Problem chemistry
Living longer or better?
Fading memories
Offspring mental and physical

Problem chemistry

It is somewhat alarming to note that the number of sixth-form students applying to study chemistry at university is declining in the United Kingdom, and that among those who study the subject to degree level or beyond there are more and more who go on to pursue careers outside the strict realm of chemistry.

As Deborah Gaskell comments in the February issue of Chemistry in Britain, there are many temptations offered to chemistry graduates to turn to accountancy, banking or information technology. Almost always these bring in more money, with less delay. Up to a decade ago industrial or academic chemistry offered a challenging career and a promising future. But in today's climate, to admit to being a professional chemist may generate hostility and distrust in acquaintances.

The public has grown suspicious of scientists in general, in the wake of squabbles over genetic engineering and the flood of toxic and hazardous agrochemicals affecting our environment and the countryside. Chemists, it is thought, now expect to endure the sort of distrust traditionally associated with traffic wardens, tax inspectors, journalists and, more lately, politicians and lawyers.

Much of the trouble arises because chemists are unable or unwilling to explain with any degree of transparency to the public what it is they do and mean. Moreover, academic chemistry departments are today starved of funds. Chemistry graduates are often assumed by ignorant employers to be overqualified for comfort. Times are particularly hard for women chemists, since part-time academics are rarely accommodated by institutions. The teaching of communication skills which might enlighten some of the ignorant and misunderstanding is inadequate. There is reluctance to provide adequate facilities for women chemists. Chemists who become involved in pharmacology and the production and testing of pharmaceutical products have to contend with public fears concerning the testing of new compounds on animals, even if this occurs only in the last resort.

Yet there is no need to write off chemistry as one aspect of research. Chemists must expand and broaden their role and not specialise too rigidly. Employers in industry recognise this better than institutions. But the prospect is not bright.

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Living longer or better?

There has been a remarkable extension of human life expectancy during the century that has just passed, perhaps by as much as 30 years, on average. From now on any increase will inevitably be far less. Average life expectancy is expected to level out at 85 years by 2033 in France and 2035 in Japan, but not until 3182 in the United States. In 1995 life expectancy in the US at birth was 79 for women and 77 for men, according to a report in Science for February 23.

S. Jay Olshansky and colleagues in California maintain that an increase in longevity is unlikely to exceed 15 years. They consider that extending the life span of a 70-year-old individual is considerably harder than preserving a younger one. Earlier advances have principally depended upon reducing infant mortality and premature death from infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis.

In distinction against a mere increase in life-years, the feeling of most experts is that the biomedical resources of society should concentrate their attentions on improving quality of life as people grow older, any increase in years being an added bonus.

As Thomas Kirkwood of Newcastle-on-Tyne comments in The Lancet for February 24, ageing is the natural result of a host of tiny faults arising by cellular malactivity in body tissues, and eventually compromising the continued viability of essential organs. If we looked upon senescence in this light, we ought to conclude that the more beneficent conditions of modern living either lessen the rate at which cellular damage accumulates or induce less destructive patterns of stress which threaten us. The notion that there need be no limit to the span of our existence is fantastic and unrealistic. The important thing for us is to study the aspects of the ageing process and its incident disease patterns in much closer detail than hitherto. That may not result in impressive advances in research, but it should bring with it valuable dividends in terms of quality of life.

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Fading memories

It was claimed by Sigmund Freud that the human brain has an inbuilt capacity for repressing the memory of an experience that was found painful at the time by its owner. Indeed, a central motif in the theoretical background of the psychoanalytical school of thought is the unconscious repression of emotionally disturbing thoughts. The mechanism involved is believed to be one of raising a barrier between the memory and the conscious state, rather than eliminating it. However, studies of repression during the 1960s and 1970s yielded conflicting results, and the idea arose that all sorts of aspects of human memory involve powerful inhibitory processes designed to raise doubts when stored items of recollection present themselves as contradictory.

In a paper published in Nature for March 15, from the department of psychology of the University of Oregon, Freud's idea, controversial as it has been, receives support from a recent trial. Participants were asked to concentrate on pairs of unrelated words and to provide one word when offered the other as a clue. The cue word, presented on a screen, was regarded for five seconds, then an effort made by the participant to think about the associated word or alternatively to recall it as rapidly as possible. A later challenge showed that words that had been consciously suppressed could be recalled to mind less often than when the subject had been requested to think about the association. Trying to avoid awareness of an unwanted memory apparently led the subject later to forget it, even when there was a desire to recall it.

In the study, 32 neurologically healthy college students were each given 40 critical and 10 neutral filler word pairs, and asked either to quote the paired word to a cue word or deliberately to avoid recollecting it. At later questioning, the avoided word of the pair was inhibited, but not the associated pair in question.

This has a social bearing upon childhood memories. Those children who were once abused by a carer whom they trusted are more likely to forget the abuse than are those abused by an unfamiliar carer in whom they felt no trust.

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Offspring mental and physical

In the case of man, that which he creates is more expressive of him than that which he begets the image of the artist and the poet is imprinted more clearly on his works than on his children. — Nikolai Berdyaev: 'The destiny of man' (1931).