Westminster
IS the university funding system in Britain 鈥渃reaking dangerously鈥�, as Alison
Motluk reports leading educationalists as saying
(This Week, 2 August, p 11)?
The hardest-hitting section of Ron Dearing鈥檚 long-awaited review of higher
education called for an independent body of academics and industrialists to be
set up 鈥渁s soon as possible鈥� to oversee the whole of research in Britain, and to
advise the government where funding is going wrong.
Kim Howells, the junior minister for lifelong learning in the Department for
Education and Employment, tells me his department is considering the Dearing
inquiry鈥檚 recommendations. Specifically, in considering the call for a new
advisory body, the government will, he says, take into account comments from
institutional representative bodies, private research sponsors, the funding
bodies and the research councils, and keep in mind the role of the Chief
Scientific Adviser. 鈥淲e will give our response to this recommendation in a
policy statement later in the year,鈥� he said.
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They should take into account the reality that an independent body ought to
give its advice in public. Stewart Sutherland, vice-chancellor of the University
of Edinburgh, hit the nail on the head when he said that an independent body may
not be in a position to give private advice to a government.
TREATIES covering Antarctica tend to require nations with research programmes
there to undertake environmental impact assessments for all operations. Bob
Holmes reported recently that a team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
Tennessee, has been looking into the possible environmental impact of weather
balloons (This Week, 23 August, p 14).
The Oak Ridge researchers say there could
be a few hundred encounters between whales and balloons each year. What the
effect might be on the whales is not known, so I raised the issue with
scientists at the British Antarctic Survey.
John Dudeney, the BAS鈥檚 acting deputy director, suggests that no model could
take account of all the variables involved. And while Holmes said that some 10
000 balloons were launched each year from Antarctic bases, Dudeney says that
there are now only 11 stations making regular sonde flights鈥攆ive of which
make two flights a day and the rest one flight. Balloons, he says, travel up to
250 kilometres from the launch site in the direction of the prevailing wind
(generally eastwards) during a typical flight lasting 2 hours. Most are made of
synthetic rubber and degrade when exposed to light or ozone. They tend to burst
into pieces of no more than 0.1 square metres, he says.
The stomach contents of large whales, Dudeney explains, often contain a wide
range of objects, including plastic bags, wood and bits of net. The sperm and
right whales tend to regurgitate such items to clear their stomachs, while
baleen whales crush it in their mouths and void it with their faeces. He hasn鈥檛
heard of any large whale that has died from ingesting plastic, although sperm
whales are known to have died from ingesting a tonne or so of nets.
The fragility of whale populations being what it is, my view is that any
threat, however remote, should be examined.
LORD Williams of Mostyn is the junior Home Office minister with the
unenviable responsibility for the touchy matter of testing on animals. I asked
him what current Westminster policy was on the matter. He says the Animal
Procedures Committee is now reviewing the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act
1986 and will recommend any changes in its administration that may be needed to
make the act more effective in achieving a balance between the protection of
animals and the interests of science and industry. The review, he says, is based
on submissions from the scientific community and other interested parties,
including animal welfare organisations.
Williams adds that the Home Office supported a recent study into alternatives
to the Draize eye-irritation test. None of the nine tests on the study could be
validated as providing equivalent test data to that from animal tests. Moreover,
he said, even when such alternatives are validated, it does not follow that they
will be acceptable to all national and international regulatory authorities.
Clearly, we have some way to go before we find internationally acceptable
alternatives to using animal in toxicity tests.