Walking on air
Work and leisure
Fact and profit
None so blind

Walking on air

An interesting research letter published in The Lancet for April 7 from Harvard describes the result of experiments involving 20 healthy women who wore dress shoes with wide heels and narrow heels. The object was to determine whether wide-base shoes were more or less likely to produce osteoarthritis of the knee than those with narrow heels, a matter in which there are conventional answers.

Contrary to general belief, walking in broad-heeled shoes causes as much, if not greater, increase in knee torques as does walking in shoes with narrow heels. It has to be recognised, however, that walking on broad heels may well reduce the risk of falls, ankle injuries and deformities of the feet, compared with those associated with narrow high heels.

It is concluded that wide heels create abnormal forces across the patello-femoral and medial compartments of the knee, which are typical sites for those degenerative changes in the joint that result in osteoarthritis.

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Work and leisure

The notorious slogan appearing over the gates of Auschwitz epitomises one of the strange and largely unchallenged assumptions of industrial society: Arbeit macht frei. So work is the fount of freedom — curious that the idea should have been associated with one of the least free epochs of history.

I recently came across a journal article in which the nature of work and that of leisure were discussed. The enthusiastic advocates of work generally refer to a social arrangement whereby an individual works for an employer, in an office or factory. They rarely show sympathy for the independent striver who can choose what to do and, within limits, when. In many parts of the world, industry was built on the labour of people who were virtually slaves to the bench and the clock. From such roots grew the so-called Protestant work ethic, the belief that work is, of itself, virtuous.

On the basis of such belief the remark that “time is money” arose and was bandied from mouth to mouth idly. Payment was based upon hours worked, and not on the sounder foundation of work done. Bertrand Russell remarked in 1932: “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

Such ideas impose themselves on our ideas of education. To the serious student and visionary the object of education, by definition, is to liberate personal capabilities and produce a civilised and balanced citizen who can enjoy life and contribute to it. To the capitalist work-ethicist, education is a means of training to perform a defined function usually connected with the production and distribution of material goods and associated services.

It is worth contemplating this situation, for the sake of our children. Are we trying to liberate them or enslave them?

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Fact and profit

An editorial in The Lancet for April 14 discusses the deplorable policy of some large pharmaceutical manufacturers in seeking to control the publication of results of research on their products that are not in conformity with the ideas that those firms consider desirable for advertising purposes. Although any drug manufacturer is entitled to turn to commercial ends the results of research into its products, it has no intrinsic right to censor or block publication in a scientific journal of any findings that a researcher may establish. Authors sometimes find themselves asked by manufacturers to delete or qualify parts of their communication of which the provider does not approve.

As The Lancet comments: “Efforts by drug companies to suppress, spin, and obfuscate findings that do not suit their commercial purposes were first revealed to their full, lethal extent during the thalidomide tragedy.” Since then, despite governmental drug regulation schemes worldwide, the tactics of the all-powerful firms have shown little change for the better.

The situation is complicated by some investigators' own conflicts of interest. The rising costs of modern technologies driving research tempt industry to intrude further into the realms properly belonging to science. Governments “have consistently failed to put their people before profit. By contrast, academic institutions could intervene to support scientists when financial conflicts threaten to do harm.” Unfortunately, the institutions themselves have come to be businesses, and try to commercialise research discoveries rather than remain independent, as scholarly bodies should be if they wish to remain strictly objective.

Scientific journals offer a degree of protection to researchers, who are almost always now subject to peer review. The important thing is to make explicit the role of any sponsor of a piece of investigation, so that those studying it may use their judgment over objectivity and possible bias.

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None so blind

An editorial in Science for March 30 expressed concern over the “unfortunate U-turn on carbon” made by President Bush in connection with his earlier pre-election promise that the United States would support world attempts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, in the interests of controlling global warming. A few weeks ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforced the conclusions about global warming previously established by scientific bodies and increased the assessed temperature rise during the present century.

The consensus among concerned scientists over the likelihood of future warming of the earth's surface and atmosphere is now stronger than ever, and it has been agreed that the increase during the 20th century was partially due to consumption of fossil fuels. All the 30-odd reports and articles published in Science during the past year on global warming have confirmed the retreat of glaciers, the shrinking of polar ice caps, the heating of oceanic waters and other warning signs. It may be permissible to argue over the economics of some desirable countermeasures, but the facts are established and the problem is serious. International measures are called for on a wide scale.

In the face of all the scientists, industry representatives with vested interests seem to have persuaded Bush that the idea of global warming is moonshine. As a 16th century proverb warns us: “There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see, and none so deaf as those who do not wish to hear.” This does not apply only to questions of our future climate, but to other urgent matters also. And falling in with the blind and the deaf appears to be standard behaviour among politicians, who are blinded and deafened by the big guns of a short-sighted, greedy industrial economy.