Tree of discord
Lost for words
What lurks behind the desk
Broken trust

Tree of discord

I recently visited a research establishment where trees and other plants are growing in tropical or subtropical conditions. One exhibit that particularly interested me was a grove of neem trees from the Indian subcontinent. This tree is of interest because it has recently been the centre of legal disputes and exemplifies one of the less attractive aspects of our craze for protecting the financial interests of huge transnational corporations.

The neem (Melia azadirachta, formerly Azadirachta indica) is a member of the mahogany family, indigenous to the subtropical East. It occurs naturally in India and China, and has been cultivated in Hawaii and the southern United States, and also in southern France and Spain. Its vernacular names include margosa, pride of China, Indian lilac and, according to Avicenna, Persian lilac. In Bengal the neem tree grows to a height of 10-20m and is elegant, with a smooth bark, pinnate leaves, and carrying bunches of perfumed lilac-coloured flowers and hard nutty fruits.

Neem has been used in India for many agricultural and medicinal purposes, for fuel and cosmetics. Its bark is very bitter and its outer layers astringent. Constituents are margosin, a glyceride, also called nimbosin, and tannins. The oil from the fruit is used for illumination. Oil from the bark is anthelmintic and emetic, with antifungal and insecticidal properties, and is applied externally for rheumatism. The hard fruits have been used to make rosary beads.

The neem tree has recently been the centre of a controversy over patent rights regarding some of its constituents that have industrial economic value. The European Patent Office has just revoked a patent that was originally granted in 1994 to the US Department of Agriculture and a multinational business corporation for the exploitation of antifungal compounds. Environmental groups strenuously oppose such a patent, which was regarded as an unwarranted intrusion on interests of the indigenous community. Neem has been used for traditional purposes in the Indian subcontinent in agriculture, domestic economy and herbal medicine for centuries, and the application for a patent on the ground that an agribusiness firm had produced a new fungicide from neem seed oil provoked demonstrations locally.

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Lost for words

Dyslexia, or word-blindness, is a developmental disorder that selectively affects a child's ability to read and write and seriously cramps the educational process. Boys are more often affected than are girls by this condition. It is distinguished from alexia, which is an acquired inability to read, and which is attributed to lesions in one of the cerebral hemispheres.

A commentary in Science for March 16 regarding a study of brain activity during reading in British, French and Italian adults, using positron emission tomography, makes interesting reading. It was prompted by the observation that dyslexia is more prevalent in some countries than in others. For example, its incidence in the United States is twice that in Italy, which suggests a language association. The indication is that dyslexia has a cultural element as well as a genetically determined component. Certain languages expose dyslexia in sufferers more than others, whereas some allow a measure of compensation.

In English, there are 40 phonemes, that is to say those sounds which join to form words. They may be spelt in 1,120 different ways. French is no less complicated. In contrast, Italian speakers have to deal with only 33 different spellings for 25 phonemes. Not surprisingly, it has been found that in general Italian children read faster and more accurately than do British or French children. People who develop reading disorders experience more difficulty in overcoming them if their native tongue is English or French rather than Italian. Nevertheless, defects in general education combine with other social factors in producing reading disorders. In the physiological sphere, dyslexics demonstrate less neural activity in the temporal lobe of the brain during the process of reading than do other individuals, irrespective of their native tongue. Dyslexia is therefore a complex disorder, not amenable to any one simple measure.

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What lurks behind the desk

We often hear in these disturbed days of bureaucracy and the sleaze and incompetence associated with it in public life, but perhaps we rarely meditate on what bureaucracy really means and what damage it may do to us. The word itself is derived from “bureau”, meaning a writing desk provided with drawers, installed in an office or workroom. Originally the word was French and was used particularly to describe the baize cloth with which a working desk was normally covered.

Charles Kingsley in 1850 wrote of his pet abominations, plutocrats and bureaucrats, as “the tyrants of the earth”. Strong condemnation, but perhaps not unjustified if we consider how they tend to shape our behaviour adversely.

Then Charles Lamb in his turn referred to “that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood”, and again to the “votary of the desk — a notched and cropt scrivener — one that sucks his substance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill”. We can take it that Lamb knew what he was talking about, since he spent more than 30 years in an office at India House.

The notable thing, I think, is that nowhere in literature do we find any praise for the bureaucratic way of life. One thing that such a life accomplishes is a complete disregard for the concept of personal responsibility. It is always possible, and certainly expedient, to pass the buck to someone else at a higher desk.

If there is one virtue that we desperately need to cultivate today it must surely be the willingness to stand up responsibly for our own actions, whatever the consequences. In the murky wonderland of politics and business we shall never achieve truth and straight dealing if we bend our minds to the bureaucratic mode of thought.

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Broken trust

The world is given to us on loan. We come and we go, and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it. — Erwin Chargaff (Science 1976;192:938).