The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7349 p594
14 May 2005

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Loathsome to the eye and dangerous to the lungs more
New attempt to trace human history and patterns of migration more
Mixing religious conviction with politics has become a risky business more

Loathsome to the eye and dangerous to the lungs

Revisiting some of the adventures of Philip Marlowe, as narrated by Raymond Chandler, I was reminded that not long ago smoking cigars and cigarettes was usually accepted without serious criticism. Indeed, in many circles you were seen as a trifle odd if you suggested that the habit was a bad one and that on no account would you descend to sharing it.

Chandler’s characters, both men and women, were almost never met without tobacco between their lips, and they lit up in the street, in homes, in offices, sometimes even in the bath. The rare person who objected to sharing the smoke did so only because of its undesirable effect on chronic asthma. And, come to think of it, most plays on the professional stage relied for their critical moments on the lighting up of a pipe or a cigarette.

Yet today we hear a vast amount about the damage done to essential organs not only by indulging in smoking but also in suffering as a passive bystander. A little reflection, too, will reveal that the idea is far from new. James I in 1604, in his ‘A counter-blaste to tobacco’, commented that smoking was: “A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” Robert Burton, in his 1651 ‘Anatomy of melancholy’, chose to refer to “tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent … but as it is commonly abused by most men … hellish, devilish, and damned”. No one appeared to take these comments too seriously, although George du Maurier in 1892 profferred the idea that: “The wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one smokes, the wretcheder one gets — a vicious circle!”

We have to admit that society has made some progress, however slight, during recent years. Those who smoke, at least in public, have at last found themselves in a situation as outcasts, although at the same time a section of the community has resorted to worse things than tobacco, and there are many such things.

The intriguing thing is — why does it take so long to press home a lesson and a caution? The tobacco industry is still making its millions from the gullible and governments all over the world are still cashing in on a loathsome custom.

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New attempt to trace human history and patterns of migration

An article by Elizabeth Pennisi in Science for 15 April, describes an enterprising programme of research designed to collect samples of DNA and use them to reveal the mysterious patterns of migration since humans emerged. A five-year project involves the National Geographic Society of Washington and the IBM Corporation of New York. They will collect 100,000 human DNA samples for investigation and will sell kits for sampling to people who wish to learn about their own past or to contribute genetic samples towards the study.

A population geneticist, Spencer Wells, is to co-ordinate 10 research groups across the world, teams collecting DNA samples locally involving some 1,000 indigenous populations. Another researcher, Alan Cooper, of Adelaide, is to gather DNA from preserved human remains worldwide. The data will be stored and analysed and placed in a publicly available database. The overall cost is estimated at $40m.

The study follows the Human Genome Diversity Project, which has been stopped after more than a decade because of technical and political challenges and lack of funding. Opposition has come from indigenous groups who worry about the commercial exploitation of their tissues and DNA. The new project hopes to avoid former ethical objections by pledging not to use its data for biomedical research and is claimed to be one 100 times more powerful than the earlier study, which managed to collect only about 1,000 cell lines.

Private funding has removed some earlier constraints and it is hoped that the confidence of indigenous groups will not be destroyed as the study proceeds.

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Mixing religious conviction with politics has become a risky business

An editorial in the 8 April issue of Science draws timely attention to a problem which is affecting certain cultural aspects of society in Europe and the US. For the past two centuries scepticism, with a growing confidence in the findings of science and rational modes of thought, has dominated the way in which questions of life and death, and why the universe is as it seems to be, are faced and answered.

As Donald Kennedy expresses it, we have inherited an effect of the Scottish Enlightenment of the early 18th century, when the practice of executing religious heretics made way for a budding conviction that faith in experimental progress should take the place of blindly inherited dogma.

In the US this understanding is undergoing a degree of dissolution because some school boards there have eliminated the teaching of evolution as a developmental force and substituted religious version of creation that are to be adopted as scientific alternatives. Alternatives to the teaching of biological evolution are being debated in no fewer than 40 states.

Evolution is not the sole scientific theory being challenged. Geological matters in some school textbooks are being rewritten because the dates they give for the ages of the earth clash with scriptural claims, being far too old.

Kennedy writes that certain aspects of science are now proscribed on what appears to be religious grounds. For example, stem-cell research is claimed by its critics to present a moral dilemma. This does not follow any confrontation between science and ethics but arises from an argument over what constitutes human life.

Certain religions, but not all, have strong views on this issue. The present wave of evangelical Christianity in the US would arouse no anxiety if it were limited to individual conviction and the expressions of limited groups. But a convergence is appearing between religious conviction and political partisan loyalty, and apparent in the statistics of the 2004 presidential election. When this impinges on a nation’s research agenda, foreign assistance programmes and the high school curriculum, it is warning of an important change in national life and culture.

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