Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 211

22 January 1981

Towards what shining city, which hill? The American presidency is an impossible job which has an

enlivening effect on those who d o it. New encumbents embark on tasks widely held to be beyond the resources of one man with the zeal and enthusiasm of an army. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, when new to office, offered the promise of a fresh start on old problems, domestic and international. Given the persistent importance of the United States in the affairs of most other communities, the promise of a change of direction echoes around the world. Some of the consequences are unsettling; changes of direction are disconcerting. Some are also enlivening, as for the new incumbent himself. It is too soon to know what will be the consequences of Mr Reagan's accession to the presidency, but a single inauguration speech is not a sufficient guide to what will follow in the months ahead. The safest assumption is that Mr Reagan, like all his predecessors, will be good at some things and less good, or even frankly bad, at others. There is no shame in that, given that the job is everywhere acknowledged to be impossible. After a spell in which the president seemed to be bad - but not for want of trying to be good - at most things, it is no wonder that Mr Reagan's coming has cheered even his political opponents. For a time, at least, people will be prepared to give President Reagan the benefit of the doubt. The vacillations and exaggerations of the election campaign will be forgotten. T o that rule, there will be only one exception. In his acceptance speech in Detroit last summer, Mr Ronald Reagan promised that he would lead the American people to a "shining city on a hill". That phrase, redolent of Blake or Bunyan, is too arresting to forget.

President Reagan, no doubt less innocent than he seems, will not be starved of advice, solicited and otherwise. Politics being what it is, his presidency may well be made or broken in the next few months by almost accidental issues - the inflation rate, o r the problems of Central America. In these connections, n o new president would choose to start from where President Reagan must. One of the perils of the job is that he has no choice. Another is that the issues, although recently made clear, are by no means irrelevant to what may happen on the wider stage. If inflation continues as it has been in the past few years, American institutions will be weakened as surely as they have been undermined elsewhere, then the foundations of the shining city will be found not to exist. Already many of the new occupants of offices in the White House must be regretting that there had to be a campaign, and a promise of a tax-cut to go with it. If the problems of democracy in Latin America are ignored or, worse, supposed to be familiar problems susceptible to oldfashioned solutions, the roof could fall in. Even President Reagan's friends will be well aware of the seriousness of these dangers. Those who heard his acceptance speech may be forgiven for looking further ahead.

The Reagan position, so often defined in the past several months that it has become unclear, is ambiguous on two crucial issues - arms control and academics. In the parochial spirit in

which trade magazines such as Nature grind their own axes on occasions such as the inauguration of a new president, special pleading may be excusable. On the face of things, for example, there is no reason why the new Adminstration should give an instant's thought to the special interest of the scientific community in the management of the arms race. Scientists, the argument might go, have (among other things) a special competence in military research and development. But only taxpayers have a right to say what should be done about relationships between the superpowers. President Reagan has in any case come a long way since the beginning of the election campaign, when he was bent on seeming a 1950s hawk. Now (the argument continues), he is for renegotiation of Salt I1 and other accommodations of that kind. The argument misses a point that will quickly become apparent, that the special but not exclusive interest of the scientific community in arms control is not merely academic. There is a sense in which J. Robert Oppenheimer was right in saying that "the physicists have known guilt" - hawks among them have persuaded doveish graduate students to work on unwelcome projects since time immemorial. The point has been reached at which both hawks and doves share with the general public the belief that it would be best if the consequences of the products of their joint endeavours could be contained within bounds, and that more or less any bounds would be better than none. This does not imply that all scientists share with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the view that international tensions have worsened in the past few weeks - the Bulletin advanced its notorious minute hand one minute last week (and was mentioned on the British Broadcasting Corporation's morning news programme as a consequence) but did not convincingly explain why it had done so. Yet there is a great majority in the scientific community that would wish something sensible done about arms control, and which knows that such a course is not unattainable. The political question for the new president is whether he can see this as an opportunity.

Another issue for President Reagan, not too long to be left on the back burner, is that of the research community itself. Mr Carter (or, more probably, Dr Frank Press) has left the incumbent President with an awkward choice. Should an expansionary science budget be cut in the interests of financial prudence, or left as it is so as not to give offence? Neither of these questions should bother President Reagan in these early heady days. There is a simpler question he must answer. Sincc his early days as Governor of California, he has cut the figure of an adversary of the universities. At one stage, he forced Mr Clark Kerr out of his post as president of the University of California. Since then, he has made clear his disdain for academic preoccupations - decision is what matters. Such a position can be defended but is not defensible. The President needs urgently to build a bridge to the academics. T o fail to d o so will be to alienate some of those who might build a city, or find a hill.

Responsibility for trust in research The public complaint, fashionable in the 1970s, that scientists people's first reaction to the article by Harris et al. on page 228,

could not be trusted when making statements about the hazards and our Washington Correspondent's commentary on it (page of pollution or of genetic manipulation, is now mercifully 227). The reaction is understandable, even forgivable. For what abating. Is the complaint now about to be replaced with the has emerged is that three out of four laboratory cultures of cells suspicion that scientists cannot trust each other? This will besome originally described in 1977 as derived from the spleens of patients

212 Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 with Hodgkin's disease have nothing to d o with human malignancy but are, instead, almost certainly derived from owl- monkey kidney tissue. This improbable conclusion h8s been established by means of as neat a piece of detective work as can be found in the recent literature. The fact remains that the four cell cultures have been the basis, in the past four years, for aspattering of spurious data in the scientific literature. Some of these unwarranted conclusions have been used by others in unrelated work towards the understanding of Hodgkin's disease. Elsewhere, laboratories have tried (usually without success) to establish their own analogous cell cultures from patients with the disease. But Dr John Long's apparent success with his supposedly authentic cultures appears to have led to the award of at least one substantial research grant (for $500,000 over three years), afterwards rescinded. Especially because the principal investigator had been accused of falsifying data in a different context, many will now be tempted to suppose that four years of work with Hodgkin's disease has been a kind of hoax.

T o jump to that conclusion would be wrong. Those who work with cells in culture are continually aware of the risks of contamination. Especially in laboratories specializing in this work, one established cell culture may be contaminated with cells from another by a variety of means - contaminated glassware, people's hands or defects of laboratory plumbing. Almost by definition, the most esoteric kinds of cells, requiring the most elaborate mixture of nutrients to make them grow, are those which are the most susceptible to contamination. HeLa cells, the malignant cells derived from a single tumour half a century ago, and widely used as models of malignant cells, are frequent contaminants. Inevitably, when a cell culture that grows only with difficulty is contaminated by cells that grow more vigorously, like HeLa cells, it is a matter only of time, perhaps days, before the original cells disappear, swamped by their more strongly growing competitors. Naturally, people with cells at risk are constantly on the look-out for contamination. This is obviously easiest when the cells at risk can be easily recognized, perhaps because of some distinctive biochemical characteristic. Again, however, and almost by definition, novel types of cells are likely to be least easily recognizable. In other words, it is entirely possible that people may work for weeks or months with cells from a tissue culture without knowing that the originals have been supplanted. It is less easy to see how meaningful results can be wrung from such a culture, but nothing is impossible. The fact that Harris etal. have been able to say no more about the fourth of the cell lines than that it is of human origin emphasizes the difficulties of identification. There is therefore no reason to doubt Dr Long's assertion (see page 227) that he believed the cell lines to be authentic; but his response to the doubts raised within and from outside his laboratory seems to have been too casual.

The significance of the paper by Harris et al., for all its interest, should therefore not be exaggerated. Almost certainly, this is not the first occasion on which research reports based on themistaken identity of tissue culture cells have appeared in the scientific literature. Most of the articles concerned have probably disappeared from people's citation lists as their data have been recognized as spurious or simply puzzling. It would be foolish to ask that the scientific enterprise should be carried on in such a way that such unwanted and unrecognized noise is entirely eliminated. Would intending authors be required to submit with their manuscripts samples of their tissue culture cells for validation by the referees? Would those working with supposedly pure and authentic strains of laboratory mice be expected to follow suit? And how would the scientific journals cope with the problems that would follow? The only reasonable conclusion is that the ideal is probably unattainable, that the scientific literature is based to a very large extent on trust in what its authors say, that the system works surprisingly well and that its occasional failures can be accommodated without too much difficulty. If it follows that the scientific literature is not to be regarded as a collection of Mosaic tablets, nobody will be the loser.

The problems created for laboratories by such developments as those identified by Harris et al. are more immediate and in some

ways more difficult. The necessarily close working relationship between people sharing the same facilities and even the same objectives in research is one of the most powerful safeguards of the authenticity of the scientific literature. However great may be the temptation for individuals to make too much of preliminary findings or to apply cosmetic treatments to otherwise untidy data, the knowledge that their most candid critics are likely to be their closest colleagues is constantly an influence towards sobriety. It is true, of course, that individuals who have misled themselves can usually succeed in misleading more junior colleagues as well, but even this is an unsure calculation now that many graduate students are zealous custodians of what is right and proper. The more certain safeguard, however, is that people in laboratories where all researchers are in the habit of talking freely with their immediate colleagues about their work, not merely at formal colloquia but over lunch, are imperceptibly persuaded to couch their interpretations of their work in moderate language. (The so- called sociologists of science, always on the look-out for subjects to study, could profitably pay some attention to the sociology of the laboratory as a formative influence on the pattern of science.) No doubt one of the reasons why the most successful laboratories are frequently large laboratories derives from the influence of these local invisible colleges.

Why, then, does this system of polite and imperceptible persuasion by colleagues not always function as it should? In the past few months, the grant-making system has frequently been blamed for departures from the path of strict propriety. The competition for grants, the argument goes, is now so fierce, and the consequences of failing to secure a grant can be so serious for the career of an individual, that people are tempted beyond endurance. This danger is more apparent than real. If the competition for grants is now more fierce, so is the scrutiny of the peer-review committees on whose recommendations most grants are awarded. A more likely explanation is that the grant-making system has disturbed the balance there would otherwise be among colleagues working within the same laboratory. A successful grant-holder tends, when grants are hard to come by, to acquire a status and a degree of autonomy that may not be entirely justified by his colleagues' estimate of his work. And people who are seen to enjoy the goodwill of the grant-making agencies are, if they so choose, to some extent immune from the necessarily searching scrutiny of their immediate colleagues. The Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the best known components of the Harvard medical complex, moved quickly after Dr Long's resignation last year to promise an audit of his work, and the paper by Harris et al. is one result. The hospital has probably for the time being done everything it can. But, in the long run, there and elsewhere, the objective should be to make sure that laboratory communities remain as rigorous as they should be in their internal assessment of all their members.

The responsibility lies fairly and squarely with heads of laboratories and heads of university departments. It is an unpalatable responsibility. But unless it is exercised diligently, the result will be unpalatable for the scientific community as a whole. One obvious danger is that of the emergence within the scientific profession of groups of zealous and often over-zealous people dedicated to rooting out what they consider to be dishonesty. Already there are signs of such developments. Some of the allegations of plagiarism in the past year or so appear to have had their roots as much in self-righteousness as in a concern for honesty in the literature. Some of the consequences of these allegations have been unfair to those accused. Yet there is no reason to suppose that the few cases of dishonesty that have come to light are in any sense the tip of an iceberg. On the contrary, as the day to day affairs of reputable scientific journals bear out, there is a general and quite remarkable concern for truth. Would- be authors are forever going back to their benches to check small points raised by referees, who in turn appear almost masochistically prepared to recommend the publication of data or arguments conflicting with their own positions. It would be tragic if these civilized habits were to be corrupted by the activities of self-appointed vigilantes.

O 198lNature Publishing Group

Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 213

More pressures on Rothschild system Geology project threatened by more cuts

The Rothschild principle, whereby Brit ish government depa r tmen t s ("customers") commission research from research councils ("contractors"), already corrupted in medical and agricultural research, is now showing signs of strain elsewhere. The latest development is that two of the customers of the Natural Environment Research Council, the Department of the Environment and the Department of Industry, are threatening to cut the amount of geological research they are prepared to commission.

At stake are the Geological Survey and the mineral reconnaissance programme, both run by the council's Institute of Geological Sciences. The Department of the Environment, which currently contributes 1.5 million to the 4.5 million annual budget of the Geological Survey, is cutting its contribution to geological generally from 3.5 million in 1980-81 to 2.6 million in 1981-82. Although the department has not yet specified its priorities, it is expected that the cuts will be made in the Geological Survey and the engineering geology and bulk minerals resources programmes. The Department of Industry, which is the sole supporter of the mineral reconnaissance programme, is threatening to cut that budget from about 1.2 million in 1980-81 to 0.8 million in 1981-82.

Both departments say that they no longer want to fund research which is not directly relevant to their work. Thus the Department of the Environment will only fund those parts of the Geological Survey related to planning permission. Alternative funds for the survey are unlikely to be forthcoming and it will have to make do with less. Dr G. M. Brown, director of the Institute of Geological Sciences, finds his planning hampered by the Department of the Environment's delay in deciding its new priorities.

The Department of Industry is hoping tha t t h e mineral reconnaissance programme will find alternative funds from industry. Since 1972, this unit has been searching for metalliferous ores in Britain, especially in the Scottish Highlands, North Wales and Devon and Cornwall. Although deposits of several minerals - in particular copper and tungsten - have been found, only one, a barites deposit in Scotland, has led to an application for mining rights by private industry. Nevertheless, industry is interested. Companies consider that the

results provide useful information for assessing mining profitability in the light of future market trends. But hitherto, there have been no direct commissions from industry.

The Natural Environment Research Council has been trying to establish whether it could act a contractor for private industry. Meetings with the mining houses have thrown up several problems such as that of confidentiality (reports have previously been publicly available) and the assignment of mining rights. Industry itself is keen that the programme should

continue, but considers that financial support for it is properly the duty of central government.

Time is now running out. The new financial year begins in April, and twenty of the mineral reconnaissance staff have already moved to oil surveys of the North Sea, paid for by the Department of Energy. The Department of Industry has not finally decided to cut its support, but is thought by several observers to be in a mood to say that if private industry does not produce some cash, it will a sign that the programme has little practical relevance. Judy Redfearn

Carter's last budget asks for more Washington

Determined to enter the history books on an optimistic note, the outgoing Carter Administration has proposed to Congress a budget for the next fiscal year that contains a 4.3 per cent real growth in support for basic research.

"This is the best budget for the past four years for science and engineering research", said Dr Frank Press, the President's Science Advisor and director of the Office of Science and Technology, commenting on the budget proposals last week. He added that it confirmed President Carter's commitment to the support of science and technology "as an investment in the future".

In addition to the intended growth above the expected level of inflation, Dr Press singled out several initiatives that were being proposed by the outgoing Administration "to solve problems that we have known about for a number of years".

One of these is the proposed inclusion in the budget of the National Science Foundation of a $75 million fund to improve university research equipment and laboratories. Their rapidly deteriorating state was highlighted in a recent report from the Association of American universities.

Two other proposals involve trainee- ships and other awards to avoid potential manpower shortages in fields such as computer science and energy engineering, and efforts to meet the present difficulties of engineering schools where, according to Dr Press, "faculty and equipment are not on a par with what one would expect in industry".

The big question, of course, is how much of this increase will escape the rapidly sharpening budget knife of the incoming Administration of President Ronald Reagan. For many social welfare programmes, the writing is already on the wall, but for science and technology the signals are mixed.

On the one hand, Mr Reagan's budget director, Mr David Stockman, has been talking about the need to rewrite the Carter budget "from top to bottom". Mr

Stockman has previously placed the Nat ional Aeronaut ics and Space Administration (NASA) among his "low priority" agencies which might absorb significant cuts. In the same vein, a group known as the National Tax Limitation Committee put out a report last week suggesting, for example, reduced spending on the Galileo mission to Jupiter - already being delayed a year by NASA because of delays with the launch vehicles - on its list of "expenditure control opportunities". The group is also raising questions about the appropriateness of government support for the space shuttle, and suggesting a re-examination of the future cost-benefit ratio.

At the same time, however, members of the various transition teams which have been established by the Reagan Administration to look at research and development programmes have been making optimistic noises, insisting that the new president is committed to the support of "science, technology and productivity".

Part of the increase in defence spending supported by both the Carter and the Reagan Administrations, for example, is likely to have beneficial spin-offs for research support, particularly in areas where the large aerospace companies have astake. "I have beenlookingin teacups for the past two months, and each time I look I see a different picture", said outgoing NASA director Dr Robert Frosch last week.

The details of the Carter budget proposals contain several proposed new scientific starts. The NASA budget, for example, contains funding for the development of the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar - announced by President Carter shortly before the election - as well as a new Geological Applications Program (GAP) which will use remote sensing satellites to study geological resources which might contribute to the discovery of new oil and gas deposits.

Reflecting the delays in the space shuttle programme, the proposed commitment to start work on a fifth shuttle orbiter, the

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214 Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 additional costs of science projects such as the space telescope, and the new projects described above, the total requested budget for NASA comes to $6,700 million. This would be a 20 per cent increase over the budget for the fiscal year 1981 which began last October, and if it is allowed to stand, would be the largest annual increase in the agency's budget since the early 1960s.

The National Science Foundation has also put in for a hefty 23.5 per cent increase, from $1,096 million in the current year to $1,353.5 million next year. Most of this reflects the Carter Administration's keenness to support both research and training in engineering fields. The new engineering directorate will receive a 20 per cent increase in its research budgets.

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the proposed increase for biomedical research is less spectacular. On the basis that whatever the president asks for is traditionally increased by Congress, Mr Carter is suggesting that the NIH budget for basic research be raised by 9.4 per cent. Allowing for inflation, this would result in a drop of 1.1 per cent between 1981 and 1982.

At the Department of Energy, increased support for research into synthetic fuels and nuclear power - particularly fusion energy - has resulted in a requested increase of 9.4 per cent in real terms for basic research, second only to that of NASA.

Many of these figures will remain only as indications of the "good intentions" with which the Carter Administration is leaving office. Perhaps of more lasting significance are the figures prepared by Dr Press to demonstrate the main trends of federal support for science during Mr Carter's four years in the White House.

These reveal, for example, that overall the biggest winner as far as support for basic research is concerned has been the Department of Defense. If the proposed 1982 budget figures are taken into account, the Pentagon's basic research efforts will have grown by almost a quarter - 22.6 per cent - between 1978 and 1982.

Next come NIH. Congressional enthusiasm has raised the NIH research budget by 13.3 per cent over the four years, compared with a growth of 12.8 per cent at the Department of Energy.

The National Science Foundation, even if it is granted this year's large increase, will still only have seen its basic research grow by 9.2 per cent. And at NASA, reflecting the pressures which the space shuttle has imposed on the space science programmes, the basic research budget actually fell, in real terms, by 0.6 per cent over the same four years.

Overall, the growth in basic research, including the 1982 proposals, would come to 10.8 per cent for the period of the Carter Administration. In current dollars, the budget would grow by 58.2 per cent. from $3,704 million to $5,801 million.

Ironically, the research and development budget shows an identical increase of 58.2 per cent from $26,388 million to $41,734 million.

"Anyone who says that we do not engage in long-term planning is proved wrong by these figures", quipped Dr Press - expected soon to be elected president of the National Academy of Sciences - although he added that the agreement was actually fortuitous and that "the figures just happened to fall our this way". In practice, he will not be required to explain why it should be otherwise.

David Dickson

Argentinian power

Soviets help Argentina has bought five tonnes of

heavy water from the Soviet Union under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, the Argentinian Comision Nacional de Energia Atomica announced last week. It is intended for "topping up" the Atucha-1 nuclear station, which needs on the average an annual heavy-water replacement of 1.5 tonnes.

The sale is part of the growth of Soviet- Argentinian trade since January 1980, when Argentina refused to back President Carter's embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is now Argentina's main market for agricultural products. In July of last year, Argentina's Secretary of Commerce, Alejandro Estrado, signed an agreement to supply the Soviet Union with 20 million tonnes of feed grain and soya beans during the next five years. There are also persistent rumours that a major agreement to export meat to the Soviet Union is now being negotiated.

In return, the Soviet side has shown considerable interest in Argentina's nuclear programme. Argentina has been conspicuous among third world countries since the early 1950s for its nuclear programme aimed at ultimate autonomy in both research and technology. The commission has announced that the target will be for practical purposes attained by the end of 1981, when the Cordoba uranium processing plant will begin producing an estimated annual production of 150 tonnes. Rafael Coppa, the director of the plant, said last year that Argentina will then have full control of the primary uranium cycle, from prospecting for

Promises for President Reagan to deny Specific proposals included in the budget

are as follows. .Major difficulties with the development of a vehicle to launch the two Galileo spacecraft on their journey to Jupiter from the space shuttle have caused NASA to propose delaying the Galileo project for one year and switching to a new launch vehicle, a converted Centaur rocket. .The Carter Administration proposes that the National Institutes of Health should aim to stabilize support for both competitive research grants and research traineeships. Last year, the Administration promised to provide enough money to keep the number of new and renewing competitive research grants constant at about 5,000. Given general fiscal constraints, however, this meant cutting back severely on the number of traineeships, a move which brought strong protests from various sectors of NIH, and was subsequently overturned by Congress. .Defense Department support for research on US campuses seems destined to

continue to grow faster than support from any other federal agency. According to the budget request for the fiscal year 1982, military funding for research and development at US universities and colleges will be 21 per cent greater than in 1981, totalling $639 million.

The proposed figure, most of which will be spent on unclassified basic research projects, is part of a 16 per cent increase in all military-sponsored basic research expenditure. .One major new start proposed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the detailed design and initial construction of a 25-metre millimetre-wavelength radio- telescope which is planned for installation at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Plans for the new telescope have generated widespread support in the radioastronomy community. NSF has asked Congress for funds as part of a 29 per cent increase in the NSF budget for astronomical sciences, rising from $58.5 million to $75.6 million.

.The Carter Administration is proposing to cut suppor t for research and development in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from $364 million to $345 million. At the same time, the outgoing Administration wants to earmark an extra $28 million to improve its review of the environmental impact of proposed major energy projects in the west of the country - particularly in connection with the synthetic fuels programme - and to launch a government-wide research programme on the effects of acid rain. .The Carter Administration wants to give a major boost to research into magnetic fusion. The 1982 budget proposals include an increase of 28 per cent in fusion research, to a total of $520 million in budget obligations. $32.8 million of this would be spent on a new centre for magnetic fusion energy, as proposed by the Administration following a thorough review of the magnetic fusion programme last year. Research o n magnetic confinement systems would increase from $1 19 million to $151 million.

David Dickson

Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 215 uranium to putting the fuel elements into the reactor.

Nevertheless, the search for self- sufficiency does not rule out cooperative projects. Indeed, on returning from the World Energy Conference in Munich last September, Admiral Car los Cas t ro Madero, the president of the Argentinian commiss ion , o p e n l y a t t a c k e d t h e "negative aspects" of restrictions of nuclear technology transfer, adopted first by the "London Club" of nuclear suppliers and then (at the end of 1979) by a wider circle of industrialized Western states.

Soviet interest has grown in the past year. Last April, during a visit to Buenos Aires, the Soviet foreign trade vice- minister Aleksandr Manzhelo suggested a major nuclear cooperation between the two countries, stating at the same time that he thought that Soviet-Argentinian trade could well double in the next few years. At the end of July, Yurii Fokin, Secretary of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, visited the Atucha-1 plant. Vera Rich

Large electron project Swedish cloud

Sweden is having second thoughts about participating in LEP, the 500-cm 500-GeV electron-positron colliding machine which, a t a cost of 900million Swiss francs, is planned to be the next major project of the European centre for high energy physics research, CERN. At a meeting of the Swedish Natural Sciences Research Council last month, 90 per cent of those present expressed doubts about the arrangements for funding the project.

Delegates from CERN's member states are expected formally to approve the building of LEP at the next meeting of CERN council in June. The plan is to finance the project out of CERN's annual budget by reducing expenditure on other programmes such as the intersecting storage rings and the synchrocyclotron. How quickly LEP can be built will depend on how much of the budget - SwFr610 million this year - can be diverted to it each year. What seems to be worrying Sweden is that the CERN council, which requires a two-thirds majority vote to approve budgets, could demand that Sweden pay more if the cost of LEP rises above initial estimates.

One faction of the Swedish research council says that LEP is simply too expensive to be built now. Another would agree to the project with some concessions - either that Sweden .be made exempt from budget increases approved by CERN council, or that the CERN budget be divided into LEP and other programmes, giving Sweden the option of leaving LEP while remaining a full member of CERN's other activities. Under the present arrangement, a decision not to participate in LEP would effectively be a decision to

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opt out of CERN altogether, An incidental factor which seems to have added weight to the arguments of LEP's Swedish op- ponents is the feeling that Swiss industry has reaped unfair benefit from contracts arising out of CERN's work.

Sweden's objections, which have come rather late in the negotiations (most of CERN's members have informally agreed to the LEP proposal), could delay official approval for the project. Although Sweden is not alone in wanting some guarantee that costs will not get out of hand, making it exempt from cost increases approved by CERN council is unlikely to be popular with other members: neither is splitting LEP from the rest of CERN's budget. Many see incorporating LEP into the annual budget as a way of controlling the rate at which money is spent on it.

At present Sweden contributes slightly less than 4.3 per cent of CERN's annual budget. If it decided to leave LEP, the other member states would have to decide how to redistribute the costs amongst themselves or whether to extend the time taken to build the machine. The chairman of the Natural Sciences Research Council, Mr Mats Lemner, expects that the council will shortly discuss the contribution with the Minister of Education. Depending on the outcome of this discussion, parliament may have to make the final decision. If it does, the Swedes would to be able to meet CERN's June deadline for a decision on the contribution. Judy Redfearn Artificial hormones European register? Brussels

The European Commission is making heavy weather of its plan to ban the use of certain artificial hormones in animal farm- ing. A meeting of agricultural ministers planned for last week was cancelled after the death of Mr F.O. Gundelach, the Danish agricultural commissioner. But the signs were that the meeting would have failed to reach an agreement.

The Commission decided last September that something should be done about hormones af ter the discovery that diethylstilboestrol was still being used for veal production in Italy. The hormone is banned in the United States and also in many European countries, but is so effective at increasing weight-gain in calves that, where its use is banned, black markets such as that in Belgium spring up.

The agricultural ministers were to have discussed two proposals elaborating on an original proposal made last December. The first calls for a register to keep track of all hormones used as medicinal products, whether for human or animal use, from manufacture and storage to distribution and final use. Veterinarians would be required to control all administration of hormones to animals. The proposed rules say that banned hormones can be used only f o r " t h e r a p e u t i c t r e a t m e n t " o f

p a t h o l o g i c a l c a s e s d i a g n o s e d by veterinarians, and not for chronic use in preventive t reatments . T h e second proposal is that there should be a comprehensive sampling system for testing animals and carcasses

The proposals as drafted involve the "positive listing" of those hormones considered safe for use in meat production. This is opposed by Belgium and the United Kingdom. There is no dispute over banning compounds such as diethylstilboestrol, but it is held that apositive list would inhibit the development of new materials.

A system of "negative listing" would overcome some of these problems, but this would have to be continually revised as alternative hormones came on the market. Given the political need for action, the Commission favours the more cautious positive listing system. Whichever route is followed, the cost to European farmers of making the necessary adjustments will be substantial. Jasper Becker

Soviet chemical industry

Effective economy The Soviet chemical industry is rapidly

acquiring prestige status in the Soviet media and ranks, according to a Pravda article last week, together with nuclear energy, space research and electronics, as one of the hallmarks of twentieth century progress. The proximate source of this accolade is not hard to identify: almost every article cites, at some point, Mr Brezhnev's dictum that "there can be no effective economy today without amodern large-scale chemical industry".

When Mr Brezhnev made this pro- nouncement at last October's plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, however, he was not so much commending the industry as calling for a programme of "resolute measures" for overcoming major shortfalls in chemical production, ranging from chemical fertilizers and plant protection agents to synthetic fibres, dyes and household detergents. The 33 per cent production increase specified in the guide- lines for the new Five Year Plan for the chemical and petrochemical industries (recently placed under separate ministries) is, say the planners, essential if theshortfall is to be eliminated.

The chemical industry does not shoulder full responsibility for thegap. At theend of December, a Pravda editorial shifted at least part of the blame to other sectors. Fertilizer plants, said Pravda, were held up by insufficient supplies of natural gas and "inaccurate" planning by the light metallurgy sector. Plants with processes requiring high temperatures and pressures often cannot obtain corrosion-proof equipment. In some cases new factories have been built, without the necessary equipment being forthcoming, while, on other occasions, expensive installations have been purchased before it has been

216 Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 finally decided just what the plant is to manufacture. The state supply board "Gossnab", Pravda concludes, must supervise the whole supply process more closely to eliminate such discrepancies.

F a r more serious, however , a r e suggestions raised last week by a group of scientists f rom Byelorussia that the i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f r a d i c a l new technologies is being blocked by inter- departmental wrangles. In a major Pravda article they describe two such cases, in sectors which all planners consider to be of the highest priority - energy and agriculture. The first project, highly thought of by the Institute of High Temperatures of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, would have combined an electro- lysis unit with a nuclear power plant so that hydrogen for fuel or industry could be produced during "off-peak" times. This combinat ion of chemistry, electro- chemistry and nuclear power engineering ran into the stumbling block of what the group describe as the "excessively rigid special izat ion o f t h e b ranches o f industry".

The second project, for the production of protein biomass for animal feed using hydrogen-consuming bac te r ia , was worked out jointly by teams from the Byelorussian and Moldavian academies as long ago as 1976. T o be cost effective, however, the byproducts of the synthesis - oxygen, nitrogen and possibly ammonia - would also have been exploited. All these are prime requisites of the mineral fertilizer industry, which itself produces waste gas with a usable hydrogen content. Yet although plans have been drawn up for a pilot biomass plant to be run in conjunction with the "Azot" fertilizer plant in Grodno, neither the Ministry of Chemical Fertilizer Product ion nor GIavmikrobioprom - the body in charge of microbiological production - can see its way t o go ahead. Vera Rich

European research

Counting costs Brussels

The knotty problem of putting a value on the European Community's research and development programmes is the subject of new proposals which the European Commission has just put forward. The objective of this soul- searching is to define criteria and methods for both evaluating a n d exploiting research. The idea stems not from a fit of self-doubt but from the Council of "Research" Ministers in December 1979. There are no hard and fast ideas in the document, but areas of investigation are instead defined. Four pilot projects have b e e n a p p r o v e d , w h i c h wil l g ive independent experts free rein to put certain p r o g r a m m e s u n d e r s c r u t i n y . T h e commission proposes then to use the experience of the experts to formulate a

policy for exploiting and evaluating research results. This is to be ready by the end of the year but, before then, the first outlines of the policy will be presented at the International Congress for Research Evaluation in October.

One pilot project has already been completed by six independent experts, who looked into the Community's energy conservation and solar energy activities. Four other expert groups are to investigate programmes of research and development in fusion, radioactive waste management, the "Reference Bureau Programme" concerned with physical standards and critical data, and geothermal energy, the use of hydrogen as a fuel and work on the systems analysis of energy use.

T h e t ightening of the European Community's budgetary belt is one motive for the new initiative, but another is the fear that the results of research are being ineffectively disseminated. The experts will be concentrating on the diffusion of information and in particular how to make the results available t o the layman, requiring that more outlets should be found and language barriers overcome. Indeed, one member of the European Parliament has asked in a written question why the Commission does not publish the results of research in English as well as in the author's mother tongue. But the commission says that unless the results of research are first digested, readership is always restricted to specialist circles.

The stickiest part of the process on which the Community has embarked is the evaluation of research whose impact is likely to be long term or even unforeseen. Simplifying the results may help. Thus the report on solar energy and conservation says that the success of the programme cannot be measured in "tonnes of oil saved" and that the use made of research carried out may require further action and will take time. Even so, the chairman of the evaluation team, Ugo Forinelli, is confident that European research in this area is already competitive with that in the United States even though the European budget is much smaller than the American. Forinelli's team has made a number of recommendations about the management of the Community's programme, including the need for more explicit statements of objectives when putting contracts out to tender and some suggestions of areas where research might be concentrated or even discontinued.

The commission seems modestly aware of the inherent limitations of plans to eva lua te research. T h e underlying objective is to strengthen the link between research and development and industrial i n n o v a t i o n , a n d t h e c o m m i s s i o n acknowledges that its own research cannot be an important source of commercial inventions. But restrictions on Community expenditure outside the agricultural field are likely increasingly to stimulate the justifying of research. Jasper Becker

Swedish research Lucky science Stockholm

Research is one of the very few areas to be given more money in the budget bill for the fiscal year 1981-82, presented this week in Stockholm. Against the background of a budget deficit amounting to about $15,000 million, cutbacks in social services and mounting economic gloom, research received a n extra $28 million.

Considering that this money is to be divided between the projects of eight ministries, individual increases will not be very great, and in real terms may well be eaten up by inflation, which was 14per cent in 1980. One staff member at the Natural Sciences Research Council estimated that the net results of the council's $2 million increase will be an unchanged level of activity. But this is better than a cutback, the fate of nearly all other sectors.

The government sees research strength- ening Sweden's industrial competitiveness in the long term. The Minister of Industry, Nils Aasling, wants to develop sophisti- cated chemical and mechanical products, and is to make specific allocations for this purpose in the spring. One sign of this policy is the changing proportions of the space budget being allocated between inter- national and national programmes. In the 1980-81 fiscal year, the Swedish Space Corporation's budget of about $44 million was equally divided between international and national activities, but in future the accent will be on national programmes. The corporation's budget has been increased overall t o about $58 million - a real increase in spite of inflation - about half of this will be used to build the country's first space satellite, Viking, which is to be launched from the European rocket Ariane in May 1984. It is hoped to produce the Viking at half the cost of comparable satellites from other European countries, and the project is planned to give Sweden a profitable national space industry. Another project being planned is a n experimental telecommunications satellite.

The lion's share of the increase in research expenditure - about $16 million - is to be disbursed by the Education Minister, Jan-Erik Wickstroem, who wants to increase research capacity across the board. He is proposing an increase of about 12 per cent for mathematics and natural science faculties, an average of about 9 per cent for the four research councils as well as 90 new PhD places to be spread over all subjects, $2 million for particularly expensive equipment, $2 million to subsidize lecturers who want to take time off for research and $1 million for research libraries. Fifteen new chairs will be set up, among them molecular genetics (Karolinska Institute), medicine (Uppsala) and astrophysics (Gothenburg).

Wendy Barnaby

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Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 217

Graduate education Too many laggards

The Science Research Council, the chief source of public support for British graduate students, is alarmed at the lengthening time taken to complete PhD courses. A preliminary survey of 25 higher education institutions has shown that on average only 60 per cent of those holding SRC studentships complete their PhDs within four years. According to Sir Geoffrey Allen, chairman of the council, a figure of 80 per cent would be respectable, but 90 per cent would be the ideal.

The issue has come to the surface after an investigation by a working party of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, which has been looking into the broader question of postgraduate education and manpower needs. That in turn was stimulated by the revelation of Sir Michael Posner, chairman of the Social Science Research Council, to the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons last summer that fewer than 30 per cent of his council's graduate students complete their PhDs within four years.

Given pause by that statistic, the Science Research Council made a rapid survey of five institutions where it supports students and arrived at the figure of 60 per cent, which a subsequent survey o f 25 institutions has upheld. The advisory board's working party, which is also concerned with the performance of postgraduates supported by the Social Science, Medical a n d Agr icu l tu ra l Research Councils, has commissioned a more detailed study intended to throw some light on why so many students take so long to complete their theses, or even fail to complete them at all.

Particular attention is likely to be paid to the performance of the Science Research Council's students, if only because there are more of them than of the other councils - on the average, 2,350 new science studentships are awarded each year. Most of these are in the gift of university departments, to which studentships are allocated on a quota basis. Studentships are worth about 3,500 a year, and are tenable for three years, the estimated time for completing a research project.

The reasons for these delays are still obscure. The Science Research Council expects to find marked differences of performance in different institutions and subject areas. PhDs in pure science may more often be completed than those in applied science - applied scientists and engineers are more likely to find jobs in industry, where writing a thesis may seem irrelevant and where there is little time for writing up anyway. It is also suspected that institutions and departments with a large number of PhD students will have a better track record than those with relatively few.

The issue also, however, raises questions concerning the meaning and purpose of a

PhD, which the advisory board's working party is looking into under its broader remit. Should a P h D for example, be a thorough and lengthy investigation of a detailed scientific problem, or more simply a means of training a student in the techniques of research? The approach is bound to have implications for the completion time.

As yet, no reliable pecking order of institutions has been established, but the early surveys d o suggest t h a t the Universities o f Birmingham, Cambridge, East Angliaand Bristol, and King's College in the University of London, have the best c o m p l e t i o n r e c o r d s a n d t h a t t h e Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne, Sussex and Bradford, together with Imperial College, London, and most of the polytechnics, have the worst.

The poor track record of Imperial College, regarded as a highly prestigious scientific and technological institution, may seem surprising. Lord Flowers, rector of the college, says that the explanation may be that large numbers of its postgraduates rapidly find employment in industry, leaving them little time for writing up.

The advisory board's working party has yet to decide what should be done. Sanctions against departments with poor track records have been mentioned. Cut- ting quotas of studentships is an obvious device. Sir Geoffrey Allen, however, hopes to avoid such heavy-handed treatment. Most academics, he says, are willing to accept genuine criticism and put their houses in order. The peer review system should take care of that.

Judy Redfearn

British universities

More confusion Confusion among British universities

about their financial prospects appears to have been further deepened by the letter from thechairman of the University Grants Committee, Dr E. S. Parkes, circulated t o vice-chancellors on 30 December. The letter contained a warning that the resources available for the 1981-82 academic year may be reduced by between 5% and 6 per cent compared with the a m o u n t s advert ised in t h e Publ ic Expenditure estimates a year ago. The committee's latest estimate of the shortfall next year is a n amalgam of a 3 % per cent cut estimated to be the universities' share of the 30 million cut for higher education announced last November and the still incalculable effect on university finances of the partial disappearance of overseas students, some of whom have been frightened away by "economic" fees.

Some universities regard Dr Parkes's warning as a signal for drastic belt- tightening. Last week, for example, Lord Annan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, told the university senate that

the total budget of 200 million might be reduced by between 15 and 20 million in 1982. Other universities appear to be taking a more phlegmatic line, believing that they cannot know the worst until the individual allocations of funds for 1981-82 are made in April o r soon thereafter.

Between now and then, the committee itself will have several difficult questions to decide. One possibility raised in the letter from Dr Parkes is that the committee may keep back until later in the academic year a proportion of the funds made available by the Department of Education and Science, using the reserve to make good deficiencies that have by then appeared. There are precedents for such a reserve, but no decision has yet been made, nor have criteria for deciding how to use the money been defined.

The Parkes letter also promises explicit guidance in the spring on the numbers of home students at which British universities should aim in the coming academic year, and on their desired distribution among different kinds of courses. Although such "guidance" has accompanied previous financial allocations to British universities, some universities now apparently fear that the committee intends t o be more "dirigiste" than in the past - while others remark that Dr Parkes's letter is a good deal less so than his speech to a closed meeting of the Committee of Vice- Chancellors at the beginning of December. It does however seem clear that the University Grants Committee will take steps to ensure that universities d o not earn their way out of trouble by recruiting more home students than at present f ~ r the sake of the extra fee income that would bring.

Planning for the year ahead has been further confused by reports that Mr Mark Carlisle, Secretary of State for Education and Science, told a conference in the north of England on 6 January that he saw no reason why the cuts now proposed should be matched by "a reduced provision". Universities, on the other hand, say that there will have to be a reduction of student entry this October if they are to live within their straitened budgets.

The future constitution of the University Grants Committee itself also appears to be in question. Taking its cue from a recommendation of the House of Com- mons Select Committee on Education towards the end of last year that the corn- mittee should cultivate more indepen- dence, the department has raised the possibility that the committee's staff (at present seconded from the Civil Service) should become direct employees. Some of those concerned wryly reflect that this is not quite the independence that the House of Commons committee had in mind, but they acknowledge that such a step would reduce the size of the Civil Service and transfer part of its cost away from central government. The fine print in the proposal, which is said to be "very small", is being read carefully.

CORRESPONDENCE Badgers guilty SIR - In his letter published on 11 December 1980 (page 532), Stephen Harris, among many other misleading and biased remarks, stated that the rate of decline in the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) in badgers in the South West was "paralleled" by a decline in the incidence of reactors in cattle herds not only in the South West but also in the rest of England. This statement was based on a graph which was attached to a copy of the letter sent to Lord Zuckerman and which is now reproduced (Fig.1). It was deduced from this that there might well be some common cause unconnected with the gassing campaign that was reducing the incidence of TB both in cattle and badgers throughout the country.

This "parallelism", however, was only secured by expressing all plotted values as per- centages of the corresponding 1974 values. In Fig.2 I have plotted the breakdowns for the South West and for the rest of England on the same scale, subdividing the South West into (a) Gloucester, Avon and Wiltshire; (b) Cornwall; and (c) Devon, Dorset and Somerset. The radical differences between the counties that have a high incidence of herd breakdowns, (a) and (b), and the rest of England (d) is immediately apparent.

Table 10 of the report (Badgers, Cattle and Tuberculosis, Lord Zuckerman; HMSO, London, 1980) shows that the sources of infection are indeed different in the South West and in the rest of England. In groups (a)

Cattle in SW

Fig.1 Annual changes in the incidence of TB in badgers sampled at the Gloucester Veterinary Investigation Centre (page 62 of the report) and herds of cattle in South-West England and herds of cattle in the rest of England (page 64). The first year for which data were available in the report from all three samples (1974) was taken as 100 per cent; for subsequent years, the level of TB was expressed as a percentage of the incidence in 1974.

and (c) three-quarters of the infections are attributed to badgers, but only 1 per cent to imported Irish cattle, whereas in the rest of Great Britain one half are attributed to imported Irish cattle and none to badgers.

In Cornwall (b), as Harris observes, only 15 per cent were definitely attributed to badgers, but as almost three-quarters of the causes of Cornish breakdown were recorded as "unknown" and the remainder were either from purchased cattle or contiguous premises, it may be presumed that infection from badgers was much greater than this.

Fig.2 The percentages of herd breakdown are shown by full lines (from Table 19 of the report). The percentages of badgers found to be infected are shown by the broken line (Table 15). The dotted line gives some supplementary information from Table 18 (updated).

The fall in the incidence of herd breakdowns following the introduction of the gassing campaign in Gloucester/Avon agrees well with the reduction in the incidence of TB in badgers (broken line), bearing in mind that in addition to the reduction in the percentage incidence in badgers the numbers of badgers in close contact with herds must have been substantially reduced by the gassing.

The dotted line is derived from the latter part of Table 18, updated to September 1980, and indicates the rise in TB incidence in badgers following the cessation of gassing. (Updated figures for herd breakdowns in Gloucester/Avon and Wiltshire are not yet available).

The only support that Fig.2 gives to the suggestion that there was a common cause, other than appropriate action by ministry officials, affecting the decline in TB operating throughout the country is the substantial rise between 1974 and 1975. This cannot be related to infection from badgers. It may possibly have been due to climatic factors or to some improvement in the tuberculin test.

Figure 1 is a sad illustration of the way in which distorted and partial graphical presentation can be used for propaganda purposes.

FRANK YATES Rothamsted Experimental Station, Harpenden, UK

Rothschild retreat SIR - It is not clear from your leading article in the January 1/8 issue (page 2) whether you regret the government's "retreat from Rothschild" or just the manner in which it is happening.

One of the difficulties for the Medical Research Council (MRC) at the time of the Rothschild report was the uncertainty as to the failures in the then current system which it was intended to correct. The Ministry of Health did not identify any omissions on the part of the MRC in their contribution to improving the health of the nation, nor did they subsequently propose contracts in fields of work outside the previous commitment of the MRC. Rothschild, in a thoughtless comment, referred to the very low expenditure on research into ageing, one of the fundamental aspects of all living things, but the understanding of which is nowhere in sight. He failed to ask the practical question as to how much of the MRC budget was spent on investigating diseases most common in old age. The answer would have been a major part.

There are, at present, three developments in medical research on which great hopes of practical gain are based: interferon, antibody production by hybridomas and DNA technology. How far the expectations will be justified remains to be seen, but the heavy investments of pharmaceutical companies throughout the world in these fields is evidence that the hopes are held widely. MRC laboratories were responsible for the first two discoveries and made a very big contribution to the third. None came from planned research but from "Dr Gowans' doctrine of investment in good ideas and good people".

It has been argued strongly that much more attention shouldbe given to public health and ~reventive medicine and that the MRC's expenditure has the wrong emphasis. But one of the major advances in this field, the correlation of the incidence of lung cancer with cigarette smoking, came from work in an MRC unit.

No doubt governmental administration of civil science could be improved substantially, but the next enquiry which you appear to be advocating must surely start by identifying the omissions and failures of the present system whether in medical, agricultural or any other field of research before recommending changes to overcome them. Your generalized denigration of a system which has achieved obvious successes is not enough.

R.R. PORTER Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Creating problems SIR - Your readers should know of the court action by creationists against the State of California, now expected to begin on 2 March. The suit, which is sponsored by the Creation Research Society of San Diego, is in the names of Segraves et al., students in California schools, including children of Mrs Nell Segraves of the society. The suit charges that the State of California has violated the

Continued on page 335

Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 219

Deep-ocean hydrothermal vent communities

from J.T. Enright, W.A. Newman, R.R. Hessler & J.A. McGowan

THE theory of plate tectonics has led to a completely unexpected bonanza of research problems for marine biologists. The theory predicted major heat input to the ocean in areas where the sea floor is spreading, and in the search for those sources, geophysicists discovered not only deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, where warm water emerges from subterranean sources, but also extraordinary concen- trations of large and unusual animals surrounding the vents's2. The bottom of the deep sea typically has a sparse fauna dominated by tiny worms and crustaceans, with an even sparser distribution of macro- fauna, including clams, crabs and echinoderms. Near the hydrothermal vents, however, are bizarre ensembles of abundant large animals - communities which resemble nothing ever before en- countered by marine biologists. The most conspicuous and unusual animals around the warm-water vents (- 20C) are huge gutless tube-worms (Vestimentifera), some of which are over 3m long and up to 10 cm in circumference; but there are also remarkable densities of huge clams (25cm length is typical), blind crabs, fish and polychaetes (see figure). More than 100 species have been collected2, many of which are elsewhere unknown.

How do the animals in these deep-sea communities find enough to eat? Else- where, the deep benthic fauna relies on particulate matter, ultimately derived from photosynthesis, falling from above. The food supplies necessary to sustain the vent communities, however, must be many times that ordinary fallout. In the first report which described the vent fauna, Lonsdalel proposed two possible sources of nutrition: advection of food materials from surrounding regions and bacterial chemosynthesis. Shortly thereafter three kinds of evidence were presented3 which support the idea of intense local chernosynthesis: (1) hydrogen sulphide, as a potential basis for fixation of CO,, was found in vent water; (2) some of the bacteria isolated from a vent site were found to be capable of chemosynthesis on a thiosulphate medium; and (3) bacterial

concentrations of 108 to 109 cells per ml were found in samples thought to be pure vent water. This final observation seems decisive: if such astonishing concentrations of bacteria - difficult to achieve even under optimal laboratory conditions (D.M. Karl, personal communication) - are indeed typical of steady-state vent outflow, then food from within the vent would be dwarfed by any contribution from advection. Hence, the widely quoted conclusion was reached, that bacterial chemosynthesis provides the foundation for hydrothermal-vent food chain^^-^ -an exciting prospect because nowhere else on Earth is a major community of diverse organisms known which does not depend, at least indirectly, on photosynthesis.

There are, however, certain difficulties with this interpretation. Some of the large sedentary organisms associated with vents are found a t ordinary deep-sea temperatures many metres from the nearest hydrothermal sources6, and therefore would not directly encounter any bacteria from within the vent. It is con- ceivable, however, tha t bacterial aggregates, which have grown subterraneanly, in the rising plume of vent water might rain back out in the peripheral areas to nourish these filter-feeders. Another difficulty is that similarly dense populations of large animals have been found2,' in the proximity of 'smokers' - hot-water vents where the dominant, conspicuous flow emerges at temperatures up to 350C. No bacteria can be expected to multiply or even survive such heat, and none was found in the hot vent water7. Unless the smokers are consistently associated with smaller but more hospitable warm-water vents2 - a distribution that has not actually been observed (F.N. Speiss, personal communication) - the chemosynthesis hypothesis could at best account for only a fraction of the vent faunas.

The food resource question has been further complicated by a recent and more extensive investigation5 of the microorganisms associated with one of the warm-water vents in the Galapagos Rift

region. Bacterial concentrations were measured in near-vent water which were approximately three orders of magnitude lower than those initially reported (5 x I@-l@ cells per ml). These values were confirmed by replicate estimates of biomass based on ATP concentrations in the water5 (100-250 pg of microbial carbon per litre, compared with the previous estimate3 of 100-1,000 mg of bacteria per litre). Although the authors of that report still endorsed the chemosynthesis hypothesisS, the available data suggest that Lonsdale's first alternative1 deserves more attention than it has received. Could advection conceivably supply the near-vent fauna with enough food organic matter ultimately derived from photosynthesis?

Because of its temperature, water from a vent is very buoyant, densities as low as 0.62 gm cm3 having been reported for a 'black s m ~ k e r ' ~ . The rising plumes of vent water are, however, rapidly diluted. Spiess et aL7 report that a vent discharging at 23OC into water at 1.8OC produced a temperature only 0.3OC warmer than ambient at a height of 10 m above the vent. These values indicate that within 10 m of the bottom, the advected diluting water was about 70-fold the discharge volume [(AT, -AT,)/AT,] . Stability considerations dictate that such advective flow into the vent area would originate near the water- substratum interface. where sus~ended organic matter accum;lates and epibenthic animals are concentrated. Typical values for suspended particulate matter in deep- sea waters within a few metres of the b o t t ~ m ~ . ~ ~ are of the order of 50-500 mg m-3, of which several per cent is organic matter. Taking a conservative estimate of 5 mg of particulate organic carbon per cubic metre and the calculated dilution factor of 70, we find that for every cubic metre of vent discharge, 350 mg of particulate organic carbon would be advected into the vent area. If discharge volume were to be, say, 1 m3 s l , advection could provide more than 30 kg per day of potential food. In addition, there is a good chance that small live animals in the advected water might be killed or stunned by thermal and/or

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220 Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981

Examples of hydrothermal-vent fauna from Galhpagos Rift area. Left, vestimentiferan worms, about 3 cm in diameter. Middle, dense group of encrusting serpulid polychaetes, about 5 cm long, some with tentacular crown extended. Right, vesicomyid (white) and mytilid (grayish) bivalves adjacent to an aggregation of anemones. The tip of the probe is 1 cm

in diameter.

chemical shock, and subsequently rain down, thereby contributing to the vent food supply. Hence, it appears that an input of non-photosynthetic food might not, at least in principle, be required by the vent animals.

Such input calculations, however, ignore what may be the most important aspect of advective processes, that the near-vent area should accumulate and con- centrate most advected organic matter. Entrained food particles which are not con- sumed in their initial passage through the vent area would be wafted upwards, but ought thereafter (given a density greater than ambient seawater) to rain out pre- dominantly on the near-vent substratum. Once on the bottom, this food material would not be lost to the vent ecosystem because of resuspension. Sediment-trap d a t a H indicate t h a t the part iculates suspended in near-bottom water of the deep sea must, on the average, be resus- pended every few days. Because of such re- suspension, the initially advected material would be subject to repetitive re-entrain- ment, thereby enriching the advected waters. Hence, filter-feeding animals near a vent should experience not only increased flow rate of waters bearing organic nutrients, as suggested by Lonsdale', but also experience unusually high concen-

I . Lonsdale. P. Deep-sea Res. 24, 857 (1977). 2. Ballard, R.D. & Grassle, J.F. Naln. Geogr. 156.689 (1979). 3. Corliss, J .n . el a/. Science203, 1073 (1979). 4. Galapagos Biology Expedition Participants Oceanus 22

110.2. 2 (1979). 5. Karl, D.M., Wirsen, C . O . & Jannash, H.W. Science207,

1345 (1980). 6 . Killingley, J.S., Berger. W.H.. MacDonald. K.C. &

Newman. W.A. Nature 287. 218 (1980). 7. Spiess. F . N . el 01. Science 207, 1421 (1980). 8. MacDonald. K.C., Becker. K., Spiess. F . N . & Ballard, R.

Eurlh planet. Sci. Letl. (in the press). 9. E~ttreim. S.L & Ewing. M. in Studies m Physrcal

Oceanography Vo1.2 (ed. Gordon, A.L.) 123 (Gordon & Breach, London. 1972).

10. Jacobs. M.B., Thorndike. E.M. & Ewing, M . Mar. Geol. 14. 117 (1973).

I I . Gardner, W.D. tliesis,Massachusetts Inst.Technol.(IY77). 12. Rau. G.H. & Hedgec. 1.1. Science203. 648 (1979). 13. Rau. G.H. Nature(in the press). 14. Williams. P.M.. Smith. K.L., Druffel, E.M. & Linick,

T.W. Nafure (in preparation). 15. Williams. P.M., Stenhouse, M.C. . Druffel. E.M. & Koide,

M . Nature 276. 698 (1978).

trations of suspended particulates from non-vent sources, food which is ultimately derived from sea-surface photosynthesis. The nutrition of filter-feeding animals is even more dependent on food concen- t ra t ions t h a n o n t h e f low r a t e o f surrounding waters. At any new vent site, even if chemosynthesis were t o b e negligible, this sort of accumulation should progress until catabolic degradation, by b o t h micro- a n d macroorganisms , balances the net rate of advective input.

Both Lonsdale's suggestion that food mater ials would b e advec ted f r o m extensive areas surrounding deep-water hydrothermal vents, and the enhancement of the local density of these food materials due to gravitational fallout and recircu- lation, appear t o be reasonable, if not logically inescapable, expectations. The as yet unresolved issue is the quantitative one - what proportion of the food supply for macroorganisms is provided by such advective input and what proportion by vent-related chemosynthesis? T h e suggestion that advective input alone might provide an adequate nutritional basis for near-vent food chains implies that animals relying on advected biomass ought to d o well around any intense persistent deep- water source of heat - an idea which may be worthy of direct experimental test.

By similar reasoning, the near-vent area s h o u l d a l s o represen t a z o n e o f accumulation for any organic materials which might be produced by chemo- synthesis, and therefore it may prove to be extremely difficult to distinguish between a

photosynthetic and a pre- dominantlv chemosvnthetic basis for the near-vent food chains by measuring the local density of organic matter and associated bacteria, or by examining the spatial gradients in those densities. Even samples thought to be pure vent water3 are not easy to interpret; the possibility of dilution or contamination by materials of non-vent origin will remain troublesome, because of the intense mixing around the vent5.

S o m e of these uncertaint ies a n d paradoxes may soon be resolved by carbon-isotope data. The stable isotope ratio, I3C t o 12C, depends on the nature of an organism's carbon sources, and is also a sensitive indicator of alternative metabolic pathways involved in photosynthesis and of heterotrophic fractionation. In the tissues of some of the vent fauna, the ' 3 C P C ratio differs significantly from values typical f o r o ther deep-sea animal^'^-'^, suggesting that some sort of unusual carbon sources o r metabolic processes - perhaps chemosynthesis - may be important in near-vent areas. The finding that the I3C ratios differ between vent bivalves and vestimentiferan worms in the direction of this anomaly (H. Craig, persona l communica t ion) is s o f a r unexplained, the one group having smaller and the other larger values than expected. Also of great interest are data on the ratios of I4C to 12C in the tissues of near-vent animals, which ought to reflect their food resources, a n d which indicate14 a n apparent age of about 2,500 yr. Intra-vent chemosynthesis would incorporate the dissolved inorganic carbon of vent water, 80% or more of which apparently comes f r o m magmat ic sources (H. Cra ig , personal communication). If one assumes that magmatic CO, is very old and contains negligible amounts of I4C, then in-vent chemosynthesis should lead to I4C ages (>15,000 yr) very different from those obtained for the tissues of vent macro- fauna (- 2,500 yr). So far, however, no actual measurements of I4C in vent water are available, and other interpretations about its probable I4C age have been proposedi4. The apparent age of 2,500 yr of the circumvent fauna is clearly much o lder t h a n concur ren t sea-surface photosynthetic production (expected age -O), and much younger than the available data for organic carbon incorporated into the top few millimetres of deep-ocean The authors are professors at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California.

O 198lNature Publishing Group

Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981 221

A new stingray from South Africa from Alwyne Wheeler ICHTHYOLOGISTS are accustomed to the regular description of previously un- recognized species of fishes, which if not a daily event a t least happens s o frequently as not to cause great comment. Previously undescribed genera are like- wise not infrequently published, but higher categories are increasingly less common. The discovery of a new stingray, which is so different from all known rays as to require both a new fami ly a n d a new s u b o r d e r t o accommodate its distinctive characters, is therefore a remarkable event.

A recent paper by P.C. Heemstra and M.M. Smith (Ichthyological Bulletin o j the J. L. B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology 43, 1; 1980) describes this most striking ray as Hexatrygon bickelli and discusses its differences from other batoid fishes. Surprisingly, this remarkable fish was not the result of some organized deep-sea fishing programme, but was found lying on the beach at Port Elizabeth. It was fresh but had suffered some loss of skin by sand abrasion on the beach, and the margins of its fins appeared desiccated in places. The way it was discovered leaves a tantalising question as to its normal habitat, but Heemstra and Smith suggest that it may live in moderately deep water of 400-1,000m. This suggestion is supported by its general appearance (small eyes, thin black dorsal skin, flacid snout) and the chemistry of its liver-oil.

The classification of Hexatrygon presents some problems, the most obvious of which is that it has six pairs of gill openings, whereas all other batoid fishes (sawfishes, rays, skates, stingrays and electric rays) have only five paired gill openings. Another striking feature is that the spiracular openings behind the eyes are closed dorsally by a cartilage- supported flap to form a n oblique slit. It seems that Hexatrygon may be able to shut its spiracles down externally, something that other batoids cannot do. Internal features a r e as strikingly different from its relatives, and the shape and structure of the snout are also unique. The snout is elongate, of uniform thickness (16-18mm deep in the fish of 103cm t o t a l l eng th) a n d f lacc id . Internally it is supported by lightly calcified rostra1 cartilages and filled with

Ventral view of Hexatrygon bickelli

an acellular jelly, while the underside is richly supplied with well developed ampullae of Lorenzini. These ampullae are known to be electroreceptors and assist in finding buried food organisms in shallow-water rays. The combination of characters persuade Heemstra and Smith t o e rec t a new s u b o r d e r (Hexatrygonoidei) within the order Myliobatiformes to contain this fish. The order contains the other stingrays, eagle rays and mantas, most of which, like Hexafrygon, have one or more serrated dagger-like spines on the back of the tail.

The interest of this fish is not just that it represents a novel group within a well known order, but that all theother mylio- batiformes are shallow-water bottom- living species o r surface-living fish. Hexatrygon seems to be the first deep- water stingray known. Its elongate, jelly- filled snout richly supplied with electro- receptors is similar to the deep-water

c h i m a e r o i d s Rhinochimaera a n d Harriota, and there can be little doubt that it is an adaptation for finding food in the soft-bottom ooze of deep water.

One final point that Heemstra and Smith note is the remarkably small brain of Hexatrygon (it is about 3% of the c ran ia l volume); in shal low-water stingrays it is about 80%. As they point o u t t h e c o e l a c a n t h , Latimeria chalumnae, has a similarly small brain (as does the basking shark, Cetorhinus mauimus, according to Scott J. Fish Biol. 16, 665; 1980). This may also be an adaptation to deep-water life.

If nothing else the discovery of Hexatrygon off South Africa, as with the first coelacanth, reminds one of the tag - ex Africa semper aliquid novi.

Alwyne Wheeler is in the Department of Zoology, British Museum (Natural History), London.

sediment (apparent agem8,OOO yr)ls . For the advect ive con t r ibu t ion t o vent nutr i t ion, however, the appropr ia te comparison would be with the I4C content of suspended particulate organic matter ordinarily present in near-bottom waters, which ought to be somewhere between these extremes, but again, appropriate measurements are not yet available.

In a d d i t i o n t o t h e uncer ta in t ies associated with the two initial hypotheses for vent nutrition considered here, a third hypothesis has now entered the scene. Recent evidence (G.N. Somero and H. Felbeck, persona l communica t ion) indicates that significant bacterial chemo- synthesis may be taking place outside the warm-water vents , by symbio t ic

microorganisms within the tissues of some of the macro-fauna. Hence, the basic problem of how the hydrothermal-vent fauna gets enough to eat remains an open and challenging question.

We are most grateful t o the many colleagues who have shared their ideas with us, as well as those who havegiven us access to their unpublished data. U

222 Nature Vol. 289 22 January 1981

Untangling ataxia-telangiectasia from Bryn A. Bridges and David G. Harnden THE rare autosomal recessive disorder, ataxia-telangiectasia (AT), has attracted attention because it is associated with an unusual sensitivity to ionizing radiations and an increased susceptibility to cancer, particularly of the lymphoid tissues. Patients also have a variety of other problems, including a progressive neurological disorder, a substantial immunological deficiency, spontaneous chromosome instability, a defect of DNA repair, premature ageing, raised serum alpha fetoprotein(AFP) levels and other less regular features. How are all these diverse manifestations of the genetic defect interrelated? In an attempt to answer this question and to resolve inconsistencies in reported results, workers from a variety of different fields came together at a recent conference* at the University of Sussex.

Many laboratories have now confirmed the cellular radiosensitivitv of AT cells to ionizing radiation and there was agreement that AT cells are also unusually sensitive to the chromosomally radiomimetic anti- tumour agent, bleomycin. Not all agreed that AT cells are sensitive to a range of other chemical mutagens, suggesting that increased sensitivity to any of these agents cannot be very marked although some of the disagreements may be due t o differences between AT lines. Three different groups (Paterson, Chalk River; Inoue, Mishima; Jaspers, Rotterdam) all reported complementation between different AT lines for some radiosensitive function and agreed that AT3BI could be distinguished from AT4BI and ATSBI. Attempts to elucidate the molecular basis of the radiosensitivity failed to detect differences between AT cells and normals in the repair of single-strand or double- strand breaks in the DNA using presently available techniques. Two different types of abnormal molecular response were described, a failure to inhibit DNA replication after y- or X-irradiation, and a defect in one or more repair pathways. A possibly analagous situation exists in Escherichia coli where mutations at the rec A gene block both inhibition of DNA replication after UV exposure and several pathways of DNA repair. The existence of a repair defect was demonstrated in different ways by several different groups. Cox (Harwell) showed a failure to repair potentially lethal damage in AT cells following X-irradiation. Indirect evidence of a repair defect comes from cytogenetic studies following Go irradiation of AT lymphocytes which reveal a large increase in fragments and chromatid aberrations as

' I he u v r l \ h o p unc held from h o ~ e m b e r 6th to 7th, 1980, and uas organlied jointly by the MRC Cell Muta t~on Unlt and the Department of Cancer Studies, University of Birmingham. Sponsorrhip was provided by the MRC, the Cancer Research Campaign and the International Cancer Research Workshops programme (ICREW) of theUICC.

compared with normal cells (Taylor, Birmingham). This, together with the observation that caffeine can potentiate DNA damage to visible chromosome damage a t least 24 hours after Go irradiation of A T cells (Natarajan, Leiden), suggests that there are long-lived unrepaired lesions. The exact nature of the DNA repair defect is still not clear and it is possible that more than one pathway may be affected. Paterson detected a reduction, in some AT cell lines,of y ray-induced repair replication,and also a deficiency in their capacity to excise and repair specific y ray-induced base damage, although there has been difficulty in reproducing some of these results elsewhere. Inoue reported a deficiency in cell-free extracts of all AT cell lines studied of an activity which modifies y ray-damaged 3' sites to permit the action of DNA polymerase. Some, but not all, laboratories could confirm these results.

The other abnormal radiation response which was agreed by several groups is that AT cells show a much less marked decrease in DNA synthesis than do normal cells following y-irradiation (Edwards, Birmingham; Lehmann, Sussex; Jaspers). Similarly, Scott (Manchester) finds that AT cells do not show the normal post- irradiation mitotic delay. It is not clear how these defects relate to the repair defect.

Unlike the other cancer-prone DNA repair deficiency syndrome, xeroderma pigmentosum, where there is a hypersen- sitivity of the cultured cells for mutagenesis by UV light, there is no evidence for any spontaneous o r radiation-induced hypersensitivity for the induction of gene mutations in AT (Cox; Simons, Leiden). Furthermore, Arlett (Sussex) was unable to detect any radiation-induced gene mutation in AT cells. One of the most inter- esting features of AT patients is the high level of spontaneous chromosome aberrations in circulating lymphocytes and particularly the tendency of cytogenetically abnormal clones to proliferate in the absence of any haematological abnor- mality. The formation of these clones following breakage at specific points on chromosome 14 was emphasized and it was suggested (Hecht and McCaw, Tempe, Arizona) that aberrations involving the breakpoint at or near 14q32 may have particular neoplastic potential.

There is definite evidence for a profound immunological defect in AT patients. All have a defect of cell-mediated immunity and some have a deficiency of IgA and IgE. Waldmann (Bethesda) showed that the IgA deficiency is due to lack of synthesis rather than abnormal metabolic rates. There is diminished helper T-cell function, but even stimuli which do not require a helper T function fail to provoke an IgA response, suggesting a defect of B-cell maturation.

Waldmann also presented evidence to sug- gest that the DNA sequences necessary for IgA production are present in AT patients and there was some speculation about the possibility that the cutting and splicing of DNA required to produce the specific im- munoglobulin genes may be impaired. The rec A gene of E. coli also controls the cutting and splicing involved in genetic recombination. The relationship betwen the immune defect and the occurrence of lymphoid cancers was considered. Unlike the other immunodeficiency syndromes AT patients show a range of epithelial cell tumours in addition to the preponderance of lymphoid cancers (Spector , Minneapolis). The pattern is also different from that seen in irradiated populations, where there is a preponderance of leukaemias rather than lymphomas. No conclusion was reached, but it seems likely that the cancers in AT are not related in a simple way to either the radiosensitivity or the disordered immune system, but rather to some comb