A rchive Date
[ 12-04-2003 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Science & Technology ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/gillespie.html
Science, friend or fright?
By Ian Gillespie - Free Press News Columnist
April 12, 2003
It's a dangerous world, but science can save us. That's what four out of five scientists said yesterday. But it's what the fifth one said that proved most intriguing.
The setting was the Natural Sciences Centre at the University of Western Ontario. The title of this third annual symposium was The Scientific Journey 2003: Averting Disasters, Seeking Solutions.
And the content? It was the stuff of a sci-fi disaster flick-collapsing buildings, virulent viruses, crushing tornadoes, devastating earthquakes and deadly cancers.
"Hopefully, at the end of the day," London Deputy Mayor Russ Monteith told spectators, "you'll go home with an understanding of how the brain power of the Western world is trying to resolve some of these issues." Monteith didn't stick around. If he had, he might have gone home bearing a somewhat different message: Be afraid - be very afraid.
First, Alan Davenport spoke. A professor emeritus of civil engineering and the founder/director of the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel at UWO, he described how - during the 1960s - he helped design the World Trade Center. The twin 110-storey towers demanded a host of innovations, Davenport said, including "sway and comfort criteria" and "visco-elastic dampers."
It was hard not to give a little gasp, though, at the sixth innovation on his list - "estimation of aircraft impact." Those estimations, Davenport dryly noted, were for aircraft much smaller than the two that toppled the towers.
Next up was Grant McFadden, a scientist at the Robarts Research Institute and a professor of microbiology and immunology. In his plaid shirt and running shoes, McFadden looked non-threatening. But his topic - smallpox as a weapon - was anything but.
McFadden described how smallpox, which can rot the skin and organs before causing excruciating death, has likely killed 10 per cent of all the people who have ever died.He said it was first used as a weapon in 1763, when a British general intentionally distributed smallpox-infected blankets to North American Indians.
McFadden said the Soviets stockpiled massive amounts of smallpox virus for biological weapons and that it's unclear what's become of those stocks. McFadden said the protective powers of a smallpox vaccination wanes over time. "The safe conclusion is that essentially nobody is really protected out there," he said. "It's a modern-day Nightmare on Elm Street."
Then it was Gordon McBean's turn to scare the daylights out of us. An expert with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, McBean said that during 2001 natural catastrophes wreaked more havoc than ever, claiming 25,000 lives and costing $36 billion US in property damage.
He said Ontario gets slammed by about 15 tornadoes every year. But he observed that most politicians refuse to set aside money to detect, warn and help prevent such events - small changes in the design and placement of buildings can greatly improve their chances of withstanding windstorms, he said - because most politicians figure the next election will occur before the next catastrophe.
David Eaton, of UWO's department of earth sciences, said some earthquakes pack more punch than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He said 70 per cent of the world's supercities sit in areas of moderate to high earthquake risk. But we can relax a bit because we don't.
Jeff Nisker, of UWO's department of obstetrics and gynecology, spoke last. Ostensibly, his presentation was about averting genetic breast cancer. But his topic was best summed up by his question: "Just because we can, should we?" Nisker said scientists were initially elated when they discovered how to administer prenatal tests that could alert women their unborn child would be fatally debilitated. But scientists were dismayed when 55 per cent of respondents wanted to screen their unborn for gender.
"What they wanted to prevent," said Nisker, "was having girls."
Even screening women for genes that predispose them to breast cancer raises ethical questions, Nisker said. Should this be available to all women? Or only to those who can pay? What about cloning to create stem cells with the potential to restore movement to para-lysed limbs?
But Nisker reached a different conclusion than the other speakers because in the end, he said, these questions can't be left to scientists - they need to be answered by every one of us.
That struck me as quite possibly one of most frightening things of all. ]
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