Japanese researchers have developed a probe for ovarian cancer that can be sprayed onto tissue during surgery, fluorescing where malignant cells are present — allowing surgeons to identify and remove scattered bits of tumour.

Ovarian cancer has a tendency to spread, leaving small tumours of less than a millimetre in diameter throughout the abdominal cavity, which can be hard for surgeons to spot and remove — being able to find all the malignant cells is crucial for a good survival outcome.

In September, I reported on a similar use of fluorescent labels to identify cancer cells during surgery (see Glowing cells guide cancer surgeons). Researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany used a probe for ovarian cancer in human patients, which targeted ovarian tumours by binding to a folate receptor expressed only on the surface of diseased cell.

But that probe was administered through injection — and can take hours to appear.

“Our probe is actuated in minutes or even seconds — that’s very important for the surgeon, who can’t necessarily wait 20 minutes,” says Hisataka Kobayashi of the University of Tokyo, author of the new study published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Beware of bears. Send food and supplies. Xo”

Most that followed struck the same chord.

“We are here and we are having fun. Come and join us, come and join us, now.”

“So here we are, trying to talk to you, but you never call or write, what is that all about?”

Some chimed more in tune with current Zeitgeist.

“Are there any jobs out in space??? I am looking for work.”

Quite a few discussed (and apologised for) what’s on the telly.

“Hullo, Hope you’re well. Maybe you’ve seen some previous transmissions from our planet. Just to say, please don’t judge us too harshly for Hollyoaks. Many of us hate it. Ta muchly. Jim.”

“If Jeremy Kyle is your first experience of Earth, I am not sorry! We are not all crazy, I promise! ☺”

And a few were far from frivolous.

“Mum. I hope you are looking down on me.”

Each of the 47 messages left by our guests at the Astronomers’ Ball at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich said something, in its way, about the very odd thing that is the human condition. And every one will be sent into deep space from a parabolic dish antenna in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Using satellite broadcasting equipment with redundant high-powered klystron amplifiers connected by a traveling wave-guide to a five-meter parabolic dish antenna, owned and operated by the Deep Space Communications Network, these messages will travel for four years from Earth at a frequency of around 6,250 MHz.

Professor Izzat Darwazeh, head of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, donned his suit and tie, and joined us to explain to our costumed guests how radio waves will carry their messages into the deep unknown.

“What I found most fascinating is how interested people were. Astronomy itself is interesting to most people – but people were asking in general about my work, and about what do we do in communications engineering.” he says. “People from non-scientific backgrounds were asking quite sensible questions: ‘How could you send a message so far? Will these messages get anywhere? Would these be sent direct or through another mode? When might we get a message back?’” he says.

What would you say if you had one chance to speak to the stars? We still have plenty of space in the package that we will send out: email your thoughts to zoe@guerillascience.co.uk and we will add them to our interstellar chatter.

Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. Those messages kept to a succinct 140 characters or less will be re-broadcast on our terrestrial Twitter feed. If so inclined, please record your microblog moniker with your note – who knows, our galactic followers may receive it. Alternatively, you can send us an illustration, as a few at the Astronomers’ Ball chose to. Or – if you are feeling extra communicative – you can send us a short video less than 20 seconds in length.

Will our message reach a receptive audience? And might we get a reply?

Almost certainly absolutely not. The sheer size of space, and the distance between the stars, reduces the chance of making contact to virtually zero.

Yet could there be intelligent civilizations out there – even some with the right equipment? Almost certainly absolutely yes.

As Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research (and the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in Carl Sagan’s Contact) argues in her TED talk, the number of stars that we have inspected, compared to all the lights in the universe, is equivalent to a glass of water in the sea. “And nobody would decide the ocean was devoid of fish on the basis of a single glass of water,” she says.

SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, has scoured the skies with radio telescopes for four decades, listening for signs of life – more precisely, the electronmagnetic transmissions that would be given off by a species with technological capacities like our own.

There have been some false positives: when the first pulsar was discovered in 1967 (the year of the summer of love no less), its rhythmic trills sounded so regular, astronomers concluded that it must have been created by artificial means fashioned by intelligent beings, and the cluster was deemed LGM – for little green men. You can hear it on the 8th track of the Guerilla Science Sounds of the Stars audio tour here.

But despite hope, and false hopes, all our listening has turned up nothing. But then, who are we to complain that the phone never rings, unless we dial up the networks ourselves? Contact will never be made if everyone simply listens.

The first deliberate attempt to shout a message to the stars took place exactly 37 years ago today, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, aimed at the M13 globular star cluster more than 25,000 light years away. This is still the strongest signal we have ever broadcast to space.

What on earth is a species to say in its first shout out to the stars? And in what language?

The now famous Drake message, crafted by astronomer Frank Drake with advice from science fiction writer Carl Sagan (author of Contact), went with the basics: the numbers 1 to 10, a graphic figure of our solar system, an outline of a human figure, chemical denotation of the elements that make up DNA, and so on – seven pieces of basic information to give a snapshot of our planet. Binary was the chosen tongue, because it lends itself easily to encoding: shifting the frequency of the signal up or down a notch could denote 1 or 0.

Exactly 1679 bursts of noise were broadcast – the number 1679 chosen because it is a semiprime number, the product of 73 by 23, which can be arranged into a rectangle to create the image.

This, our first message, will reach it’s target in 25,000 years – if received, and if a reply is made, we will not hear back for 50,000 years. Responders would need to not only have the equipment to receive the signal, they would also need to speak binary,and have the intuition to turn the 1679 notes into a grid. Not surprisingly, the intention was to demonstrate the technological sophistication of the equipment, rather than an earnest effort to make contact.

Symbolic or not, this was not to be the last snapshot of life on earth sent to intergalactic receivers: five years later the Voyager probes launched into space, with a more low-fi (and easily decoded) mode of delivery. It carries with it still a golden record of sounds and images of life on our planet, including whalesong and Mozart, Chuck Berry and string quartets, pictures of frogs, leaves, snowflakes, airplanes, people eating cheeseburgers, the moon, and this very famous image of a man and woman saying a friendly hello with a graphic of the origin of the probe – the third satellite from the sun.

This image, in fact, annoyed many representatives of half the human population: it is the male who waves, as though his status as interstellar ambassador is a given.

The female form however provides the first piece of information that finally reached another star: the sounds of vaginal contractions reached Epsilon Eridani in 1996. These were recorded and broadcast in 1986 by artist Joe Davis, who felt that all previous messages sent to space lacked depictions of human reproduction, and thus failed to really portray the human condition. These sounds, he felt, would best portray the essence of our species.

“If anything is going to inspire an alien civilisation to come running, surely that would be it,” noted Pigalle Tavakkoli of Contemporary Vintage, our guest that night.

There have been other attempts to craft universal messages. The “Cosmic Calls” in 1999 and 2003, sent from the Ukraine, broadcast what is known as the Interstellar Rosetta Stone – similar to the Arecibo message, but much larger, depicting the chemistry of DNA, the geology of the Earth, and basic mathematical principles. In 2009 Joe Davis broadcast the code for RuBisCo – the plant enzyme responsible for photosynthesis, and the most abundant protein on earth; not as salacious as the sounds of a ballerina’s vagina, but certainly an admissible ambassador for life on earth.

Some messages have been less philosophical: in 2008 Doritos broadcast a commercial for its nachos towards Ursae Majoris, the winning entry to an open contest for amateur filmmakers. The first ad sent to space, a stop-motion film of nacho chips performing a pagan ritual is, actually, rather impressive.

Nacho chips, prime numbers, plant enzymes and audible vaginas aside – is there any point in broadcasting our message to space? Many scientists would argue that it is a waste of time and energy. Others would go so far as to say that it is outright reckless, most notably Dr Stephen Hawking (a scientist so serious we might never expect him to turn his mind upon this subject). He very rationally argues that any civilization with the capacity to receive, interpret and respond to our messages will undoubtedly be far more powerful and advanced than our own – and likely to come here at all speed to harvest our resources. We might as well tweet “come and get us” into space.

But, the point remains: contact will never be made if we only listen. As Jill Tarter of SETI counter-argues: if there is intelligent life out there, and if we have the capacity to speak to them, we have a moral obligation to let them know that they are not alone.

Thanks to fluorescent labels that help them to spot cancerous tissue, surgeons have removed ovarian tumour cells that might otherwise have been left behind.

Most malignant ovarian tumours express high numbers of receptors for the molecule folate (also known as vitamin B9), so by attaching the fluorescent molecule fluorescein iso-thiocyanate to folate, researchers created a cancer-cell probe. After injecting this into patients, labelled cells were made to glow white with a special camera and light, allowing surgeons to spot cancerous tissue even when cells were otherwise indistinguishable from their healthy counterparts.

“This provides more accuracy and more certainty for clinicians to remove cancerous cells in real time during surgery,” says study leader Vasilis Ntziachristos of the Technical University of Munich in Germany. The results are published today in Nature Medicine¹.

Of all the gynaecological cancers — ovarian, vaginal and uterine — ovarian is the greatest killer of women in both the United States and Europe. Removing as much cancerous tissue as possible during surgery is crucial to giving post-operative chemotherapy the best possible chance to kill the remaining cancer cells.

“This advance represents a real paradigm shift in surgical imaging,” says Ntziachristos. “Until now we could only rely on the human eye to find carcinogenic tissue, or non-specific dyes that would colour the vascular tissue as well as particular cancer cells. Now we are going after precise molecular signals and not simply physiology.”

As a result, in this preliminary study, surgeons were able to remove tumours less than one millimetre in size. In principle, Ntziachristos says, the technique could locate spots of carcinogenic tissue as small as 50 micrometres.

Proof-of-principle

During the past decade, molecular-imaging techniques have been hailed as the “next big thing” Ntziachristos says. Although X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and ultrasound can all be used to help surgeons determine the size and location of tumours, they cannot differentiate a cancerous cell from a healthy one, limiting the precision of surgical removal. So researchers have turned their attention to optical-imaging techniques and the development of tumour-specific fluorescent probes. This is the first time that such tools, originally developed in mice, have been tested in humans.

At this point, says Ntziachristos, this study only constitutes a proof-of-principle. The probes used apply only to ovarian cancer, and one patient’s tumour did not fluoresce after being injected with the label. This is to be expected, because folate receptors are only overexpressed by 90–95% of ovarian cancers. To tag 100% of cases might require the use of two different probes.

John Primrose, director of the scientific programme of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, welcomed the advance, but was doubtful of its wider applications. “This is a significant small step — it’s not a paradigm shift, but a significant step,” he says. “The problem in its use is that there are not many cancers in which this approach will be helpful.”

The next step is to demonstrate that the technique improves outcomes for patients after surgery, and the only way to do that is with a large, randomized clinical trial. “For now we shouldn’t celebrate this as an advance — it may not yet be,” says Primrose.

I did not expect to be deemed less attractive than an orangutan.

“You will never live this down,” my best friend grinned.

The things we do for science.

At the Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party this past July, we presented our audience with an array of human scents for them to sample, judge and rate: two boys, a woman (myself), and an ape (Hannah, a female orangutan, only revealed to be non-human after the judging).

More than 50 eager noses took turns sniffing our Smell Stations, plastic boxes containing ripped shreds of fabric from t-shirts worn by our four research subjects.

Taking it all in. Photo Credit: Mike Massaro

This was a Guerilla Science take on the famous t-shirt experiments, which investigate the molecular basis of attraction and by examining how humans preferentially rate the smells of other people.

“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” says Dr Leslie Knapp, an immunogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and a global authority on the relationship between smell and attraction in primates. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”

Anyone who has ever known the smell of a lover may be able to relate: the scent of that certain someone is utterly distinct, wholly individual, and – when it belongs to the right person – completely intoxicating. Once upon a time, it was the smell of someone that lay in the crease between his nose and his face that made me weak in the knees.

The mysterious charm and allure of a particular person’s scent is seemingly impossible to put into words, though a few have uttered some rather poignant phrases: Napoleon is reputed to have written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”

Canadian gay gospel outfit The Hidden Cameras croon in The Smell of Happiness, from the album The Smell Of Our Own, “Happiness has a smell I inhale… I feed my own face when I soon crave a taste of the neck of a boy.” The rest, um, gets a bit dirty – read full lyrics here.

The influence of smell over our hearts and our bodies is undeniable, if you have ever felt that way, and yet exactly why seems mysterious: why should one person smell so sweet?

Scientific research, wielding the modern tools of genetic analysis, has uncovered some fascinating clues. Remarkably, studies have shown that our preferences for smells are partly determined by subconscious genetic cues. The same genes that determine how we smell – known as the “MHC cluster” in animals and the “HLA” in humans – also play a key role in programming how our immune systems operate by determining what innate and individual resiliences we all possess.

Lab animals as well as people will preferentially chose mates who possess MHC clusters that are different from their own, which most scientists believe acts as a subconscious mechanism that protects against inbreeding, as well as confers a greater spread of protection to their children.

Dr Knapp’s own research on mandrills has demonstrated that individuals will use smell to “identify potential partners with the appropriate genes,” as she puts it.

In humans, some fascinating studies (such as this one) have found that when women are shown photographs of men and given a selection of smell samples from the same men (though without knowing which smell belonged to which man), their choices frequently matched: the scents they deemed sexy often came from faces they declared handsome. Remarkable.

In the spirit of renegade research, we decided to conduct our own investigation into the relationship between smell and attraction, asking our audience to judge the smells of our contestants with a Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events.

We gave things a twist, as we are wont to do. We threw a non-human – the orangutan Hannah – into the mix, without telling our unwitting judges.

The very attractrive Hannah - who wore a beige shirt, because she refuses to wear white.

To thicken the plot (or at least, their odours), we had our two male subjects go without washing for forty days and forty nights in the run-up to the festival, in a Smelly Tweeter competition.

For the chance to win a ticket to the Secret Garden Party, we asked contestants to attempt to last 40 days without soap and water, and tweet daily about their experience of being physically filthy, the reactions of those around them to their odiferous state, how being dirty makes them feel, and their reasons to quit the contest should they choose to drop out.

You can see all the tweets from contestants on Twitter under the hashtag #smellytweet. Daniel, the champion, kept a detailed blog on his experiences – you can see a choice selection of his posts here: “I am sitting less than three metres from a bathtub. This is torture. I will persevere. I WILL persevere.”

Daniel, enjoying a well deserved bath at the Feast of Stenches.

Beyond having a good chuckle at their expense, we hoped to enrich our understanding of the cultural implications of dirt: “This will be something that no-one has ever done before – this is a totally unique experiment,” says Dr Knapp. “Humans usually try to cover up their natural odours, so we will be interested in the results.”

The audience’s first task was to guess the gender of each of the four stations using coloured beads to indicate male (blue) or female (pink). The overwhelming majority vote in every case was correct – most people could tell that Daniel and Jim are male, and Hannah and myself are female. (Somewhat humiliatingly, more people thought Hannah was female than thought I was female.)

Next we asked the audience to rate the four smells on a sliding scale of attractiveness. Daniel was deemed least attractive, Jim somewhat less so, followed by myself – and then Hannah, the orangutan, was declared the most pleasing. My friends said this would keep them in jokes for weeks to come (and that afternoon called their team in the pub quiz “ORANG-

UTAN > ZOE”), but I query this conclusion: Hannah’s shirt smelled more like laundry detergent than any of ours, presumably because she did not have the patience to wear it for long. Had she kept it on her hairy form for as long as I did, I believe I would have won. But I digress.

Our last table featured strips from four shirts, all worn by Daniel, at various points during his 40 day soap fast. Unsurprisingly, the shirts worn at the later stages were deemed unbearably putrid.

But here’s where things get more interesting: Dr Knapp examined our DNA, extracted from mouth cheekswabs, and produced visual illustrations (in the form of gel electrophoresis assays, which display genetic variations in the form of lines) of our HLA genes. She also examined the DNA of Shamima, Daniel’s long-term girlfriend.

The HLA clusters, pictured using gel electrophoresis, of Hannah, Daniel, his girlfriend Sham, and the Guerilla Science team.

Unsurprisingly, Sham (who descends from both European and Asian parents) boasted diverse HLA genetics – Daniel, who’s lineage is largely Irish, possessed more homogenous genes, which would make him less immunologically robust and more vulnerable than Sham.

But, amusingly, Sham deemed the smell of the other boy, Jim, to be more attractive than Daniel – and his genetics looked to be a better match for her as well, said Dr Knapp.

Of course, being social creatures who rely so much on language, and whose beliefs, desires and behaviours are largely governed by the cultures in which we live, we use far more than just smell to pick our partners. It certainly makes life more interesting.

But the results are certainly fascinating, nonetheless. And even if Hannah was deemed more attractive than me, I do take pride in having defeated the boys – even if they hadn’t bathed in 40 days.

The virus is described inPLoS Pathogens today. The team that discovered it might also have found the first human to be infected: the primary carer for a colony of titi monkeys (Callicebus cupreus) that suffered an outbreak.

The culprit is an adenovirus, one of a class of viruses that cause a range of illnesses in humans, including pneumonia. But this particular strain has never been seen before. It has been dubbed TMAdV, or titi-monkey adenovirus.

“It’s always been thought that adenoviruses are not likely to be causes of outbreaks or pandemics because they have never been known to cross between animals and humans,” says Charles Chiu, director of the UCSF–Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who led the study. Now that assumption needs to be re-examined.

In May 2009, a deadly outbreak of respiratory illness spread through a colony of titi monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Of the 65 monkeys housed in one building, 23 developed symptoms, including pneumonia. As a result, 19 died or were put down.

Chiu and his colleagues analysed tissue taken from the affected monkeys, and identified a previously unknown virus. Genetic sequencing revealed it to be an adenovirus, although its genome was substantially different to those of all known related viruses.

But what tipped the researchers off that there was something unusual about this virus, says Chiu, was what happened when they tried to culture it. “It was unusual to see it grow well in human cell lines, but not monkey” cells, he says. This suggested that the virus could infect humans as well as titi monkeys. “After we interviewed all of the staff, the only person who said they had been sick was one researcher — the one who had had the closest daily contact with the colony,” says Chiu.

That researcher experienced flu-like upper-respiratory-tract symptoms for four weeks. More crucially, a family member who had never visited the primate centre also became ill — demonstrating that TMAdV can spread between humans.

Unknown origins

The titi monkeys might not have been the original hosts of the virus. Of those that developed symptoms, 83% died — a fatality rate that would prevent the virus from circling in the population without wiping out the monkeys. In human-specific strains of adenovirus, death rates usually only reach 18%.

The original host species could be humans, who passed the virus to the monkeys, only for it to jump back to humans — or it could be another animal, such as a rodent. The researchers are collecting blood samples from monkeys and humans from all over the United States, Brazil and Africa to help them to discover the virus’ origins.

Chiu says that there is no reason to suspect that there will be a pandemic of TMAdV, as there has been with other viruses that spread to humans from animals. A survey of blood samples from 81 random, healthy blood donors from the western United States found that two people already had significant levels of antibody to TMAdV. “This virus then potentially crossed into the human population a long time ago and is now circulating at low levels,” says Chiu.

But the more we know about this and other new viruses, the better, says Eric Delwart, a virologist at the Blood Systems Research Institute at UCSF. “Characterizing animal viromes facilitates the detection of related viruses, and may shave a few precious days from identifying a new virus in the event of a future severe outbreak,” he says.

The discovery also raises the possibility of using adenoviruses as vectors in gene therapy, in which a virus is used to correct defects in a patient’s genes, says Chiu. “The fact that TMAdV appears to infect two or more different species but is not common in the human population also suggests this might be a therapy that could have broader applicability,” says Chiu, because it means the virus on a wider range of targets. Other labs are already investigating gene therapies using adenoviruses. “This could open up new and better treatment possibilities,” says Chiu.

It began at the entrance to a giant white cube, the Decontamination Unit, amid the muddy mess of Glastonbury. Bewildered guests – who thought it was a night club – were greeted by two guides in biohazard suits, who led them to a Microbial Zoo: an array of colourful Petri dishes bearing swirls and stripes and spots of rainbow-coloured bacteria.

Some of the strains produced these artful patterns all on their own.Proteus mirabilis, with to its whip-like tails, swims in circles at high speeds through the agar, producing concentric rings.

“Drawing people in like this helped them to learn that you really wouldn’t be able to live without these ‘dirty, disease-causing things’,” says Sarah Forbes, a microbiology PhD student at the University of Manchester, who grew the plates. She gives the example of Staphylococcus epidermidis, which lives on our skin and prevents other more virulent bacteria from taking hold.

The exercise was part of the latest experiment by Guerilla Science, which aims to introduce non-scientists to the beauty and relevance of our favourite subject by mixing it into arts and cultural events – places where people don’t expect to see science, and where we can reach more people who would probably avoid anything to do with it, perhaps after experiencing dull, rote exercises at school.

“We have strived to bring science in unconventional ways into unconventional places – and this was definitely the strangest project we’ve delivered at a music festival yet,” says Guerilla Science director Jen Wong.

Muddy punters, leaning forward to hear over the cacophonous grimecore coming from next door, were horrified to learn that our bodies are home to thousands of species of bacteria. A kilogram of bacteria reside in our guts alone, and overall we host 10 times as many bacterial cells as our own cells.

Perhaps most shocking of all for the muddy revelers was the fact that they encountered this display in Shangri La – the riotous after-hours “naughty corner” of Glastonbury. Next door was the Snake Pit, nightly filled with appropriately filthy electronic dance music; across the way was the Slumba Rave (featuring a caged arena for pillow fights); and all around the Decontamination Unit was a sprawling, slum-like collection of art installations and micro venues, populated with dead baby doll heads, neon lights, and mannequins placed in extremely compromising positions.

Bringing scientists into one of the most rebellious arenas in Glastonbury was the brainchild of Debs Armstrong, creative director of Shangri-La, in partnership with Dr Amy Sanders at the Wellcome Trust, which has been organising a series of events celebrating dirt. “Glastonbury seemed an obvious choice: organisers and visitors have to deal with copious mud and dust, limited showers and loos, and numerous humans (and their germs) in close proximity,” says Dr Sanders.

“This year I wanted to bring some scientific content to Shangri-La – give the narrative a bit more meat,” says Armstrong. “There are so many interactive artistic installations that are very creative, but to bring actual science into the fold is altogether different, and rarely done.”

Shangri-La revolves around the story of a city, born as a hedonistic dystopia in 2009, and this year stricken with a fantasy “virus” – in the form of UV reflective paint – contaminating everyone who wound through the city’s maze of venues.

With the support of the Wellcome Trust as part of its Dirt Season, Guerilla Science was brought in to cleanse citizens of the virus.

For eight hours daily for three days, we “decontaminated” the muddy revellers who wound their way through a network of hexagonal chambers inside our giant white cube.

As part of the narrative of the Decontamination Unit, following their lesson in microbiology, guests could opt for one of two kinds of disinfection: physical, which led to an undressing room (yes, many people opted to get completely naked) and then a smoky, strobe-lit shower; and moral, which led to a private session with bona fide psychiatrists: Dr Mark Salter, Dr Peter Macrae, Dr Priscilla Kent, and Dr Caroline Methuen.

Moral decontamination involved an intimate, personalised session lasting however long the patient needed, resting their tired legs on a couch while two shrinks sat in red-leather armchairs counselling them in preparation for the next room: the Shame Drain, where they could share a guilty secret with a microphone. Their words were broadcast anonymously through a row of speakers opposite the Decontamination Unit.

“Some people just lay on the couch straight away – I was surprised at how quickly people bought into the idea that confession in itself could be a cleansing experience,” says Dr Methuen. “Some really got into the idea of sending an idea out to the ether, sharing it anonymously with other people – a way of getting rid of the guilt you unnecessarily carry inside you. Even when they were off their heads, they got it.”

Some were too off their heads (it was Glastonbury after all) to remember their own initials. But for most the psych chamber was useful, says Methuen. Some joked. Others basked in the attention. A few cried. One wept about how much he missed his mum.

“There are still negative stereotypes about psychotherapy, so it was useful to show what a flexible thing it is – you don’t fit into a conveyor belt,” she says. “We were all nice, friendly and non-threatening. We were just having a chat – and in the chaos of Glastonbury, the normality of sitting down and being asked how they were was quite therapeutic in itself.”

Guerilla Science would be lying if we said it wasn’t all a bit trying at times: the combination of mud, sleep deprivation and occasionally addled revellers were challenging. But it was worth it to introduce a scientific note to one of the world’s most popular music festivals.

The Scatalog. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

On the outside: a sleek and smooth white briefcase, sporting a bright silver handle, cheerfully labeled “E. chromi” in a cursive font, each letter a different colour of the rainbow. On the inside: an assortment of stool samples, each also brightly spotted in a different colour of the rainbow, cushioned neatly into white pockets for easy examination. Dubbed “The Scatalog”, this is the spectrum of fecal matter that could be produced through the ingestion of the “E. chromi” bacterial strain, depending on your internal conditions.

The Scatalog itself remains speculative — but the bacteria already exist. Developed at Cambridge University and winner of the grand prize at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM). E. chromi is a modified strain of the harmless stomach bacterium E. coli and comes in six strains, each capable of secreting a separate colour: red, yellow, green, blue, brown or violet. E. coli is a normal bacterial species that lives throughout the human gut; E. chromi is a new, multi-coloured version that can produce pigments visible to the naked eye if set off by certain chemical triggers (like a pregnancy test strip changes colour when the hCG hormone is present).

Theoretically, you could populate the human intestines with E. chromi (with a yogurt drink, for example), where they could live harmlessly perpetually, just as E. coli do. But if they were to detect something unusual — such as the chemical signals from colitis or intestinal worms — they would produce their signature colours, giving you a quick, visible sign that something is wrong. Think of them as colourful microbial sentinels.

Rainbow excrement was just one of many applications that James King and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg devised for E. chromi (others included bacteria programmed to indicate whether drinking water is safe or to detect elevated carbon dioxide levels).

“We are actually being quite mischievous with the Scatalog,” King says. “Most synthetic biologists would rather promote medical applications that are more sexy. We thought this was one of the more logical outputs.”

But King and Ginsberg are not scientists, they’re artists. Or, to be more precise, “speculative designers” (King’s phrase) who specialize in fashioning uses for emerging technologies (or sometimes, technologies that don’t quite exist). While some speculative designers are imagining uses for information technology or space exploration, King and Ginsberg have, for the past few years, focused on synthetic biology. While genetic engineers modify existing species — rice crops that come packed with vitamin A, for example — synthetic biologists seek to invent new life forms altogether. Nobody has yet to create a bona fide “artificial” form of life, though the most famous proponent of synthetic biology, Craig Venter, aims to do just that.

Already biologists are stitching together assemblies of genes into new kinds of organisms — usually single-celled — so they can do useful things for us: vats of modified E. coli bacteria that produce insulin, for example, are already sitting in laboratories around the world, saving the lives of diabetics. Designer microbes could produce clean energy, decontaminate polluted air and water, and give birth to a new universe of outlandish consumer products. Synthetic biology is poised, so its supporters believe, to revolutionize the 21st century, just as computers did in the 20th.

Hoping to influence this supposed revolution, artists and designers around the world are working in laboratories, partnering with scientists, and collaborating on projects that imagine how these innovations in genetic engineering could be applied. King’s latest project, Cellularity, envisions how medicine could change as pharmaceutical developers begin to deliver drugs inside chemical cells rather than via compressed chemical tablets. The chemical cells would adapt to the environment inside their host and evolve — jut as living cells do. Dressing The Meat of Tomorrow fashioned palatable designs for in-vitro meat (lab-grown animal tissue, sometimes termed “victimless steaks”), a possible staple of future meals. Ginsberg’s latest project, The Synthetic Kingdom, features an array of imagined oddities like bioluminescent kidney stones extracted from factory employees of the future who work in bio-electronics manufacturing facilities.

"Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow"

Bringing an artist’s eye and an outsider’s viewpoint, designers who work in synthetic biology can influence how we perceive a field that’s riddled with negative connotations. Genetic changes, after all, are challenging for even the most educated to grasp: they take place on a scale we cannot see and have intricate molecular effects none of us can absolutely comprehend.

“Watching people’s reactions to a suitcase full of poo is interesting,” Ginsberg says. “The normal horror of genetic modification goes right out the window. People are suddenly challenged to think more carefully about a technology they normally oppose.”

“Whenever there’s a debate about synthetic biology, one side will claim it will open up a new utopia and the other will say it is untested and unsafe,” King says. “The truth I think lies in the middle. Our work presents a more subtle argument, it depolarizes it.”

Though the colourful and crowd-pleasing nature of their work may have the capacity to challenge mainstream perceptions, King says he in fact is far more interested in influencing the researchers who practice synthetic biology: “If you can make a researcher think more deeply about their work and its implications, that’s worth more than changing the minds of thousands of people who don’t engage with genetic technology at all.”

SOFTENING SYNTHETICS

Tinted turds are just one idea among many in synthetic biology that have been inspired by artists and designers. Cambridge researchers have harnessed the genes of fireflies to “model the feasibility of using bioluminescent trees as a replacement for street lamps.” There have also been petri dish cultures of E. coli capable of producing photographic images — dubbed “Coliroid” — and microbial strains engineered to produce “the smell of rain.” Last year saw the inception of the International Genetically Engineered Art Competition (to mirror iGEM).

At the crest of the movement is Synthetic Aesthetics, an initiative jointly run by Stanford University in California and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which supports long-term collaborations between scientists and designers (Ginsberg is a design fellow). “The aim is to explore rather than to advocate,” says Pablo Schyfter, a sociologist and a postdoctoral scholar with Synthetic Aesthetics. “We wanted to know, what could artists and designers bring to the field?” The process of researching requires scientists to be very focused on the particulars of their field. They can become too focused “on the Petri dish” as Ginsberg puts it, and insulated from thinking about the broader implications of their work.

“It’s fair to say that before this project, considering the public’s reactions wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind,” says Dr. Alistair Elfick, Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. “Meeting designers who were imagining possible scenarios for how our technologies could be applied gave me new insights. It was almost a wake-up call that forced me to consider how the public may perceive what I was trying to do.”

Those perceptions, of course, are highly coloured by the ways that genetic technologies were introduced in the 1990s; tight controls over patents and laws, opposition to labelling, and widespread fear of unknown risks have left their mark. Claims to have the public’s best interests in mind were widely perceived with skepticism. Acrimonious legal disputes over crop ownership, say — most famously with Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser — seemed to confirm suspicions that corporate motivations solely concerned profit.

“We’re all very conscious that the way genetic modification was initially presented to the public has left us with baggage,” Dr Elfick says. “We don’t want to make those same mistakes again; we want to be very open about what we do.”

BIOBRICKS AND BIOHACKS

These new vanguards of synthetic biology seek to make their technology, information and ideas available to all. Organizations such as OpenWetWare and Hackteria provide vast databases of information free online, often in wiki format. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based BioBricks Foundation, which supports the development of so-called “standard biological parts, devices and systems,” states that it “works to ensure that the engineering of biology is conducted in an open and ethical manner to benefit all people and the planet.” Though they are a for-profit organization, their lack of emphasis on genetic patents strikingly distinguishes them from the behaviour of biotech firms in the ’90s, which came under heavy criticism for attempting to patent even naturally existing genes, such as those that predispose certain women to breast cancer. (Last year in US courts, this practice was deemed invalid.)

Taking things a step further is the “DIY Biology” movement, which aims to put biotech tools into the hands of amateur scientists. The BioFab project, a spin-off from BioBricks, aims to eventually produce a kit with all the tools and parts necessary to perform basic genetic modifications. The made-in-Canada Genomikon is a similar kit aimed at high-school students, and should be available next year. “You could sit a teenager down with this and within an hour they’d be designing bacteria,” says Andrew Hessel. “It’s pretty cool.” Hessel’s the Bioinformatics and Biotechnology Co-Chair at the Singularity University and one of synthetic biology’s main proponents in Canada. He’s also the co-founder of the Pink Army Cooperative, which claims to be the world’s first cooperative biotechnology company, focused on breast cancer drug development. “I believe in transparency,” he says. “You cannot see into giant drug companies and government laboratories.”

As genetic modulation equipment continues to become cheaper and more accessible, he predicts the involvement of artists, designers and other non-biologists will only grow. “We’ll end up seeing a lot of new artists coming into this field and showcasing products that push the boundaries in ways that can be quite stylish and even playful, without scaring people,” he says.

“WHERE IS THE WHY?”

Skeptics might think that artists are using their aesthetic flair and sensitive touch to give genetically modified life forms a more friendly appearance. But many of the designers working on synthetic biology are suspicious of the technology themselves.

One of the biggest misconceptions of their work, say Ginsberg and King, is that they aim to popularize, or even condone synthetic biology. “We are definitely not trying to promote its use,” Ginsberg says. “We’re trying to promote debate. I wanted to understand why I myself felt so strangely about it. The more I learned, the more seductive the technology becomes.”

Dr. Schyfter goes even farther to say that he is still “unconvinced” by the technology. “I am rather skeptical of synthetic biology,” he says, “but that’s precisely the reason I find it so interesting.” One of his main critiques is the fact that that synthetic biologists seek to model their field on electrical engineering – practitioners speak of biological “circuits,” seek to build “oscillators” and “switches” and the capacity to “store memory.” Some of the flashiest and most publicized innovations in synthetic biology have aimed to replicate electronic devices, such as the bacterial photographs and glowing trees. “This focus is misplaced, “ he argues. “There are qualitative differences between living and electrical systems that just can’t be ignored.”

Indeed, many scientists who work in the field of synthetic biology will make the same breathless statements about the revolutionary, world-changing potential for this new field — much as the disciples of Silicon Valley have spoken about web technology and the idealized “information commons.” Self-styled “biohackers” see themselves as democratizing information, liberating data and undermining power just as web pirates do. “Synthetic biologists should instead be focusing on what biological systems already do very well,” Schyfter says, “which is produce chemicals. Innovations that allow us to produce chemicals like fuel, water, and medicines will be more likely to succeed.”

Though these are certainly among the goals of many biologists working in the nascent field of synthetic biology – as mentioned, we’ve produced insulin this way for years – Schyfter feels they still have a long way to go to defining their true aims. “Where is the why? Not enough people in this field are actually asking this question, why do synthetic biology in the first place?”

In fact, we cannot even agree in the first instance on a clear definition for “synthetic biology,” he points out. Designers like Ginsberg call it “a new approach to genetic engineering,” while Hessel calls it “genetic engineering with computer-aided design combined with DNA synthesis.” Most people tend to think of synthetic biology in terms of Craig Venter’s ambition: to create a new form of life from scratch.

The Pandora’s Box metaphor has been applied to modified genes (usually with nefarious implications) with such great frequency that it’s beyond cliché. But it does remain true that the technology has developed to such an extent, and its application found such wide use, that the place of synthetic biology in our future is absolutely guaranteed. We will undoubtedly see more forays by artists, amateur enthusiasts and democratic mavericks. “That’s part of the beauty of synthetic biology: everything becomes so cheap, it becomes playful,” says Hessel. “And playfulness should come into the genetic realm. It’s been far too serious for far too long.”

A Laphroaig jelly breast, with gold leaf nipple. Photo Credit: Mike Massaro

“Please put your genitals on the table.” Epidemiologist and author Elizabeth Pisani was speaking to a crowd of 60 diners sitting beneath the gilded iron arches of a Victorian sewage pumping station. “No, you cannot trade your genitals with your neighbour — you have to take the genitals you are given.”

A few chastised guests eyed their neighbours penises and vaginas with envy. “I have a penis,” announced Pisani, holding up a yellow banana flavoured phallic marshmallow. “Will anyone give me an orifice in which to insert my penis?”

“I have a cunt,” a woman shouted, holding up a concentric circled sweet.

“I have a bum hole,” another offered.

“I’ll see your bum hole and raise you money,” Pisani countered. “Now, the game begins: if somebody at your table wants a pairing with your genitals, see what you will readily accept — a cock with a cunt? — or what you might want to be paid for.” Many pairings were made, including the sale of a bum hole by a New Scientist reporter for two Euros.

This very serious scientific experiment precluded the dessert course at “Dirt Banquet,” held in Crossness Pumping Station and hosted by Guerilla Science (of which I’m a member, more on this later) and food artisans Bompas and Parr. Our goal: to challenge our guests to think more critically about what they consider to be dirty, and why, by combining talks by scientists — anthropologist Val Curtis on the evolution of disgust, and Pisani, the author of The Wisdom of Whores, on sex — with a five-course meal of “dirty” food inside the antique sewage facility.

We were inspired by a genuine public health concern supported by decades of research: many scientists increasingly believe that allergies, asthma and many other auto-immune disorders and illnesses are at least partly attributable to a lack of dirt in our lives. Known as the “hygiene hypothesis,” this posits that our developing bodies are exposed to unnaturally low levels of bacteria, mould and other infectious agents as we mature, leading to hyper-reactive and maladjusted immune systems.

“We are using the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ as a wake-up call for people to welcome dirt back into their lives — and in the case of our banquet, into their stomachs and minds,” explains Guerilla Science director Jen Wong. (The banquet was funded by the British biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust, which has supported a host of other events and publications this year under the simple banner “Dirt”.)

Crossness — the first sewage pumping station in the world, left to disrepair for 50 years — is being restored with Wellcome grants. The Victorian-era hanging fruits, climbing ivy and soaring buttresses glisten red, white and green once more, having emerged from more than a century of grime. For the evening, we were able to turn on one of the four 52-tonne pumps; guests entered the building as the massive wheel slowly spun, filling the giant cathedral-like hall with grumbling shakes and billowing steam. “I’ve waited years to get inside this building,” Bompas said, light mottling the ironwork floor up to the ceiling.

Feast of Filth

With radioactive cheese serum appetizers, bacterial jellies, blue cheeses, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, charcoal cleansed Thames water, durian chocolates and civet coffee (recovered from the feces of wild cats), the meal was “inspired by the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt,” says Sam Bompas, one of the menu’s creators and a rising star on London’s gastro scene. “We wanted people to engage with the concept of ‘dirt’ on many different levels.”

Some of the ingredients, topics and settings were provocative — and intended to be so. “We designed this banquet to visceral and instinctive responses of disgust, whilst inspiring our guests to overcome those responses and in so doing reconsider their relationship to dirt,” says Wong.

The most contentious dish: the fermentation platter, featuring netto beans (aptly described as “vomit beans”), served as a garnish to fermented fish with pickled ginger. These, says Bompas, were sourced in the wild west markets of London. “We had to trawl through many Chinese supermarkets to find them,” he says. The sticky tendrils of the hard-won beans, sadly, were “too horrifying for many people.”

Before the netto was served, Val Curtis gave her lecture on the evolution of disgust. “I hope you all have strong stomachs,” she said, taking her place above the crowd like a preacher in a pulpit. “But you must do or else you wouldn’t be here.”

Disgust is actually “the hygiene instinct,” she says. “It keeps us from eating what might make us sick.” Surveying cards that all the guests had previously filled out, listing three things they find disgusting, she spoke for twenty minutes on maggots, feces, and fetishes, before inviting guests to dine on ingredients resembling some of the offending items.

The main course — roast pork with barbeque sauce vegetables — was refreshingly familiar, but came served inside clay pots teeming with earth. Guests were required to dig for their dinner, and the tables (and plates) wound up covered in soil.

“No genitals in mouths, please”

Laphroaig jelly breasts with gold leaf nipples drizzled in posset of ambergris (a kind of whale expectorant) preceded Pisani’s short talk on sex. These were instantly devoured before she could even take the stage, standing on a balcony next to a towering steam engine. “I can’t believe everyone ate their genitals right away,” she later said.

Her opening line was an apt quote from Woody Allen: “Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.” Joining her, a sexual expert of considerable knowledge: Catherine Stephens, a sex worker who’s slept with more than 4,000 clients. With the genital pairing game, Pisani and Stephens hoped to illustrate that what people will pay for and why provides insights into what we value — and what we consider dirty. And “dirty”, of course, varies widely. “What constitutes dirty sex is what crosses your personal boundaries as transgressive,” she later said via phone. “For example, anal sex to some is just sex with a different orifice, but to others it’s ‘dirty’ — and therefore, to some, much more fun.”

A journalist turned academic, Pisani has spent many years in anthropological surveys of prostitutes, johns, and other individuals whose sexual behaviours are often narrowly understood by traditionally minded public health professionals. She’s perhaps best known for surveys of the attitudes and behaviours of transgendered prostitutes in Indonesia (she speaks Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia).

“I try and ask questions that have potential relevance to people’s actual lives — the challenges, joys and pleasures that people actually experience in real life, rather than the narrow boxes that public health nerds define,” she says. For example, if men complain of disliking condoms widely, simply insisting that they are the best and only means of preventing new STD infections will not help. “If we don’t try and think of the problems that people are working with, we won’t identify solutions.”

The genital dessert game was intended to inspire guests to consider the diversity of ways that we can have sex – a topic many find threatening — through the use of a decidedly non-threatening unit of exchange: candy. Her impression? “I was surprised nobody at the table tried to pair a mouth with an anus.”

Science by Stealth

Guerilla Science did not find itself staging banquets of filth inside sewage pumping stations with professional sex workers overnight — four years of experimentation brought us here. “Science Camp” began in 2007 as a small tent in a field at the Secret Garden Party, one of England’s most riotous music festivals, with eight lectures on topics such as quantum mechanics and the structure of DNA. Several of us joined the following summer, all with a shared philosophy: science belongs at festivals, alongside music, theatre, comedy and other entertainment. Far from boring, science is about discovering how remarkable the universe is — truth genuinely is stranger than fiction.

We’ve since grown to six team members — most of whom work full-time jobs at museums in London — and now stage events far more experimental than standalone lectures. Our most recent: a life drawing class inside the iconic Battersea Power Station (perhaps the most famous Art Deco building in the world), with the anatomy of the models painted on their skin. Prior to that, we held workshops inside an abandoned hospital on lobotomy techniques and electroconvulsive treatment as part of the Secret Cinema’s homage to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Taking science, and scientists, into ever more unusual settings, our mantra has become “to set science free,” as Wong puts it.

The Dirt Banquet, pairing food artisans with scientists, exemplifies our strap-line: “We mix science with art, music and play.” Unconventional cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, musicians and performers have become our stock-in-trade – such as a game exploring the condition synaesthesia that paired neuroscientists with the professional agency of play Coney, featuring a giant brain covered in flowers and cogs.

Such cooperative projects — sculptures incorporating new forms of technology, or genetically modified bacterial paintings — are broadly known in some circles as “sci-art,” and generally aim to break down perceived barriers between the arts and the sciences. “But the whole ‘sci-art’ label isn’t really helpful,” says Wong. “In the past, it’s simply been linked to a lot of funding schemes, and merely placed science alongside art. We’re trying to offer something more rich, actually blending disciplines seamlessly together, to showcase not just science and art but all the things in between.”

A diner unearths a course in the Dirt Banquet organised by Guerilla Science. Photograph: Mike Massaro

Under the soaring arches of one of Britain’s most remarkable buildings, a gilded iron cathedral of sewage, 60 diners dug into clay pots of earth to get at their main course of roast pork and vegetables. The meal on Saturday had started with bacterial jelly canapes and the earth was followed by prosecco jelly breast desserts.

The UK, once gastronomically uneventful, is today home to some of the worlds’ most extraordinarily experimental culinary experiences, but Guerilla Science is confident that there has never been one quite like the Dirt Banquet, which we hosted with food artisans Bompas & Parr inside the spectacular Crossness Pumping Station. Completed in 1865, this Victorian masterpiece was the ideal venue for a feast of filth, designed “to explore the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt” explains Sam Bompas.

The banquet at the Crossness Pumping Station in London. Photograph: Mike Massaro

“Dirt is seen in most cultures as something undesirable,” says Jenny Wong, a director of Guerilla Science. “We designed this banquet to provoke visceral reactions of disgust – through the smell of the building, the menu, and the subject matter.

“The context of the banquet – with its majestic architecture, tasty food and engaging speakers – then provoked people’s curiosity to reconsider their relationship to dirt and overcome their disgust responses, so that they could eat and enjoy.”

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this is one of many events that the biomedical research charity is sponsoring as part of its Dirt Season, a celebration of all things sordid and unhygienic from the history of cholera to sculptures fashioned from faeces (the latter on display in the Welcome Trust’s exhibit hall at its Euston HQ). The aim is to challenge us all to reflect more deeply on just what exactly is “dirt” (once described by anthropologist Mary Douglas as simply “matter out of place”), and its profound implications for human health.

Research suggests that our contemporary obsession with ridding our lives of “dirt” has played a significant role in the rise of allergies and other autoimmune disorders. The “hygiene hypothesis” postulates that many of us become sick because we are, in fact, too clean. Without our daily dose of bacteria, fungal spores and other noxious agents, our immune systems become unbalanced, over-reactive and ill-equipped to cope with ambient levels of “dirt”.

The Wellcome Trust wants you to “welcome dirt back into your lives”. Guerilla Science decided to invite our dinner guests to welcome dirt directly into their bodies. Master chefs Bompas & Parr served an array of delectably filthy food, including mouldy cheeses, bacterial jellies, savoury haggis, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, fermented fish, roast pork (pigs of course being the “dirtiest” of animals), and a dash of posset made with ambergris – whale expectorant once widely used for perfumes and Victorian garnishes.

The mud cakes were “quite tricky” to make, says Bompas. “We had to use mud that was clean – we ended up sterilising the topsoil pellets that went into the geophagy course.”

We fed the minds of our guests as well as their bellies. Anthropologist Val Curtis of the University of London spoke before the second course – fermented fish with pickled vegetables – on her speciality, the evolution of disgust. She encouraged our diners to ponder what they might find revolting, and why.

Before dinner, we had asked our guests to list three things they find disgusting on anonymous slips of paper, which Curtis perused for discussion. The most common offenders were vomit, faeces and maggots – things we all instinctively avoid thanks to evolution.

“Disgust is the voices of our ancestors telling us to stay away from the things that make us sick,” she said. “If we didn’t listen to those voices we wouldn’t be here – if your great-great-great-great grandmother had thought poo was yummy, she would not have survived and you would not be here today.

Also common on the list of disgusting things: bad habits, from picking one’s nose to farting in public. “We are disgusted by bad manners as a kind of moral outrage with people who threaten us with disease,” she explained. “Torture”, “cheating” and “paedophilia” were also listed.

Disgust may be an emotion we wish to avoid experiencing, or even contemplating, but Curtis argued that it’s an important exercise to consider its origins and functions: “I am interested in disgust because it keeps us healthy – it is the hygiene instinct.”

What would you be prepared to pop in your mouth? Photograph: Mike Massaro

If the first course of conversation was sobering, dessert was anything but: epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores, asked our guests to pair their genitals – marshmallow vulvas, rectums and penises – with those of another guest. To make things more interesting, she asked everyone to consider what pairings they might give freely, such as heterosexual sex, and for which pairings they would ask for payment, such as receptive anal sex.

When some diners attempted to swap genitals, she reprimanded them: “Stop that – you get the genitals you are given, you do not get a choice.”

Joining her was Catherine Stephens, a professional sex worker with many years’ experience of clients with unusual tastes. As they played with their genitals, our giggling guests had become like a class of giggling schoolchildren. But as soon as Stephens announced that she had slept with over 4,000 men, the building instantly fell quiet.

“It’s not every day that vomit is spoken about as a prelude to a fermented starter, or that someone announces in all seriousness that they’ve had 4,000 sexual partners over dessert, or that you are asked to ‘put your genitals on the table,’” says Wong.

Though we may blush to discuss anything but “vanilla” heterosexual sex, Pisani argues, the full spectrum of sexual behaviour deserves deeper consideration from an empirical point of view, even if couched in fairly colloquial terms.

“It is considered dirty to have sex with a woman who is menstruating, so many men would prefer to have intercourse with her anus, somehow considered less dirty. You figure that one out,” she said.

Pairing challenging speakers with the most unusual food, in the most sublime setting, Guerilla Science aimed to inspire all our guests to reflect a bit more critically on what they think of as dirty and why. What we may subjectively consider dirty may not actually be so in the harsh light of scientific objectivity.

To that end, Pisani left us with this: “Is sex dirty? We only seem to call it dirty if it’s done right.”

If you didn’t see us administering electroconvulsive therapy in the Secret Cinema’s rendition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest this past November, you can see it in this short film. You may find it disturbing – many of our guests did.

Anyone who hasn’t seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest probably knows just one thing about it: the main character is subjected to shock therapy as punishment for his subversive behaviour. The image of Jack Nicholson chomping on a mouthguard, eyes clenched in pain and veins throbbing, is iconic.

No vision of electroconvulsive therapy is so famous. Nothing in popular culture has so profoundly influenced the way we perceive ECT, described in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel as a dehumanising ordeal forced upon patients in a “filthy brain-murdering room that they call the ‘Shock Shop’”.

Before the pharmaceutical revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, ECT was practiced widely: it was one of very few therapies that could produce genuine, lasting changes in the mentally ill. It was lauded as a miracle cure: the Italian neurologists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini were nominated for the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on the treatment in the 1930s.

It is interesting to note: ECT failed where the lobotomy succeeded. Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in 1949 for the transcranial lobotomy, a procedure that is now almost never performed.

Yet more than a million people a year undergo ECT today – though the experience now is very different from what it was half a century ago.

With advice and expertise from psychiatrist Dr Mark Salter, who coached our ‘patients’ Lime and Ramey, we staged ECT treatments (along with lobotomies) circa 1950 for two weeks straight.

Guerilla Scientist Steve Mould with our willing patient, Mr Lime.

We wanted to create the most historically accurate performance possible – even the machine we used dates from the era.

Many who passed through the Experimental Ward found the performance deeply disturbing, understandably. ECT is still performed today, and is still upsetting to many people. For some, it too easily brings to mind that horrific tool of capital punishment, the electric chair.

But proponents of ECT – and there are many, both doctors and patients alike – blame the film for permanently tarnishing its image. Though it may seem crude, it is “spectacularly successful” in treating depression, Dr Mark Salter tells us in this interview:

“We like to shoot the messenger, but the fact of the matter is that ECT if used in a model way, discriminately, and for life-threatening depression, is one of the most effective and powerful techniques in the psychiatric armoury today.”

The face of ECT now is far different from what one may have seen in a 1950s ward: muscle relaxants are used to immobilise patients and prevent the fractured bones and broken teeth that they once suffered, and a general anaesthetic ensures they will feel no pain and remember nothing about the experience.

Carrie Fisher – author and (yes) Princess Leia – has publicly championed ECT, which she says helped her with bipolar disorder: “It makes you feel better. They put you to sleep now. It’s not like it’s depiction in the media, which is really what caused the stigma. And I think a lot of pharmaceutical companies are not so happy [about it] because it works so well.”

Psychiatrist Dr Maurice Greenberg tells us just what it is like to administer the treatment in this audio recording.

Nonetheless, there is something deeply unsettling about ECT – to many medical professionals as well as patients. As Dr Greenberg tells us, one colleague in particular “refused to give it on principle… he argued there was no real evidence to justify its use.”

That was back in the 1970s, when very little was known about how ECT actually affects the structure of the brain. Delivering a shock of electricity to force a seizure, without understanding the true consequences, seemed to many physicians to be reckless, barbaric, and inhumane. All patients who undergo ECT – then and now – experience memory loss, sometimes to a severe degree, a side effect many patients find deeply upsetting.

The patient Harding tells RP McMurphy what the experience will be like, in Kesey’s 1962 novel:

McMurphy: And you say it don’t hurt?

Harding: I personally guarantee it. Completely painless. One flash and you’re unconscious immediately. No gas, no needle, no sledgehammer. Absolutely painless. The thing is, no one ever wants another one. You … change. You forget things.

It is indeed true that ECT was used as punishment by some hospitals, as McMurphy experiences in Kesey’s novel. Even more common, it was doled out therapeutically but indiscriminately, administered to patients suffering from conditions that it could not help, such as schizophrenia, learning disabilities and even epilepsy itself.

Lou Reed was subjected to ECT in the 1950s to “cure” his homosexuality, an experience he describes in Kill Your Sons (1974):

All your two-bit psychiatrists

Are giving you electroshock

They said, they’d let you live at home with mom and dad

Instead of mental hospitals

But every time you tried to read a book

You couldn’t get to page 17

‘Cause you forgot where you were

So you couldn’t even read.

Sylvia Plath also underwent ECT, in her case for severe depression and suicidal desires, which she also describes in poetry.

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

- The Hanging Man”, 1960

Ernest Hemingway also received ECT for severe depression. We do not however know much of what he had to say about the experience – his capacity to write was virtually destroyed by the treatment, and he committed suicide shortly afterwards.

ECT has persisted as a course of treatment since it was first used in the 1930s – virtually the only medical treatment from that era still in use today – and millions of people credit it with alleviating their severe depression, and ultimately saving their lives.

It is undeniably remarkable – from a biological point of view – that inducing an epileptic fit by sparking the brain with a brief pulse of electricity can alleviate depression, improve mood and change disposition.

But of course, this beggars the question: who in their right mind would conclude in the first place that seizures should be induced as a medical treatment? How could a convulsive fit help a sick person get better? As the epileptic patient Sefelt puts in, in Kesey’s novel: “What a life – give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one.”

Medics had observed since the 19th century that schizophrenics tended not to have epilepsy, and vice versa. It was mistakenly believed that the two conditions were antagonistic. So it seemed reasonable: perhaps artificially inducing a seizure could alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia? Hungarian Ladislas von Meduna tested this hypothesis by inducing seizures in schizophrenics using the notorious and now banned medication Metrazol, before Cerletti and Bini brought in the use of electricity.

The hypothesis turned out not to be true: schizophrenia is not “antagonistic” to epilepsy, so to speak. Epilepsy involves waves of electrical activity spreading through the brain – almost like explosions. Schizophrenia on the other hand involves anatomical changes, and can be spotted almost at a glance in MRI scans: ventricles – the fluid filled spaces within the brain – are much larger in schizophrenics.

Twin brothers - the schizophrenic is on the right.

Nonetheless, we now have evidence to support the idea that seizures can be used therapeutically. Modern research in rodents seems to show that ECT works by pruning the connections between neurons in the hippocampus, a portion deep in the temporal lobe of the brain involved in memory formation and mood. It seems that the production of neurotransmitters – chemical messengers that the brain cells use to “talk” to each other – are then reset and recalibrated.

Interestingly, it seems that important changes are brought about in the secretion of serotonin, noradrenaline, and other messengers that are targeted by antidepressants. Some studies show that in fact ECT has an even more dramatic effect on these neurotransmitters than pharmaceutical medications. Neuroscientists are still working out the details, but it seems that ultimately a boost is given to the production of “growth factors” – chemicals that foster the growth of new nerve cells.

The end result: new connections are forged in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that seems to shrink in severely depressed people. By pruning down old connections and forging new ones, ECT could almost be thought of as administering a kind of neural renovation.

For many individuals, as a last resort for suicidal thoughts, depression, catatonia, psychosis and bipolar disorder, the therapy has succeeded where all other treatments have failed. As a last resort, it can truly be life saving – despite the costs.

If all else failed, would you choose to burn away the connections in your mind if it took the pain away?

Coupled with a soliloquy on the virtues of the frontal lobotomy, an ice pick was gently jammed into the eyes of a polystyrene head, and swirled through the frontal lobe of the dummy brain, severing connections between the foremost structures of the cerebrum and the medial structures in the interior. A rigorous twirl produced the most marvellous squeaking.

Over the eyeball, under the eyelid, and straight on till morning.

Catch a glimpse of our lobotomy class in this short film, starting at 2:30. Or enjoy the procedure in Russian at 2:45 in this TV news segment.

Our demonstration – disturbing to some, hilarious to others – may have seemed grotesquely comical. But every single thing we said was absolutely true.

It is indeed the case that the transcranial lobotomy, refined in Portugal in the 1930s by the neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz, gleaned its inventor the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Perhaps, if you knew this already, you could have answered correctly the question posed by our medical instructor: What do Albert Einstein and the transcranial lobotomy share in common?

Though it may seem absurd now, the frontal lobotomy was indeed regarded as a medical marvel in the middle years of the last century – it was lauded on the front page of the New York Times in 1937 as a breakthrough “Surgery of the Soul”. Some 40,000 people received the procedure in the 1940s and 1950s in America, and another 10,000 in Europe.

The prefrontal lobotomy stood alone among medical procedures in its ability to permanently modify the mentally ill: the ‘incurably insane’, violent individuals suffering from severe psychosis, were rendered placid, gentle and uncomplaining. Moreover, sensory and motor functions – the ability to move and feel – could be left largely unaltered, while disposition and temperament were utterly transformed. Violent tendencies evaporated, and suicidal thoughts disappeared.

But as miraculous as it seemed, the transcranial lobotomy had practical drawbacks: it was messy and intensive, requiring two unsightly holes to be bored into the sides of the skull. It required a fairly intensive hospital stay, with a great deal of postoperative care.

On occasion, it resulted in tragic consequences: patients could be rendered mute and immobile. Humans became vegetables. The most famous case: Rosemary Kennedy, sister of John F, who underwent a transcranial lobotomy in 1946 at the bequest of her father for her extreme “moodswings” (the true nature of her mental condition before the operation remains highly contested).

Rosemary Kennedy, in 1938 - three years before her lobotomy.

As they bored into her skull, Kennedy’s surgeons asked her to count backwards, and to recite phrases she knew by heart, so they could calculate if they had penetrated sufficiently far into the brain – including the words to God Bless America: “Stand beside her, and guide her / Through the night with a light from above.”

Unfortunately they went a touch too deep, and Miss Kennedy spent the rest of her life without the ability to speak or control her bladder. Considered the first “Kennedy tragedy”, she was kept largely out of the public eye, a great embarrassment to the family. She died in 2005.

Her surgeon, Walter Freeman, was dismayed by the event – yet still resolute in his determination to perform what he considered to be a miraculous procedure.

Could there be a better way? Cleaner, gentler – perhaps cheaper as well?

He hit upon the solution: an icepick.

Rather than reaching the brain by going through the top of the head with a drill, why not access the cortex from the opposite direction, through softer tissue: from the bottom?

Thus Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy: it was this technique that revolutionised the procedure, and which we taught to our medical students on those chilly evenings in the Secret Cinema. It is this operation that RP McMurphy receives at the end of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – an “installation”, as it is dubbed in the book.

The appeal of the transorbital lobotomy is that it can be done very, very quickly: in just ten minutes. The patient may be sent home that same evening in a taxi cab. No anaesthetic, no bloody mess, no unsightly scars – only two black eyes. The operation became, in effect, a simple office procedure.

Walter Freeman, performing his trademark ice pick lobotomy.

The procedure is simple: after immobilizing the patient with electroshock, simply insert an icepick under the eyelid, slide it over the eyeball, tap it through the roof of the orbit with a hammer, and insert it roughly five centimetres into the white matter of the brain (the connecting portions of the neurons). Then simply swirl it around to sever the connections. According to Mr Freeman, the ideal manoeuvre is to imagine that one is “beating an egg”.

Want to see for yourself? Have a look at this short instructional film produced by Freeman himself. Be warned: the content is extremely graphic.

Freeman’s theorising – as explained in this first portion to his instructional video – seemed to make intuitive sense. The most ancient parts of our brains are located at the bottom and in the middle – such as the brainstem, hypothalamus, cerebellum, and the structures that make up what we call the limbic system. The newer parts lumped on top and around the old regions – in particular, the cortex, the wrinkly surface of the brain.

The newest and most fully developed in humans compared to animals – that part which one might say most makes us human – is located right behind our forehead: the frontal cortex. This is the region we most associate with reason, higher thought, and self-control.

Freeman believed that an excessive number of connections between the frontal portion of our brains and the older, more “animal” structures – in particular, the thalamus – were to blame for many symptoms of mental illness: an excessive influence of emotion upon intellect.

So the solution was simple: cut those connections.

By simplifying the procedure, Freeman revolutionised the frontal lobotomy. More than 2,500 Americans went under the icepick with Walter Freeman and his transorbital technique. By 1951, more than 18,000 individuals had been lobotomised in the US (both transcranially and transorbitally), thanks in large part to Freeman’s popularisation of the procedure.

Of course, he didn’t simply ram ice picks into the brains of hapless patients. He practiced first: on grapefruit. According to his son Frank, he perfected his technique on a carload of fruit, using an icepick plucked from their kitchen cupboard.

Freeman was not only a physician, but also a showman – a one-man lobotomy roadshow. He went across American, performing lobotomies on as many patients as he could fit into a day, to broadcast its simplicity and versatility. His record number: 25 women in a day, 228 individuals in a month.

Freeman’s greatest innovation was to broaden the diversity of patients for whom a lobotomy could be prescribed. Originally, it was thought of as a miracle cure for the incurably insane. But under Freeman’s guise, it became a panacea for a whole host of emotional and mental conditions: anxiety, depression, OCD, post-natal depression. Even severe headaches could be alleviated with a simple transorbital lobotomy. Children too, he claimed, could benefit: hyperactivity and poor behaviour would improve following a twirl of his ice pick. He operated on 19 children under the age of 18. The youngest? Four years old.

The most famous child Freeman operated on is still alive: Howard Dully, now a middle-aged bus driver in California, who received a transorbital lobotomy in 1960 at the age of 12 for behavioural issues:

He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‘I don’t know.’ He turns the room’s lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.

Dully discovered these notes and far more when he sought to uncover why he was lobotomized – a story that is told in a fantastic documentary produced by the American station NPR. Have a listen here.

“I’ve always felt different – I’ve always wondered if something was missing from my soul,” he tells us.

In this uniquely illuminating story, we meet the first person to receive a transorbital lobotomy, Sallie Ellen Ionesco, who describes her physician as “a great man” – he cured her of her suicidal rages. Like many of Freeman’s patients, she retained many of her verbal and mental faculties, and genuinely believed the procedure had saved her life.

But we also meet some tragic cases, including Anita Welch, who was lobotomised by Freeman for postpartum depression – and spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.

If you have twenty minutes to spare, give this documentary your time. You will spend the rest of the day glad you are you.

Naturally, one is left wondering: Who on earth would allow a surgeon (an ungloved one at that) to stick an ice pick up through their eyelid, right into their brain? Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the methodology of the transorbital technique was its popularity: ‘fully functioning’ members of society, with jobs, families and relatively ‘normal’ lives, lined up to be lobotomised by Freeman for all manner of complaints. Sometimes on multiple occasions. His last patient – who died from a brain aneurism on the operating table – had come for her third procedure.

Though at first blush, Freeman appears monstrous and power-hungry – the archetypal mad scientist – it is important to remember that he is said to have genuinely believed this was a beneficial, transformative and life-saving procedure. The original lobotomy had, after all, received the Nobel Prize. At the time of its development, there were no drugs that provided lasting relief to the suicidal, the delusional, or the depressed – only nefarious and now banned treatments such as the notoroious Metrazol.

The history of psychiatry has seen many other controversial and brutal treatments – from insulin comas, to workhouse asylums, to straightjackets. Yet few inspire such revulsion as lobotomies, with good reason: the technique was designed to mangle that very part of ourselves that most makes us human.

But this story, like any study of history, leaves us with an interesting question: what medical procedure or prescription that we now consider acceptable – even routine – may we one day regard as barbaric?

Carefully carving through the surface of the shiny, quivering pink cortex with his scalpel, neuroscientist Guy Billings traced out a small area of the marvellous human cerebrum. “This,” he said, “is Broca’s area – crucial for the ability to produce language. People who have suffered damage to this region have lost the ability to speak.” The crowd peered in for a closer look.

“Let’s just cut that out then,” said Guy, and plopping the pink shiny piece onto a plate, he handed it out with a shiny pink spoon. It was instantly devoured (and declared delicious).

Don’t worry, this was no cannibal show. The ‘brain’ in question was fashioned by Guerilla Science director Jenny Wong using vanilla panna cotta as white matter and raspberry jelly for grey matter, this life-sized jelly brain was one of three confectionary cortexes we had brought all the way from Jen’s London flat to the Green Man music festival in Wales.

Each day Billings, a researcher at University College London, drew spontaneous crowds of several dozen onlookers with the shiny brains displayed on pink trestle tables in Einstein’s Garden. Intrigued, tantalised, and often grossed-out, guests gorged on bits of orbitofrontal cortex and parietal lobe as he performed al fresco brain surgery, taking them through the history of neuroscience and how we have come to understand the brain – through trial and sometimes regrettable error.

Those intrigued by the taste of brain, could find out more nearby. Food scientists Rachel Edwards-Stuart and Becki Clarke of Nottingham University explored the multifaceted nature of ‘taste’ with a sensory feast of colourings, flavours, and molecular gastronomical treats. These revealed how what we think of as a single sense is actually influenced by what we can see, hear and smell.

Sampling tester strips to search for ‘supertasters’, our diners discovered that not all of them could taste a synthetic chemical and were given a new – and highly tactile – appreciation for the fact that we are all unique organisms with our own suite of sensory characteristics, a truth that many of us can easily forget.

Edible education is a rare treat – especially in the setting of a music festival. But adding a sensory element makes the experience all the more memorable than a straightforward lecture.

“I’m going to close by addressing a popular myth about the brain – that you only use ten per cent of it,” Billings said, as he carefully sliced up the brain. “You need every bit of your brain – it’s all important.”

Sonic Fire, which reveals the shape of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, being demonstrated by Steve Mould earlier this year. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

Synaesthesia, Petra Boynton’s intimate places, communicating with the comatose and Marcus du Sautoy all feature at this weekend’s Secret Garden Party, courtesy of Guerilla Science.

It may have been the burlesque freak show temptress who set fire to her skin, the empathic robotic bust of Elvis sitting in the eyeworks laboratory in Blade Runner, or the three metre long tube that reveals the shape of sound with dancing fire – but regardless of the victor, there are many contenders for the title of the quirkiest performers Guerilla Science has featured this year.

This weekend at The Secret Garden Party might find us a new claimant to the title – perhaps Sampa Von Cyborg, who will perform live hangings and hookings in the name of science. Or maybe the giant brain that sings when you show it colours.

Guerilla Science started four years ago, sedately enough, with eight lectures in a grassy field at the Cambridgeshire music festival The Secret Garden Party, with scientists talking about such everyday topics as “Is God a number?” and “Could we live forever?” This year we have found ourselves in the most strange and unlikely settings for science, far more bizarre than an English music festival.

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, accompanied by Guerilla Scientist Louis Buckley clad in a silver spacesuit, took us on an audio tour of the stars at the Stoke Newington International Airport arts festival Distance, where he spoke alongside a performance artist offering free “spoonings”.

Then there was Secret Cinema’s grandiose homage to Blade Runner. To help the audience think about what makes us human, computer scientists Laurel Riek from Cambridge University and Peter McOwan from Queen Mary, University of London, brought robots and surreal visual tests. Seeing them chat about neural networks inside the smoky eyeworks laboratory, while above us strippers danced on platforms, and outside costumed midgets smashed vintage cars with baseball bats, was truly memorable.

At the Lovebox in east London last weekend, burlesque artist Vivid Angel performed live piercings and burnings while hooked up to live biomonitoring equipment while she discussed pain with clinical psychologist Matteo Cella. (Her favourite kind of pain? “A broken heart.”)

And the incredibly talented Vid Warren, who beatboxes while playing the flute, lent us his sonic skills as we amplified his sounds into our Reuben’s tube – a three-metre-long metal tube that reveals the shapes of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, a performance we call Sonic Fire. Our physics maestro Steve Mould (the science presenter on Blue Peter) was on hand to explain the properties of sound. As he said, “Things become more beautiful when you understand how they work.”

There are many groups doing fantastic science outreach events for the public around the world, but we’re pretty sure nobody does it quite like us. We’re especially passionate this year about creating interactive events, to break down the barrier between “expert” and “audience”. As our head of marketing Mia Kukathasan puts it, “The lab is everywhere.”

And so at the Secret Garden Party this weekend near Huntingdon in East Anglia, music psychologist Gianna Cassidy and singer songwriter Eoghan Colgan will discuss the science of musical expression, and festivalgoers will be able to help score a soundtrack for the festival using nifty interactive iPad technologies. Also on music, Cambridge neuroscientist Jessica Grahn will help us understand how babies are better at picking up rhythms than their parents and will lead the crowds with sonic social bonding routines.

Sex scientist Petra Boynton will discuss our intimate places with intimate questions and ask us where we like (and don’t like) to be touched. Boynton and other scientists and philosophers will host small intimate discussions in a boat on the lake.

“I am really excited by the prospect of having festivalgoers being
indulged in a private rowing boat experience chaperoned by a
philosopher of physics musing over the possibility that we may not
exist, or a cognitive neuroscientist chatting about artificial
brains,” says our founder Richard Bowdler, a chemistry graduate from
Oxford who started the science camp four years ago.”

Perhaps most spectacularly, agency of adventure and play Coney has teamed up with scientists who study synaesthesia to produce a game exploring this condition, in which the senses are blended. Some people “hear” colours and “smell” numbers, for example. A giant brain, created by model-maker Roseanne Wakely, will be “fed” visual stimuli and in turn will sing tunes and instructions, leading participants through an elaborate and undoubtedly original game, like “a giant visual Kaos pad” says Bowdler.

There will still be lectures. The current Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy will tell us about the beauty of prime numbers and why David Beckham wears the number 23 shirt.

And neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen will explain how we can speak to people in comas. He made history recently when, after a decade of careful work, he used brain scans to prove that some people in comas are actually conscious and can communicate if asked the right questions in the right way.

We cannot imagine any reason why science would not belong at a music festival, alongside cabaret strippers and crystal healers. The theme this year is “fact or fiction”, and of course we fall into the former category. But we don’t consider this to be a handicap. As our tagline goes: truth is stranger than fiction. Reality provides the mind with incredible fodder for the imagination. Some people just aren’t willing – or lucky enough – to see it that way.

“Why does Guerilla Science exist? Simple: Science is part of our culture, yet often it’s left languishing in the lab or conveyed in dull or patronising ways,” says director Jenny Wong. “We are experimental people by nature, who like new trying new things. So ‘mixing science, art, music and play’ [our motto] reflects all of our interests. By bringing these together and collaborating with interesting people with new ideas, you can’t help but think we’ll produce something amazing. People who think in creative ways and succeed in capturing your imagination only make life more exciting.”

By helping people to experience “science” in new ways, in unexpected places and with the quirkiest of collaborators, we hope to inspire them to reflect on the complexity of their lives and how remarkable it is to exist at all.

You’d think that given the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is already happening and that humans are to blame, she wouldn’t need to remind (or scold) journalists to not give climate change ‘sceptics’ a voice in the media – but unfortunately, she does.

Not just because of the considerable damage that they did in the past to public awareness of the reality of climate change (and thus the political will to deal with it). But because deniers and sceptics are still – amazingly – alive and well, and even seem to be on the increase.

And with the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen just over a month away, they are likely to show up on the media radar more than ever. Expect to see notorious deniers like Christopher Monckton and Steve Milloy, more and more, and especially expect to see media-friendly ‘moderate voices’ like Bjorn Lomborg, who claim that climate change, though real, is simply too difficult or expensive or unimportant to prioritize (and those crazy environmentalists are being hyperbolic and alarmist anyways).

In an unfortunate coincidence of fate, at the precise time when we most crucially need media outlets to responsibly and accurately report on the science of climate change, they are far less likely to do so. According to a feature in The Nation, as mainstream media outlets across the US have made cutbacks, dedicated and experienced science reporters – the very people who could capably report on climate change – are among the first in the firing line. From 1989 to 2005, they report, the number of newspapers in the US that featured weekly science sections dropped to 34 from 95.

‘Here an obvious question arises: if the Internet is most directly responsible for the decline of newspapers, then can science blogs and science-infused websites fill the gap?’ the authors ask. ‘Undoubtedly, one can find excellent science information on the web, but the question is whether most people will find it… Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side… global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.’

There is in fact little reason to think good scientific reporting is winning. At the 2008 Weblogs, wattsupwiththat.com – which consistently questions and undermines mainstream climate change science, won by popular vote for Best Science Blog. And according to a Gallup poll conducted this year, 41 per cent of Americans think mainstream reporting of the threat of climate change is exaggerated – a record high, even higher than 10 years ago.

Journalists and major media outlets, not the public, are to blame: for decades they gave climate change deniers and genuine climate change scientists equal air time, leaving the voting public with the impression that the two positions had equal merit. Well-intentioned but scientifically untrained reporters did so in the name of ‘balance’, despite the fact that well over 99 per cent of scientists who actually research the topic asserted that climate change was real – and ‘experts’ who disagreed seldom conducted atmospheric research themselves (and were almost invariably funded by oil and manufacturing interests).

We may never understand the true scope of the damage: scientists have known about the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s, and since the 1980s the scientific consensus has been impossible to deny, but political action has stagnated, our emissions continued to rise, and the pace of climate change has accelerated: every subsequent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has predicted higher temperature increases and higher sea level rises. Armstrong’s documentary paints a dark vision of the future based on the worst-case projections of the IPCC as they stood in 2005 – those worst-case scenarios are now considered medium-case scenarios.

Now the mainstream media (or what’s left of it) is doing a much better job of covering the science accurately, but we have a much more severe situation on our hands to deal with than we would have if they had reported on the science accurately two decades ago.

And with the disappearance of dedicated science beat reporters (and with the economic crisis obscuring the climate crisis in the headlines), there is a serious risk that climate science will again be underrepresented and misreported. In the run-up to the UN conference in Copenhagen, ‘there will be prominent deniers out there undermining the science,’ predicts Jim Hoggan, founder of desmogblog, to ‘clear the PR pollution that clouds climate science’.

‘They will chip away at the science, create doubt over how reliable the science is and the seriousness of the problem, undermining any traction and momentum that would drive public policy.’

Copenhagen is considered to be our last chance to sign a deal that could avert ‘runaway climate change’. How does the momentum to drive public policy look?

Already there are clear signs that whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will not feature ambitious (read: effective) targets – from the UN itself.

We live in a sea of toxic chemicals. Every single person on earth carries in their bodies minute quantities of hundreds to thousands of hazardous chemicals: polyaromatic hydrocarbons from smokestack and vehicle exhaust; pesticides, fungicides and herbicides from industrialized agriculture; methyl mercury from coal-fired plants; dioxins and furans from garbage incineration; hormone-mimicking plasticizers and plastic softeners from polycarbonate bottles, the lining of tin cans, soaps and cosmetics; perfluorochemicals from stain-resistant coatings and non-stick cookware; flame retardants from electronics and furniture. The list goes on.

This chemical contamination is part and parcel of our wasteful use of resources and energy. At its core it’s a sustainability issue, but it is never addressed as such – and this is the problem.

* * *

‘Biomonitoring’ tests measuring chemicals in the US population are carried out by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the results are freely available online. The latest results, released in 2005, cover 148 chemicals.¹Canada is doing similar population-wide testing; those figures will be available in 2010.

Tests consistently flag the same chemical contaminants in the atmosphere, water, soil, animals and people the world over.

Here are a few choice selections:

Lead – known for thousands of years to be toxic to the brain and nervous system and which we now know lowers IQ and causes learning difficulties.

Dioxins – some of the most carcinogenic chemicals known, released by waste incineration.

Phthalates – used to soften plastics, found in thousands of products from shampoo to blood bags. Interfere with testosterone, have been linked to reproductive defects and cancers and are thus banned from baby toys in Europe and may soon be restricted in Canada.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) – used to make hard, clear polycarbonate plastics such as water bottles as well as epoxy resins found in the lining of tin cans. Known to mimic oestrogen, causes cancer and reproductive problems in lab animals. Banned in plastic baby bottles in Canada.

Even chemicals that we have known for decades to be dangerous and which haven’t been used since the 1970s still show up in our blood today. These include organochlorine pesticides like DDT and industrial insulators like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Some of our cleverest chemicals are the most problematic – chemicals used to stop electronics from catching fire and compounds found in grease-proof food wrap and non-stick cookware persist in the environment for decades, maybe even centuries, by virtue of the fact that they are doing what they were designed to do in the first place: never break down.

No surprise then that the fruits of our industry persist in the environment, travel around the world, linger in the soil and find their way into us before we are even born. The Environmental Working Group,² an independent US monitoring organization, found more than 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10 American babies – 217 are known to be toxic to the nervous system, 208 can cause birth defects and 180 are proven carcinogens in humans and/or lab animals. Had they the resources to check for all 100,000 chemicals ever approved for use in the US, they would no doubt have found thousands more. What’s worse, the concentrations of chemicals are often higher in newborns than in their mothers. Research by Environmental Defence in Canada³ found some chemicals at levels three times higher in children than in their mothers.

Over and over the story is the same: we design the chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves

We can each of us avoid canned food, bottled soft drinks and lipstick – but total avoidance to exposure is truly impossible. In fact, the highest concentration of PCBs ever detected was in the breast milk of Inuit women, decades and thousands of miles away from their production. All the money, knowledge and seclusion in the world won’t help – it doesn’t matter if you’re living in a wooden cottage on a mountain top, subsisting on twigs and berries; or in a high-tech eco-condo with a diet dictated by a nutritional specialist in Malibu.

Over and over the story is the same: we design a chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves. Eventually, with enough research, it may be restricted or banned – the whole process can take decades. But even if chemicals are restricted, they persist – all the ‘Dirty Dozen’ pollutants restricted under the Stockholm Convention, including DDT and PCBs, are still a problem.

Moreover, new ones are introduced all the time. Environmental chemists are constantly playing catch-up. The companies don’t tell them what compounds they ought to be looking for. They have to guess, devise tests and hunt. They find new ones all the time, even chemicals that have already been in use for decades.

We still know very little about how these chemicals may be affecting our health, but even the most cursory survey of peer-reviewed scientific studies into the effects on lab animals and in people – even at astonishingly low doses – gives pause for thought. It is difficult to say with confidence that the chemical soup we are all exposed to plays some role in the prevalence of cancers, learning difficulties, reproductive defects and other health problems – but there is certainly good reason to suspect so.

Especially given the problem of ‘mixtures’. Diligent lab studies on mice test each chemical one at a time – even though nobody is ever exposed to just one chemical at a time. So what happens when you are exposed to dozens or hundreds of chemicals that mimic oestrogen? The question is not only scary to contemplate, it also defies statistical scrutiny. Teasing apart the combined (and often synergistic) effects of thousands of chemicals and how they interact is just too complex for our scientific tools to unravel.

* * *

So what are we supposed to do? Consumer advocates applaud the adoption of safe alternatives devised with new chemistry. But in many cases the supposedly safe alternatives turn out to be themselves dangerous. Brominated flame retardants pose the same hazards as chlorinated flame retardants – persistent in the environment, toxic to the nervous system, amplified through the food chain. Other times, solutions come with new hazards – such as fluorescent lightbulbs which have a lower energy footprint but contain toxic mercury.

Technological innovations and ‘green’ chemistry are indispensable and provide many solutions, but ultimately can only go so far. In many cases, it may simply be impossible to create bona fide benign chemicals that can accomplish all the same feats that we desire.

The obvious solution would be to stop using all chemicals that are remotely hazardous – but even if that were possible, would we want to? Would we want to stop producing the hard plastics used for semiconductor chips and sterile medical equipment?

The only solution is this: use these chemicals only when absolutely necessary. This would mean being very careful and calculated about how we use them. But it would also mean creating less. Produce less, make less, buy less, use less. In other words: consume less.

Peruse the pages of any women’s magazine, and you’ll find anxiety-inducing articles about chemicals in lipstick, the hazards of cling film-wrapped broccoli, the perils of certain brands of diet cola, along with advice on where to find them and how to avoid them – without ever suggesting that we could opt to stop using those products altogether. News stories list suspect chemicals, where to find them and what consumer products you could buy instead.⁴ But seldom will you read the unspeakable: buy less.

The onus is put on government to screen, test and regulate chemicals better; on industry to be more compliant in phasing out chemical hazards; and on providing adequate advice to consumers. But none of these solutions will solve the problem.

* * *

No matter which angle you come from, the undeniable conclusion is the same: we need to produce, consume and discard less. The more consumer products we produce, the more energy we use, the more fossil fuels we burn, the more air pollution we create and the more chemicals come back to us in the long run.

Even if we diligently recycle, those chemicals still find their way into the environment – some of the biggest producers of heavy metals are, in fact, recycling companies. Dumping your paper and plastic into the recycling bin does not make heavy metals and petrochemicals vanish into thin air, much as we’d like to believe it.

Our spending habits can have a chain reaction impact over thousands of miles. Take mercury. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of this toxic metal. But the British Government – despite claims to be committed to genuine action on climate change – still plans to build new coal plants. Even if British campaigners are successful in halting the new coal plants, China famously builds one new coal plant every week! And no small portion of what we buy is manufactured in Chinese factories using coal-fired electricity. Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll.

This is not a matter of ideals, of political theory or of principle: this is a matter of common sense, based on scientific evidence. Just as climate change science tells us unambiguously that we are living beyond our means, so does research into toxic chemicals.

Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll

The affluent or the indifferent may not care about changing weather patterns, crop failures or desertification in far-flung Southern nations. But they can’t escape the ubiquitous chemicals in their homes, shopping malls, drinking water, atmosphere and food.

It is equally indisputable that fossil fuels and petroleum products – though problematic – are incredible, almost magical resources. Without oil we would never have thrown satellites into space, mapped the heavens and visited the moon. Without polymer plastics we would not have recorded music, photographs and movies, semiconductor chips and computers. The 20th century and all its marvels would never have happened without plastic. But instead of preserving this incredible, finite resource for sterile medical equipment, photovoltaic solar panels and laptop computers we waste 40 per cent of it on packaging. Used once and thrown away to leach its cargo from landfills into the environment and back into us.

Every shred of science gleaned from climate monitoring, from estimates of remaining fossil fuel reserves and from ecotoxicological studies points towards the same basic conclusion: we need to consume less. ‘Buy Nothing Day’ is a nice idea, but doesn’t go far enough. This argument has been made for decades and consistently dismissed as naïve, as unfeasible and idealistic, as ignorant of the ‘realities’ of the market economy – as uninformed hippy hyperbole. But it is nothing but unbiased scientific inquiry and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from the physical realities we have measured that prove the fallacies of our economic system. We need to erase the phrase ‘retail therapy’ from our vernacular. Only when we reframe the toxics issue as one of resource depletion and economic sustainability will we start to tackle the root causes of pollution.

Zoe Cormier is a freelance science writer based in London. She also features regularly as our NI ‘alternative science’ blogger.

And yet global production of white asbestos still stands at more than two million metric tonnes a year – the same as in 1960.

So if more than 40 countries have banned the use of white asbestos (also known as chrysotile, the only kind still used), where is it all going? Emerging and fast developing economies like China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Brazil. Though disconcerting, this is not surprising: such nations are less likely to have the stringent health and safety codes in place as the developed Western nations that banned asbestos long ago.

But where the asbestos is coming from is far more surprising, and far more interesting: the world’s second largest producer of white asbestos is Canada – a nation that has itself banned the use of the carcinogenic mineral, and is in fact spending millions at this very moment to remove asbestos from the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa.

The scientific consensus is concrete: medical and scientific establishments have long recognized the carcinogenic dangers of asbestos, whose whispy white fibres breed a particularly painful and incurable form of cancer in the linings of the lungs, called mesothelioma. According to the World Health Organization there is in fact no ‘safe threshold’ for white asbestos – meaning that exposure to even the most minute dose, potentially just a few fibres, could spawn a cancer. They advocate a global ban on all uses of all forms of asbestos.

And yet in 2006, when international representatives attempted to add white asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention, a UN-kept list of hazardous substances, Canada blocked the vote, even though Rotterdam would not even prohibit the export and sale of chrysotile but would only require that exporting nations inform importing ones that the product in question is dangerous.

But white asbestos remains off the list, and unlabelled sacks of white fluff continue to flood construction sites in countries like India and Sri Lanka, where workers in flimsy face masks mix it into cement, releasing clouds of sparkly dust into the air (and carry it home in their clothes to share with their families). The Canadian Medical Association Journal has called Canada’s opposition to the listing of asbestos as a hazardous substance under the Rotterdam Convention a ‘shameful political manipulation of science’.

But according to the Chrysotile Institute in Montreal – formerly known as the Asbestos Institute (re-branded to avoid the stigma associated with the A-word) – white asbestos can be ‘safe to use’.

‘The argument that you can use asbestos safely is the lynchpin,’ says Geoff Tweedale, a Reader in Business History at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School and author of Defending the Indefensible: the Global Asbestos Industry & its Fight for Survival. ‘There is a long history of the asbestos industry corrupting science, in particular by censoring unfavourable studies and selectively choosing data. The argument that certain forms of asbestos can be used safely goes right back to the 1930s because being able to “prove” that white asbestos is safe is the way to save the industry.

‘And this argument carries on today – except that now it is being played out in countries like China and India, the main reason being that there is still money to be made.’

And there is also big money to be lost: lawsuits in the US by sickened mechanics against the auto giants who incorporated asbestos into brake pads would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars if successful.

‘Defendant corporations like GM and Chrysler have gone to extraordinary lengths to reshape the scientific literature to defend these cases, debasing and contaminating the research and public health policies that have to be based on science,’ says Barry Castleman, an environmental consultant who has testified before the USEnvironmental Protection Agency regarding the hazards of asbestos. ‘Vested interests essentially hired scientists to create controversy where there wasn’t any.’

The story is an old one: industry-funded scientists will ‘manufacture doubt’ for vested interests seeking to avoid losing (or keep making) money: tobacco companies did it with second-hand smoke, oil companies with climate change, and the asbestos industry with mesothelioma. For example, just as tobacco giants will label ‘light’ cigarettes as ‘less harmful’, the asbestos industry will brand white asbestos as ‘safer’.

Cynically, almost comically, the Chrysotile Institute will use the same language as the scientists and medical professionals who oppose its use: ‘Vested interests in the anti-asbestos lobby have deliberately used outdated science and confusion between the different fibres to advocate for a total ban on all asbestos products … The great asbestos scam is based on deliberate confusion.”

‘This misinformation is absurd, and it kills people,’ says Kathleen Ruff, Senior Advisor on Human Rights to the Rideau Institute in Ottawa. Even more absurd, she points out, is the fact that the Chrysotile Institute has been funded with tax dollars by the Canadian Government for the past twenty years, to the tune of $20 million. ‘Our Government should not be funding this manipulation of science – Canadian scientists should stand up because this is scientifically indefensible as well as morally indefensible.’

And increasingly they are. In January the professor emeritus of public health at the Université Laval, Québec, wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling for an end to the ‘perversion of scientific information‘. This August the Canadian Medical Association passed a resolution with a 95 per cent vote pushing for the Canadian Government to stop mining and exporting asbestos – and to stop funding the Chrysotile Institute. And last week a Quebec doctor wrote in La Presse that the Government’s actions are paramount to criminal negligence.

‘This is a real example of how we have to safeguard science and not allowed it to be abused,’ says Ruff.
But more than that, we need to each of us be more aware of the potential for science to be abused, to have the basic scientific literacy to understand how it can be abused – and to take the initiative to protect those who can’t.

Sex tests have a long and dubious record in the history of sport: first introduced in the 1960s to prevent men from posing as women, many ‘butch’ women have had their gender assessed, their medals stripped, and their careers and self-identity torn to pieces.

The IAFF has come under a storm of criticism, especially in South Africa where Semenya’s countryfolk have sprung to her defence, denouncing the tests as unjust and racist. The criticism is fair: if they insist on testing, they ought to have done so beforehand, rather than after her victory and publicly humiliating her. But moreover, the IAAF‘s approach is deeply flawed because they are trying to determine if Semenya is a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, when she could be neither.

The traditional view of gender has been that having an X and a Y chromosome makes one male, and having two X chromosomes female – but this is a gross oversimplification. ‘Hermaphrodites’ have long been known to us – they feature in stories and myths dating back millennia. But over the past several decades scientists have come to recognize up to a dozen different biological states – many of them subtle and identifiable only with genetic tests – that cannot be neatly classified as ‘male’ or ‘female’.

These range from ‘girls’ who hold just one X chromosome, ‘girls’ who carry XYchromosomes but develop physically as female (due to an insensitivity to the effects of testosterone), ‘boys’ that are XX but whose adrenal glands produce so many masculinizing hormones that they develop to look male, and boys that have an extra X chromosome. Sometimes the external genitals of ‘intersexuals’ look like normal vaginas or penises, but sometimes they blur the lines and lie somewhere in between.

According to the Intersex Society of North America an estimated one in 100 births can be considered to be intersexual – and this doesn’t even account for transgendered individuals who are biologically ‘normal’ XX or XY but psychologically identify with the other gender.

There is certainly no evidence that Semenya is intersexual, but it would not be implausible.

Leonard Chuene, the President of Athletics South Africa, was quoted as saying: ‘The only scientist I know, the only scientist I believe in is the parents of the child. Show me a scientist who knows her better than her mother who raised her for 18 years.’

Such a view reflects hostility, suspicion and distrust of modern ‘science’ that is widespread. But it is not ‘science’ that is to be criticized, but rather the way that it is used. ‘Science’ is not good or bad, racist or sexist, biased or unbiased. People are, and it is people who conduct science.

So much of what is investigated and what is determined by science is dictated by societal context, especially when it comes to human nature. At various and regrettable times in our history medical doctors and scientists have tried to use the tools of their trade to prove that one race was superior to another, or that homosexuality could be ‘fixed’ with the right treatment.

But as society evolves, so does the scientific consensus. While sexual orientation was often ‘blamed’ on parents and upbringing, scientists have since found that homosexuality is not only widespread in other animals, but is also linked to specific genes – reaction in gay communities is often enthusiastic because such studies are seen as validation of their life choice (‘See? I was born this way – it’s perfectly natural.’)

It is becoming more and more apparent that intersexuality is widespread, and that the black and white distinction between male and female is crude. And treatments are evolving: doctors would in the past, as a rule of thumb, assign a gender (usually female) to an intersexual baby with surgery and hormone treatment, but physicians and scientists are now widely questioning this practice: frequently children grow up confused and unhappy because they do not identify with the gender that was chosen for them.

Moreover, modern science can also improve the lives of intersex individuals in new ways: thanks to chromosomal identification, testicles that develop internally in ‘girls’ and breast tissue in ‘boys’ that are highly prone to developing cancer can be removed pre-emptively. Hormone shots can often alleviate cognitive and behavioural problems and improve their overall health. The list goes on.

But physical biology aside, ‘gender’ is still a complex question, and many would still like to believe that it is purely a social construct, with no grounding in our physical makeup: in other words, if we were all raised under equal conditions, we would none of us feel ‘boyish’ or ‘girlish’.

But this idea, as appealing as it may be to our postmodern sensibilities, is not supported by modern scientific findings: neurologists have even documented differences in how our brains are structured and wired. Men and women, simply put, are not the same, and no amount of philosophical theorizing will make us so.

That being said, there are always exceptions: as biologists say, ‘exception is the rule’. Some women have brains that more resemble a typical male brain than a female, and vice versa. Studies have indicated, for example, that the brains of gay men more typically resemble the brains of straight women than of straight men.

And as intersexuality shows, exception is indeed the rule: up to one per cent of us – some even peg the estimate at two per cent – do not neatly classify as male or female, from true hermaphrodites to people with ‘ambiguous genitalia’. For good reason, many intersexuals feel that we should recognize that there is a third category to gender, rather than trying to pigeonhole all of us into one of two strict definitions.

The more we put human sexuality under the microscope, the more we realize that humans come in far more than just two flavours. ‘Gender’ comes in many colours, spreading across a broad spectrum – not a black and white ying-yang. The more we learn, the more we realize how diverse we really are.

Competitive sports has gleaned so much from the tools and findings of science, from high-tech equipment and apparel to highly sophisticated nutrition and training regimes (and of course, doping).

Sports associations like the IOC and the IAAF are more than willing to use the tools of modern science to single out and disqualify athletes, and yet are so reluctant to recognize the natural diversity that modern science has revealed. Rather than cherrypicking what they like from biological studies, to the humiliation and denigration of talented women like Semenya, they could accept that the question of gender is far too complex to be determined by a few tests – and perhaps come up with a new set of rules to accommodate and celebrate people who don’t fit neatly into our outdated notions of gender.

More than 15 years in the making, with a price tag of almost $4 billion, the National Ignition Facility in California is in hot pursuit of the energetic holy grail: nuclear fusion. Instead of splitting heavy atoms of elements like uranium to release energy, as in conventional nuclear fission power stations, nuclear fusion would squish hydrogen atoms together to create heavier helium atoms and release astronomical amounts of energy – the exact same process that goes on in the centre of our sun.

By channelling the world’s most powerful laser through the largest optical instrument ever built, scientists at the NIF will try to recreate the reactions found in the hearts of stars by focusing 192 lasers onto a match head-sized pellet of hydrogen isotopes dropped into a 10-metre-wide chamber. If they get it right, the pellet will compress, the hydrogen atoms will fuse, and our energy supply will be ‘revolutionised’. Plus, fusion does not run the risk of running out of control, à la Chernobyl, and the waste leftover is far less radioactive and dangerous. For good reasons scientists have pursued the dream of commercially viable fusion for half a century, and it is hoped that they will finally achieve it next year.

But though it is not well-known, the main purpose of the NIF is not actually to produce clean energy. It says so right on their website:

‘To ensure the continuing reliability of the nuclear stockpile, [by] developing sophisticated supercomputer simulations to determine the effects of aging on nuclear weapons components as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program.’

Though the NIF is designed to surrogately produce climate-friendly energy and host peaceful scientific research (it will be used 10 to 15 per cent of the time for non-weapons related research, according to the National Research Council), the main purpose of the facility is to preserve and design weapons ‘of mass destruction’ (as some might like to put it). North Korea infuriated the international community this year by openly testing nuclear weapons, and it is hoped that thawing relations forged by Bill Clinton’s visit last week could lead to a denuclearization of the Asian country – while rich nations pursue new kinds of nuclear weapons that sidestep international treaties.

Because the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (though still not technically in force) has banned all nuclear explosions since 1996, the US military requires another route to research the mechanics of nuclear weapons and how to maintain existing stockpiles. Controlled fusion reactors provide that solution.

What’s more, research at the NIF and other facilities could lead to the development of new kinds of nuclear weapons; in particular, so-called fourth generation nuclear weapons that would be exempt from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

Yet a recent article from The Guardian makes no mention of the military roots of theNIF. And a piece in the New York Times makes only a passing reference to it. TheNew York Times instead prefers to focus on the doubts surrounding the feasibility of fusion, but states that if successful the NIF ‘might lift civilization to new heights’ – which one can only assume includes the development of weapons of unprecedented sophistication.

Not all media outlets skim over the weapons intentions. The Economist, in a praising editorial titled On target, finally, correctly describes the main purpose of the facility: ‘It is the resemblance to bombs which has saved the project from the budgetary chop. For the NIF provides America with a way to carry out nuclear-weapons tests without actually testing any weapons. Had the NIF been a purely scientific project, it would almost certainly have been cancelled.’

Why then is the main purpose of the facility skimmed over by most news organizations, even when the NIF states its purpose? The prominence of the energy programme on the NIF’s official website, with the seductively pseudo-religious tagline ‘The Power Of Light’, may have something to do with it.

The promise of nuclear fusion for delivering clean and abundant energy is so great, many would argue, that the bellicose branches of its research facilities can and should be overlooked.

However, there is more than one way to crack a nut, and more than one way to combine two atoms: physicists can use magnets and heat rather than lasers in a process called magnetic confinement fusion, such as at the Iter research facility in France. Magnetic confinement fusion not only cannot be used as a surrogate for weapons research the way inertial confinement fusion (using lasers, as at the NIF) can, it also is far more advanced – scientists in Oxford already achieved fusion using this method in 1991 (though without a net gain of energy).

Of course, magnetic fusion won’t allow us to widen our knowledge of how to make thermonuclear weapons. But seeing as how we in the West learned how to unleash the explosive power of the atom more than 60 years ago, and we have since devised thousands of high-tech ways to ‘deter’ other nations from using them in turn, some might argue our research money, time and manpower could be better spent.