that the spectrum
should be used by the people who really need it.’

Remote sites are becoming increasingly difficult to find, partly as
a result of environmental restrictions. ‘The pressures of commerce and of
convenience are such that in the end this is going to be a losing battle,’
said Vanden Bout. ‘We are going to be pushed to places like the Moon and
outer space.’

According to William Dember and Joel Warm of the University of Cincinnati,
people do much better in a task that requires sustained attention if they
receive regular puffs of perfume. Peppermint is stimulating, lily of the
valley (or ‘muguet’) relaxing. Dember and Warm reckoned that mint kept the
subjects alert by increasing their level of arousal. Muguet, they thought,
might produce the same result by reducing stress.

The test of concentration involved staring for 40 minutes at a pattern
on a computer screen and hitting a key whenever the pattern changed very
slightly. People generally do well to begin with, but their performance
then falls off dramatically.

Real jobs that demand a similar level of concentration include air-traffic
control, quality-control inspections and long-distance lorry driving. In
these cases a lapse of concentration could be fatal.

In none of these jobs is it practical to take time off to exercise,
and too much coffee might be bad for you. ‘We are looking for more benign
ways to keep people alert,’ said Dember.

Dember and Warm gave their subjects 30-second puffs of peppermint, muguet
or plain air every 5 minutes during the test. Those receiving whiffs of
fragrance detected 85 per cent of the signals during the first 10 minutes;
those with plain air only 65 per cent of the signals. Even with the fragrances,
however, performance eventually fell off. ‘It seems that the fragrance effect
is about the same size as a mild dose of caffeine,’ Dember concluded.

Although people sniffing muguet did as well in the tests as those receiving
whiffs of peppermint, the researchers found that this was not because they
were more relaxed. Psychological tests showed that muguet sniffers felt
just as stressed at the end of the test as anyone else.

At the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, Raja Parasuraman
has also investigated the effects of peppermint. He wanted to know whether
the improvement in the test was the result of an overall increase in the
level of arousal or something more specific. General arousal, which Parasuraman
assessed by measuring skin conductance, was not the cause. Instead, Parasuraman
found patterns of brain waves in the treated group that are associated with
alertness. ‘Fragrance enhanced the sensory pathway for visual detection.
It allowed the subjects more control over their allocation of attention,’
he said.

More practically, Robert Baron of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
in Troy, New York State, looked at how fragrances alter the way people think
and behave. Factors in the working environment such as noise and lighting
affect people’s moods; fragrances, it turns out, do too. Baron found that
subjects set themselves higher goals when placed in a room intermittently
blasted with air freshener. They were more willing to negotiate in a friendly
manner, and were able to resolve conflicts more successfully. ‘We found
the effects of pleasant fragrance on virtually all the tasks we tested,’
Baron reported. But this might not always be a good thing. ‘Being in a good
mood and more willing to take risks, for example, is no good if you work
in the loans department of a bank,’ he warned.

Baron envisaged an office of the future in which individuals can control
the atmosphere they work in, manipulating temperature, light, air flow and,
perhaps, fragrance. ‘There is lots of potential for practical application,
but we need to look more closely before we rush out and perfuse all our
workplaces with pleasant smells.’

Despite the scarcity of definitive evidence on the effects of fragrances,
some people are already trying them out. At the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Hospital in New York, William Redd is wafting ‘applespice’ into a body scanner
to keep patients calm. Thousands of dollars can be wasted if they panic
and press the eject button.

And in Japan, ‘intelligent buildings’ are already blowing fragrances
into the atmosphere to keep the workers busy or relaxed, depending on their
jobs and the time of day. The Kajima Corporation in Tokyo favours citrus
in the morning, a floral scent at midday and a relaxing woodland fragrance
in the afternoon.

Those who cannot abide the smell of air fresheners or lily of the valley
need not despair. There is some suggestion that fragrances might have just
as much effect at undetectable levels. ‘It may be better to use them below
the threshhold of detection,’ said Baron. ‘Otherwise people might suspect
that someone is trying to manipulate them.’

Radon is a chemically inert, odourless and colourless gas that can seep
into the basements of buildings from the ground beneath. It is second only
to smoking as a cause of lung cancer.

Radon is produced when radium-226 and uranium-238 decay. Both these
isotopes occur naturally in certain rocks. In turn, radon decays to produce
plutonium-218 and plutonium-214, short-lived products that emit alpha particles.
The alpha particles can damage the cells lining the lungs and cause cancer.

Richard Guimond, US Assistant Surgeon General, told the cancer prevention
conference: ‘We know as much about radon as a cause of lung cancer as we
did about cigarette smoke in the 1960s.’ Yet, despite the Environmental
Protection Agency’s warning that people should check for radon, only 3 million
out of 800 million homes in the US have been tested. Of these 100 000 have
been treated. Guimond estimates that about 8 million need remedial action.

The seriousness of the risk became apparent after epidemiological studies
of miners. One criticism of these studies was that they could not be directly
applied to homes.

The National Research Council addressed the criticism last month in
a study that compared the effects of radon in mines and homes. It concluded
that the risk of an adult developing lung cancer because of radon in the
home was 30 per cent less than for a miner exposed to a similar dose. This
does not mean that radon is less of a carcinogen in the home; the difference
might simply be that miners breathe more deeply when they exert themselves,
drawing in more radon.

In the meantime, people refuse to acknowledge that they may be at risk
from radon. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University in Redford,
Massachusetts, told the AAAS ‘radon has no staying power with the public’.
Guimond added: ‘People are not alarmed by their basements.’