Each The Other

The man has defied medical opinion and has vastly outlived the diagnosis of an early expiration to become one of the world's most respected authorities as a theoretical astrophysicist. His very name evokes respect for his mind, encased as it is in a frail shell of a body that has succumbed to the dire effects of a degenerative motor neuron disease - utterly brilliant in his ability to conceive theories.

He is of the ilk of Leonardo da Vinci, albeit far less a master of so many disparate qualities and enterprises in the understanding of science, engineering, human physiology and the plastic arts. Perhaps Albert Einstein's brilliant theoretical mind more reflects the kind of inheritance that Stephen Hawking's represents. In any event, he is capable of conceiving scientific, natural notions beyond the capacity of most professionals in his field.

He is a theoretical genius.

One supposes that he has something in common with another theoretical genius. Moses, for example, who 'understood' that there is but one God, not a panoply of gods to represent all that nature presents to awe humankind. Stephen Hawking may implicitly and with confidence understand time and space and the natural elements that inhabit the heavens.

But this genius who was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, a position held long before him by another genius, Sir Isaac Newton, also knows of a certainty that it is Nature alone that is responsible for the existence of all that is known and everything unknown. There is no God, he tells those who have no wish to hear his pronouncement.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. there is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

"We should seek the greatest value of our action." Raising the affronted ire of the faithful who bridle at his arrogance at speaking of what he knows not. If it takes a great leap of faith to believe in what we cannot see in nature, but which is theorized to exist and which propels existence, why not that faith that exalts in the belief of the Almighty?

Ah, because science and theology are not twinned, though others declare that they are but a reflection of each the other.

Humanity's Advance

Thoughtful people have without a doubt noticed this phenomenon; that educated, talented, intelligent people tend to have fewer children than people who live in ignorance and poverty. And in a world where we have learned to share, and to care and to assist others, more children born to poverty than ever are growing to adulthood. Some, if not most, destined to remain mired in poverty, where lack of exposure to educational and employment opportunities have not restrained them from having more children.

The intellectual elite plan their families. Those who will have none because they feel the world already struggles far too much to accommodate too many people. Those who relent, and have one or two, to whose physical and intellectual welfare they dedicate themselves to ensure they receive a good upbringing and education, prepared to take their responsible place in society. Theirs is a dwindling society; they barely replace themselves. So the pool of the genetically intellectually endowed is not growing apace, but stagnating.

On the other side of the equation is the immensely larger pool of the ordinary, non-cerebral drudges who perform menial duties or none at all if they live off social welfare. Amazingly, these are the people who manage to breed without a thought to the future. They are simply doing 'what comes naturally', and the outcome of what comes naturally is not necessarily a happy family with parents nourishing the bodily and mental/social needs of children. All too often the result is children growing up in a less than supportive environment, never realizing their potential.

We do have, within society, the example of a specific group of people of an ethnic, cultural, social and religious/historical background forced by a peculiar reality eliciting hostility from the greater community around them, to distinguish themselves as a matter of survival. Treated as inferiors by the commanding majority and unable to apply themselves to the usual course of employment available to others they sought alternate means by which they could support themselves.

The result was in a manner the survival of the fittest. Peoople who became by necessity more intellectually nimble, seeking out alternate means of livelihood. In the process another reality; Ashkenazi Jews who managed to distinguish themselves by their superior contribution to intellectual life, where that ethnic group representing a mere one-600th of the world's population has been enabled by their determination and DNA profile, to amass a quarter of the Nobel Prizes awarded to outstanding exemplars of human accomplishment and achievement.

Fascist Germany took the outsider status of habitually mistrusted and detested Jews to a greater more existential threat level than their predecessor anti-Semites who only slaughtered Jews in fits and starts through progroms. The Nazi regime sought to eradicate them en masse as inferior pests, portraying them as caricatures of decent human beings. The ultimate revenge upon a world that could not persuade itself to care enough, was to endure, and survive the onslaught.

And throughout human history there has always been, within any given human population those ordinary people of the masses, and among them a handful with superior mental endowments. It is not all that surprising, given the numbers then, that the majority will go on producing replicas of themselves, while the scant minority will look beyond themselves. Human advancement in the arts and sciences owes all to the few.

And they are becoming fewer.

Seat Belts Save Lives

Legislation is generally enacted when it comes to public policy revolving around health and safety issues to make the country, the province or the municipality a better place for its residents. In Canada, running lights in vehicles are always on, ensuring good visibility in traffic, making it a universal, not a choice option. It is illegal to decide not to fasten seat belts in a moving vehicle. It may be uncomfortable, but it's a life-saving device.

Folic acid and other vitamins and minerals are added to certain foods to increase the odds of a healthier population. Vitamin D for healthier bones for milk-drinking children; fortified cereals and breads for optimum health opportunities for the public. Children are routinely inoculated against measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tuberculosis. Treatment plants make our drinking water potable.

And since the use of fluoride in drinking water universally there has been a huge drop in the incidence of tooth cavities and decay in the general population. Particularly among children. It is now rare for a child under the age of 10 to have more than one or two cavities, unless they're addicted to sugary sweets and neglectful of tooth hygiene.

It was an intensely controversial subject, whether or not to embark on this bold, new experiment; putting fluoride into the public's supply of drinking water, decades ago. But common sense prevailed against the naysayers, those who warned the public would suffer from exposure to the chemical, and we've never looked back.

Its use is heartily endorsed by dentists and doctors and their professional bodies.

But it seems there are sadly backward places that still exist in their insistence that the state, or the municipality should not be permitted to force anything on the population. So the clever folks who populate Calgary and their municipal council decided to vote on the issue. And the anti-fluoride activists triumphed.

"It's about freedom. It's about choice and it's about people taking ownership of their own health, not having it imposed on them."

Right, Calgarians now have the freedom to visit their dentists far more often than previously. But this is their freedom we're talking about, their choice and their determination to live free and as they will. They will doubtless have reason to regret that choice, but that's what they chose.

On reflection, at some future date, when the sad statistics come in, and their children's teeth reflect their choice they can always recall the euphoria that accompanied their victory.

Should We? Should We Not?

"Why should I have to wait that long? Why can't more be done here, sooner, to investigate such a simple method?" Bart Bakker, Ottawa MS sufferer

Canada's universal medicare system is expected to be all things to all people. To respond to all the ills, the chronic wasting diseases, the unfortunate health conditions, surgical emergencies, exotic maladies that afflict a population of thirty-four million people. The system is overburdened.

Canadians are not a particularly health-absorbed community, which is to say, we do not take ownership of our own responsibility respecting our health. We have a propensity to live recklessly and to expect our universal health system to make us whole again.

That old adage of everything in moderation is steadfastly ignored by people. We are not moderate, reasonable people when it comes to the kinds of foods we consume, nor the size of the servings we prefer. We do not educate ourselves about healthy choices of the nutrition or-less we consume, nor do we exercise our bodies adequately. The results of which are obesity in people of all ages, leading to health complications.

Which is only one facet of the impact of our lifestyles on our health. But then there are impacts on our health we can do little to prevent, and auto-immune diseases fall into that category. As do also incidents relating to accidents, occasioning broken bones and worse, and epidemics that occur and spread rapidly in an increasingly connected world of travel and communications.

Who, other than multiple sclerosis-sufferers knew that Canada has one of the highest rates of MS in the world? And that Alberta and Saskatchewan the highest rates within Canada? Multiple sclerosis is a dreadfully debilitating disease, whose source is unknown. Long held to be auto-immune in nature, that hypothesis has been challenged by an Italian vascular surgeon, Paolo Zamboni who claims to have discovered MS to be in reality caused by iron deposits building in the veins leading to the brain.

And the solution to that situation, according to the good doctor, is to unblock the affected veins with the use of balloon angioplasty and stents so that cranial blood flow may recommence.

There are more than sufficient first-hand accounts of MS sufferers finding their conditions vastly ameliorated to the extent that they can now, post-surgery, live fairly normal lives. Yet Dr. Zamboni's findings have not been corroborated by other medical researchers. Not for lack of trying, since medical scientists in Germany, Sweden and the United States have attempted to find what he has found, but to no avail.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has just recently promised MS sufferers that his province is prepared to "...fund clinical trials of a controversial treatment for multiple sclerosis"; named the "liberation" procedure. Willing to put the province's treasury for medical discovery on the line in the search for an "avenue of hope" for people stricken with multiple sclerosis. MS sufferers, needless to say, are ecstatic.

Wouldn't anyone suffering from such a dread condition be thankful to the point of overjoyed that they would be able to undergo the surgical procedure right at home rather than travel to Italy, Poland, India or Bulgaria to undergo the procedure? The medical community outside Saskatchewan is highly critical of this decision to the point of exhibiting scorn. But Premier Wall is determined to forge ahead.

"We know there's not unanimity amongst the various groups out there about this particular treatment. But we know anecdotally, and to some extent empirically, that there's reason for hope here." Premier Brad Wall, Saskatchewan.

Sounds good to me. If I had a choice it would be to proceed. Much depends on the outcome for so many people whose futures look increasingly dim. It makes infinitely more sense on humanitarian grounds alone for a province to commit itself to just such an action, rather than the one recently declared by the Province of Quebec, to cover the costs of in-vitro fertilization. The former is an absolute necessity, the latter a pathetic conceit.

Needless to say, this is a personal opinion. Isn't everything?

Killer Weeds

Remember purple loose strife, that accursed (albeit quite beautiful) 'weed', not native to Ontario but an introduced species that had no natural enemies, no bugs or beetles that might destroy it, and whose presence multiplied along provincial waterways, threatening to usurp the beloved presence of the province's native species? The Ministry of Natural Resources encouraged people to report its presence, to take steps themselves to eradicate the damn weed wherever they saw it. It presented a threat to the existence of native species.

And then, well, nothing much. Purple loose strife behaved itself like a well-mannered guest. It thrived along waterways and ditches, and presented as a lovely wild plant to be admired on the landscape in later summer. Take the place of native plants? It did no such thing, and it admirably proved that there was room aplenty for it and other plant species in the wide, open spaces of the province. Not at all like the kudzu that had been introduced into the southern United States from its native Japan, and which ended up strangling all other plants, even trees.

Where would we be without our intermittent bouts of hysteria over things we don't quite understand. And which the news media love to plump up into stories guaranteed to up the ante of popular distress? Day after day in the newspapers, on radio, on television, and likely on the Internet as well, stories about the huge, toxic plant that threatens to bring disaster to the Province and its vulnerable population. And the dire need to eradicate it as promptly as possible, but with extreme care lest it bring disaster down upon us.

THE GIANT HOGWEED prepares to strike! Some plants can attain a height two and a half times taller than a mere mortal, now that's impressive. So what does that make this then, a fascinating botanical specimen or a noxious weed? Public opinion, fanned, aided and abetted by the media have opted for the weed designation, a mean, nasty, threatening weed. The invasion of the giant hogweed. It is to despair. What can save us from this threat?

Common sense? We deal with deadly nightshade, poison ivy and its various cousins, stinging nettle, castor-bean plants (deadly ricin produced from this beauty) all of which are far, far more are deadly. Take a walk in the woods and there are red- and white-baneberry, beautiful woodland plants, and deadly, deadly. You'll also find wild strawberry, raspberry and blackberry plants, along with thimbleberries. We eat those, we don't eat the baneberries.

At one time when people sensibly knew something about the plants that grew around them, and even planted many of them for their medicinal values, people had a basic knowledge of a country pharmacopoeia of useful plants. The most commonly-useful drug used today comes from willow bark, and a baby Aspirin a day helps people who are at risk of heart problems. Extracts from Echinacea which we grow in our gardens, are useful in fighting cold symptoms.

The tips of yew trees are used to produce a drug that fights ovarian cancer: Tamoxifen, produced by huge pharmaceutical companies. Ontario's own yews (ground hemlock) have been identified as useful for the same cancer-fighting purpose; the new tips excised and used for life-saving purposes. Lungwort and ginseng, ginkgo and St.John's wort; herbs like basil, rosemary, oregano have all been used as folk remedies for various ailments.

Nasty plants, however, abound too. And those we avoid, when we can. Stinging nettle can be a nasty encounter, but not only in the woods. When we fill our many garden pots in the spring with black dirt enriched with compost we buy in bags from our neighbourhood nursery, the soil has also been enriched with stinging nettle seed. Which germinates and gifts us throughout the growing season, with nasty nettles. Growing among the wonderful floral annuals.

To be removed with a gloved hand, lest one's digits pay the price long afterward. Common sense. We have trees in our gardens whose pods are deadly; caragena, the lovely yellow-flowering pea. Autumn crocus, monkshood, deliciously fragrant lily-of-the-valley, the stately, gorgeous Delphinium, the lovely-belled Foxgloves, candy-coloured lantana, all poisonous garden plants.

The hysteria that has accompanied news and descriptions of the hogweed plant is absurd. There are people who have grown the plant as an interesting garden specimen for decades, and who have never suffered any inconvenience as a result. No health problems. It is like the lovely flowering maple, a showy plant with large, delicate paper-pastel flowers. Some people are severely allergic to the plant and on touching it will develop blisters.

The giant hogweed which originated in the Caucasus and Central Asia was brought to Europe and North America as an ornamental garden species, a giant among plants. We once had a sea buckthorn in our garden and finally rid ourselves of it, for its thorns and its creeping roots popping up far from the original appeared a garden threat to us, but we did not fear it. Plants have their uses, practical and as representatives of nature's variety.

We should respect them as we should respect the natural world around us, by learning something about the living things that share this planet with us, and which can do so much to complement our lives.

Hemlock, anyone?

Just ... Musing

This really is a scientific-research, theoretical-potential break-through for Canada. Having a theoretical physicist of the elevated status of Stephen Hawking taking up a new research position in Waterloo, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. That is impressive, big-time scientific-academic stuff. Breathtaking, in fact, in its potential. That a subject of such immense significance would be studied right here in Canada, by the world's leading cosmologist.

"Why popular fancy should seize me, a scientist dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is one of those manifestations of mass psychology that are beyond me. I think it is terrible that this should be so and I suffer more than anybody can imagine." Albert Einstein

The public awe and adulation directed toward Stephen Hawking for the mysterious working of a mind able to conceive of abstract imaginings beyond the understanding of all but a handful of the world's geniuses immersed in the close studies of science as it relates to molecular studies, astrophysical, physics, and engineering does not, however, appear to deter Mr. Hawking; he copes well indeed.

Aside from his amazing brain, he is also a study in emotional ingratitude, in having left his first wife (and children) who supported him faithfully during the long early years of his physical decline, suffering from motor neuron syndrome that has locked his body into a motionless prison, leaving his mind free to surmise and analyze and theorize.

The wife of the man who designed his voice box, (enabling him to communicate his theories as a quantum mechanic engaged in cosmology, putting forth brave new theories based on an intense and deep knowledge) and who as a professional nurse cared for him, then became his second wife also betrayed her husband. Emotional betrayals do not mark the moral convictions of a man of high principle.

His personal failings aside, his professional qualifications and triumphs in intellectual discoveries ensured he was well regarded in the world of astronomy, particle physics and quantum mechanics. Those in awe of his monumental brain power attribute to him monumental abilities. His theories and conclusions have been built on a succession of earlier intellectual-theoretical findings, from Galileo and Newton to Einstein.

Human knowledge of the physical world around us and our place within it owes everything to the groundwork and intellectual break-throughs pioneered by scientific minds that predated Stephen Hawking. Just as humankind's incredible leaps forward in technological advancement began with the discovery of the taming of fire and the uses of flints and ores, the world's scientists leap forward on the discoveries of their predecessors.

Professor Hawking must have impressed upon himself, for some reason best known to himself, that the RIM-funded Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics presents a unique opportunity to progress in his search for new theories that would help to explain the vast, often nameless mysteries of the universe. Leaving Cambridge's prestigious and grand hallowed halls of academe as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, for Waterloo, Ontario, might appear as a descent to some.

But Professor Hawking seems to feel that the funding he was unable to access at Cambridge is now available to him here in Canada, in modest, but beautiful Waterloo, Ontario. Thanks to a billionaire whose own brilliant forays into the fields of computer technology and communications earned him the vast riches that now enable him to further the international fortunes of pure scientific enquiry.

From exploding stars, to collapsars, to black holes that swallow everything through the sheer magnetism of their powerful attractive qualities, but which leak radiation that will eventually cause them to disappear - and then what in the universe happens to all the matter that those hungry black holes have swallowed? we, the public, cannot even begin to guess at the discoveries that may emerge, well beyond our basic brain-power to grasp.

One thing many people may, however, grasp: how much in the realm of science fiction of a rather tarnished variety it seems for a brilliant scientist like Professor Hawking to argue his position that mankind should refrain from its obsession with contacting aliens. Believing, it would appear, that any such aliens might prove to be hostile and dangerous; indeed, inimical to our prolonged existence

."I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research ... the only deeply religious people of our largely materialistic age are the earnest men of research." Albert Einstein

Funding Research

We hear constantly about the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper starving our universities of needed funding. Of keeping funding from vital scientific and research groups. Of Canada falling severely behind other developed countries in funding its scientific community. Of what a disgrace it is that this government has not been active in helping to develop programs to facilitate critical research.

There may be areas of funding where there is a regrettable shortfall. On the other hand, while this is a wealthy country were are still grappling with some financial insecurity, waiting for the economy to fully recover. Still, we can't be doing too badly on the university-funding, research-granting horizon when in two different newspapers in two distinctly separate areas of research, in two universities in two provinces, news emerges that we've scored some rather fascinating coups.

The University of Ottawa, in the nation's capital, has been granted an extra $25-million to establish what is claimed will be a world-class photonics research centre. Recruiting an expert in the field, Professor Robert W. Boyd, from the University of Rochester. Dr. Boyd becomes the inaugural Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics. One of 19 researchers at 13 universities across Canada.

For each chair that is established through the Canada Excellence Research Chair program which was created in 2008 - which is to say under the current Conservative-led government - $10-million is made available over several years in support of those appointed to the chairs and their research teams. That's not too shabby, is it? With that funding ensured universities are also able to raise additional funds through other sources.

Dr. Boyd, acknowledging an existing "enormous amount" of infrastructure in photonics at the university, looks forward to taking matters to a more elevated level. "We will turn this into one of the - if not the - leading world centres for research in photonics"; the control of light for useful purposes - telecommunications, for example.

Is he enthusiastic at the challenge before him? "I don't know anyone who's ever been given this much research funding to come to a new university", he said. His previous research experience has taken him toward physics, engineering, classical and quantum non-linear optics. He and his team will be working with technologies present both at the university and the National Research Council.

Wait: there's more... A list of 19 top academics have been enlisted - some term it lured - from foreign universities to continue their work in Canada. Four of Britain's high-achieving researchers have been successfully 'poached' through seemingly irresistible offers to join the government's Canada Excellence Research Chair program as chair appointees.

Among them Professor Howard Wheater who leaves England to do his research now in Canada, at the University of Saskatchewan, leading a professional staff of 85, with a budget of $30-million over seven years. His research: water security issues. He was impressed that the university has no fewer than five Canada Research Chairs and 65 faculty with water-related interests, in a developing new science.

A science that takes into account river flows in decline, glacier alterations in the headwaters of the Rockies which have lost 35% of their volume in 25 years. While water demand is on the increase for industrial and agricultural use, the water we use and need is declining in its availability. Ecotoxicohydrology is this scientist's speciality.

And Canada will be the better for it.

Climate Blamed, Humans Exonerated

There exists various reports that Niagara Falls froze over in 1911 and in 1932. That isn't exactly ancient history. But it does represent events that were unusual,where the falls may not have frozen completely, but that freezing did take place on the exterior, reflecting the very cold ambient temperature, while under the frozen areas, water still continued to fall freely.

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We continue to experience extremes of cold and relatively warm environments throughout our written history and well before. These are extraordinary environmental, atmospheric events, and we seem to have quite short memories, and a functional inability to link these episodic events of trends toward warming alternating with cooler trends with nature's normal cycles.

We're currently in a massive international disagreement among climate specialists and environmental scientists whether the Earth has moved into a situation of global warming or simply climate change; one way or the other our climate does appear to have assumed variations from what we consider to be the norm.

We can't be certain whether certain issues regarding these changes are attributable to human activities like the emergence of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere, or whether what we are experiencing represents normal and oft-repeated cycles in alterations of our atmospheric environment.

Perhaps with a little prod thanks to human activity, but perhaps it is the absence or presence of sun spots. No one actually knows for certain how to separate theory from reality; records and observation and brilliant deduction helps, but human nature being what it is, and nature being what she is, never the twain do fully co-operate.

A new study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveal a 50,000-year record of the remains of muskoxen discovered on Herschel Island. Scientists now studying the DNA from these ancient muskox bones newly revealed, in fact - as a result of climate change melting the permafrost, revealing the bones - have concluded that prehistoric hunters did not cause a steep decline 12,000 years earlier in this species.

Rather, they theorize that the Canadian North, a refuge over the millennia for this grazing relative of cows and bison that once was present throughout the entire circumpolar world, declined as a result of an ongoing climate-driven pattern of changes that doomed not only it but other animal species such as the woolly mammoth, as well.

The team of international scientists who undertook to study the 50,000-year evolution of this creature with its large, curved horns weighing up to 300 kilograms, illustrated that the animals' numbers "expanded and declined several times over the last 100,000 years or so", alerting the scientists to the reality of ongoing climate change being responsible, not human hunters.

A warmer, wetter climate that concluded the last ice age is now recognized as the likeliest cause of the beast's disappearance along the Planet's northern frontier. In this instance, too, humankind formerly thought responsible for an event of some dramatic proportions, turned out not to have been so.

The migration of humans to the new world meant that in some areas hunting in more recent centuries cleared off southerly-located muskoxen. But the real culprit in the clutch was climate, and nature's propensity for whatever cause to swing between one extreme and another.

Sounds kind of familiar.

A Brilliant Mind

Imagine, a young man with a reputation as a skilled nanotechnologist, a brilliant engineer whose expertise and promise for the future has earned him one of the coveted Canada Research Chairs at a Canadian university; feted from Parliament Hill to the New York Times as an exemplar of academic, scientific excellence - what more might any young man envisage for himself?

With a record of super-charged work ethic, the reputation of an excellent academic supervisor with scores of young scientists working under him in university laboratories and brilliant theories to match expectations for his future, Daniel Kwok, still at University of Calgary, a man whom the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council now has been forced to place on a no-funding list faces a different future entirely.

Accused by the University of Alberta of plagiarism and of illicitly side-tracking research funding, he is in a place far removed from the promise his career trajectory pointed toward.
At his lab at University of Alberta he had 16 graduate students running his experiments, and he was busy publishing scientific papers far outdistancing his peers' output.

Federal records indicate that Daniel Kwok had been awarded in excess of $1.7-million by NSERC, the Canada Research Chairs program and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, in the last 12 years. The professor who oversaw Mr. (Dr.) Kwok's studies at University of Toronto where he obtained his Masters and PhD in engineering said "Daniel has a brilliant mind, and he is also a very straight arrow."

That straight arrow veered off its course. The University of Alberta began to investigate "financial misconduct" as well as "scientific misconduct" relating to "plagiarism", in 2005, and alerted NSERC. Mr. Kwok announced to the university that he was re-locating to University of Calgary, and the Edmonton engineering department searched frantically for a replacement teaching academic.

It would appear that the University of Alberta did nothing to alert the University of Calgary with respect to the problem that had arisen with Mr. Kwok. Problems that include the scientist allocating to himself for his own private use $150,000 in research-directed funding for such items as large-screen televisions, car parts, telephones, electronic gadgets and entertainment systems for his home.

Perhaps it is difficult for some people not to feel particularly entitled due to the prestige of their position, the pride of celebrity-status attention they appear to merit from colleagues, and the seeming security relating to the vast amounts of publicly-funded research dollars coming their way.

The researcher has returned in excess of $24,000 to the University of Alberta, and the university has turned that sum over to NSERC, and several other funding agencies. The case is far from closed; it will take the RCMP some considerable time to conclude their investigation for fraud.

Fellow researchers working in the field are outraged at the snail's pace of response to Daniel Kwok's malfeasance, which he steadfastly denies, claiming that matters have been misconstrued, that he is innocent of the charges brought against him. He has rendered, he insists, a full explanation of the situation to NSERC.

The really awful thing about all of this is that this man's actions will smear the reputation both of NSERC and the deserving scientists who make good use for Canada and for science of the funding allocated to them to further research and scientific investigation in their chosen fields of endeavour.

This man's actions are an anomaly and an abomination, and represent a miserable breach of trust.

Another Urban Legend Beloved of Conspiracy Theorists

Trouble is, it probably is not. In all likelihood it is entirely true. And that is incredible in and of itself. That after over a half-century having passed, the authentic version of a mysterious malady that attacked a village in southern France has finally been identified for what it most certainly was. Not an accidental poisoning of innocent villagers by an equally-innocent village baker who had accidentally contaminated the flour he used to bake bread, with a common rye-mould that was also a hallucinogen.

The legend of Le Pain Maudit (The Cursed Bread) that afflicted people living in Pont-Saint Esprit in the south-east of France in 1951, has finally been revealed for what it actually was. A malign, utterly discreditable 'research project' initiated by the U.S. CIA and the U.S. army's Special Operations Division to try their hand at mind-altering experiments. On a single day in 1951, the people of that little hamlet suddenly were assailed by fearful hallucinations utterly terrifying to them.

Some attempted suicide, others attempted to murder those closest to them. Five people died, while dozens of others were committed to insane asylums, among the hundreds of villagers taken ill by some mysterious force. Now, an investigative journalist, H.P. Albarelli Jr., has published his finding that this mysterious outbreak was a result of a CIA conspiracy (hah!) to use the people of this little village as unwitting, experimental subjects.

This covert, and utterly illegal research program, was an operation of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, an official U.S. government program which ran for a decade, using American and Canadian citizens as unaware test subjects. Drugs, mostly LSD, were used under the pretext of assisting people with mental problems in university and allied health institutions, to manipulate their mental states, for the purpose of altering their brain function.

In Canada the experiments were conducted by psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron whose theory was that by removing peoples' memories their psyche could be reprogrammed to correct schizophrenia. Dr. Cameron worked out of the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University. Aside from the use of LSD, paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy at huge strength was used; subjects were placed into drug-induced comas for weeks to months at a time. Never were patients or their families advised of the proceedings, nor consent sought.

People ho had entered the institute for help with relatively minor anxiety disorders and postpartum depression suffered permanent damage from the treatments they unknowingly underwent. From amnesia to incontinence, inability to vocalize or to recognize loved ones, patients exited the experiments in dreadful shape. The British psychiatrist William Sargant at St.Thomas Hospital London and Belmont Hospital Surrey, was also involved there in these experiments.

Mr. Albarelli found CIA documents in his investigative work on the death of a biochemist who had worked for the Special Operations Division, and while writing his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, two of Dr. Olson's former colleagues confirmed the mind control experiments run by the CIA and U.S. army in collaboration with Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company.

The names of French nationals clandestinely employed by the CIA were revealed in a White House document which made pointed reference to the "Pont St. Esprit incident", more than obviously linking the entire affair.

Heating The Debate

What debate? Well, the transformation from human-derived global warming, to a more generalized and likely reality of climate change. The Earth's climate has a habit of doing that. It does alter itself from time to time. This Globe experienced Great Ice Ages and Little Ice Ages, the little ones remarked in written, witnessed human history. There was a time when Henry VIII skated on the Thames. It's doubtful that anyone might like to try that at the present time.

The Frozen Thames, 1677

Nature is not static, it is forever changing, alterations take place and we move along with them, for there is rarely anything that human beings can do to alter what nature has designed on that scale. And before that Little Ice Age there occurred the Medieval Warm Period that lasted about four centuries. It was, in fact, warmer back then than it has been now, in what the current crop of alarmed environmentalists proclaim is the disaster of man-made global warming.

Funny thing, that; the Medieval Warm Period was a natural event that occurred before the man-made interventions of industrialization, before there were millions of vehicles crowding roads internationally, and air machines plied the skies above, before coal-fired furnaces and the guilt placed upon us by our admittedly energy-wasteful lifestyles. And if you believe in the above, and beg to differ from the conclusions reached by those who declare the science is fixed, then you're a denier.

It's an awful thing to be a denier. But people who have stated a preference for a belief in the very natural and sometimes-alarming fact that Climate Change appears to be occurring, and who also may admit to believing that human activity has some part to play in changing weather patterns, but to a minimal degree, then take heart, because there are hordes of climate scientists who believe just as you do.

The consensus is not that the conclusions reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are universally accepted as immutably correct. Despite Al Gore's equivocating statements such as "...the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work..." And "It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris covered glaciers in the Himalayas..."

And further: "...and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate", does not say much for scientific rigour, in scrupulously determining the accuracy of vital data proclaiming disaster is imminent, before publishing that data as veritable proof. Grasping at every conceivable unproven symptom that will prove their theory does not represent good science.

"In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law..." and etcetera, feeble and self-serving as it is, does not make for a feeling of confidence.

Any claims of impending international disaster brought upon us by our own stupidity and wastefulness rings hollow coming from a man whose own credentials as a committed environmentalist bringing truth and scientific probity to our attention has been irremediably tarnished by his own wasteful use of energy, and the cap-and-trade, and film and publication profits that have accrued to him. He is manifestly self-interested, not altruistic.

That said, and taking into account all the revelations that have come hard on one another about the sources of the irrefutable data, the lack of scientific integrity, the in-fighting, the absurdity of claims handily refuted, the reliance on a data-base carefully selected to produce the required result; all of it has served to raise real doubts in the minds of those who had once supported the IPPC findings.

Continued bleatings of outrage at the lack of trust in those same conclusions, the continued badinage of the principals, the revelations that the IPCC did not operate to high scientific standards, have served to prick the balloon of settled science. The less heard from the likes of Al Gore, under these circumstances, the better.

Mutant Pig, Anyone?

Well perhaps not quite mutant; rather, biologically engineered. Coming to a dinner plate near you. Perhaps your very own home. We're already eating, in Canada, genetically modified grain crops, so it's only a matter of time, logically, that the livestock-product we consume will also undergo biological alterations to endow them with a wide range of positives for human consumption. Creepy, isn't it?

But genetically engineered pigs are on our horizon. Environment Canada is involved, because the University of Guelph bio-engineers have been hard at work to develop a strain of Yorkshire pigs whose waste is less inimical to the environment. Once the hurdles are cleared under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, it will be up to Health Canada to approve an application submitted by University of Guelph.

After which the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will get in on the act. Aren't we well cared for? Should matters progress as planned, the University of Guelph's break-through in producing what is termed the world's first transgenic animal, the 'Enviropig' may result in a new era in livestock production techniques. The animal in question, or the concept leading to it, was created in 1999 from a piece of mouse DNA introduced into the Yorkshire-breed pigs' chromosomes.

The result is pigs that emit low-phosphorus feces. By the creation of a special composite gene enabling digestion of an otherwise-unavailable form of phosphorus, allowing the pigs to produce manure 30% to 65% lower in phosphorus than that of normal pigs. Which have borne the brunt of environmental accusations that they pollute surface and groundwater, raised in intensive livestock operations.

"The university has successfully satisfied the requirements to allow the line of transgenic pigs to be produced and farmed using appropriate containment procedures. So that's the step we're at right now", Steven Liss, associate vice-president for research at University of Guelph, explained.

"As part of an overall goal, I think it's fair to say, yes, absolutely, the university researchers involved were very driven and passionate about addressing an important environment problem at the same time supporting production of food stock and to bring forward a more sustainable and environmentally friendly option to do that."

The approval process may be a long time in bringing the research to the reality of production. Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may get around eventually to approving the technology and its results, but consumers generally may be more than a little standoffish in their attitudes toward accepting the product.

That'll be one huge hurdle. People don't like to actually think about the fact that the meat products they so enjoy consuming does not, in reality, appear, preparation-ready on supermarket freezer shelves without having first come from a purpose-slaughtered animal. This is not something people like to focus their minds on. It takes away from the appetite.

Digesting the information that the meat they're about to consume is the result of an animal scientifically tampered with may result in the unfortunate focus that will propel people away from enjoying their morning bacon and dinner ham steaks.

Earth's Geology, Our Vulnerabilities

Canada, leading an initiative to be shared by the international scientific community, has undertaken the installation of three seismic stations spaced 50 kilometers apart, in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Their purpose: to detect otherwise-imperceptible tremors and quakes and, of course, larger jolts such as the one that devastated Haiti a mere month earlier.

Those jolts, of a less impressively destructive variety, are still ongoing. One was picked up a quarter-hour after the installation had been switched on.

The three stations were carefully positioned to ensure as little interference as possible with the critical seismic measurements. Each station is valued at $45,000 with the inclusion of a seismic sensor anchored within a concrete paid, along with solar panels for power-provision, and a 1.8-metre-wide satellite dish capable of relaying the data back to the receiving laboratory at Natural Resources Canada.

The team installed at the Geological Survey of Canada stationed in Ottawa, scrutinizes the recovered data, picking up dozens of tremors along the Haiti faultline to attempt to fully understand the ongoing quake threats in a country with a history of violent tremors, to gauge the impact for the country in the future, while it rebuilds itself. Seismic monitors in Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba had picked up data of the cataclysmic quake that shook Haiti.

Placing the three stations at strategic places within the country itself provides a far clearer understanding of what is occurring underground. "We can see about 100 times more events", geologist David McCormack said. Explaining that quakes rupture the surface only when the geological action that leads to them are produced sufficiently close to the surface.

The devastating January 12 earthquake began with a rupture roughly 12 kilometres below surface, resulting in a rupture two kilometres below the surface. That rupture was 40 kilometres long, resulting in two plates bordering the fault sliding a few metres, releasing pressure that had been building for several centuries. Additional strain has been created on the ends of the rupture zone.

And the $64-thousand question now is the future of that added pressure placed on the eastern end of the fault, close to Port-au-Prince. Seismologists now estimate a 50% chance of another major earthquake sometime in the next half-century. The seismic-measurement installations will assist researchers in reading the potential threat and the possible intensity of anticipated quakes.

"The plates keep moving and earthquakes keep happening, that's just the way the world works."

Arctic Treks: Polar Explorations

Polar exploration continues to enthrall bold adventurers enraptured by the vision that through their determination and hard-earned knowledge of the icy reaches of the Planet, they can still achieve new exploration firsts. And one such individual is modern-day explorer Jim McNeill, who was set to take his British team to trek from the edge of Arctic Canada to the most remote place in the Arctic Ocean - the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility.

British explorers have a long and respected tradition of exploration for science and adventure. They were matched by American, Russian and Norwegian adventurers, all of whom were fascinated with the far reaches of ice-bound North and South poles exploration. Everyone wanted to be there first, to plant their respective national flags, and to bring to themselves national acclaim and international reputations.

Their determination to succeed cost many of them dearly. The treks were arduous beyond the comprehension of any who had never attempted them. The inclemency of severe weather conditions, the vast, isolated geography, the geological and weather-bound features of the areas they sought to explore, to arrive at their distant and severely-difficult-to-attain destinations caused the eventual grievous surrender of life and limb of too many intrepid explorers.

The swell increased that night and the movement of the ice became more pronounced. Occasionally a neighbouring floe would hammer against the ice on which we were camped, and the lesson of these blows was plain to read. We must get solid ground under our feet quickly. When the vibration ceased after a heavy surge, my thoughts flew round to the problem ahead. If the party had not numbered more than six men a solution would not have been so hard to find; but obviously the transportation of the whole party to a place of safety, with the limited means at our disposal, was going to be a matter of extreme difficulty. There were twenty-eight men on our floating cake of ice, which was steadily dwindling under the influence of wind, weather, charging floes, and heavy swell. *

Despite the hardships and the misery and the unbelievable pain suffered by North and South Pole adventurers, they kept returning time and again, and incapable of tempering their enthusiasm, met the forces of nature head on with often predictable results that destroyed their frailty, but ennobled the enterprise.

Now this British team planning to trek from the edge of Arctic Canada to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility - who ever even heard of such a destination, it is considered to be the most remote place in the Arctic Ocean - has had to re-think their plans, on the brink of departure into their adventure from Ellef Ringnes Island, Nunavut. For modern-day adventurer-explorers, hoping to burnish their reputations and aid science in the process, have tools at their disposal that earlier such enterprising men of outstanding courage and determination had not.

Environment Canada forewarned this hardy troupe that the High Arctic is currently in the "worst conditions" for winter ice cover in decades. So their leader, Jim McNeill, has been forced of necessity to postpone for the third time his desire to trek the 1,100-kilometre journey in the recognition of its foolhardiness that would "endanger lives unnecessarily".

The sun was shining in the blue sky on the following morning (April 8). Clarence Island showed clearly on the horizon, and Elephant Island could also be distinguished. The single snow-clad peak of Clarence Island stood up as a beacon of safety, though the most optimistic imagination could not make an easy path of the ice and ocean that separated us from that giant white and austere (peak). "The pack was much looser this morning, and the long rolling swell from the north-east is more pronounced than it was yesterday. The floes rise and fall with the surge of the sea. We evidently are drifting with the surface current, for all the heavier masses of floe, bergs, and hummocks are being left behind. *

The Northern Pole of Inaccessibility exists roughly 400 kilometres farther out to sea than the North Pole itself, therefore it is defined as the most difficult place on the Planet to arrive at, on the Polar ice cap. It was first discovered in 1927 when a pioneering aviator over flew it, while a Russian ice-breaker is thought to have passed close by it in the 1950s. Yet no human has ever yet successfully completed a crossing by foot over the expanses of heaving ice and murderously icy water leading to the centre of the Arctic Ocean's beyond.

At 9:30 p.m. a particularly heavy shock went through our floe. The watchman and other members of the party made an immediate inspection and found a crack right under the James Caird and between the other two boats and the main camp. Within five minutes the boats were over the crack and close to the tents. The trouble was not caused by a blow from another floe. We could see that the piece of ice we occupied had slewed and now presented its long axis towards the oncoming swell. The floe, therefore, was pitching in the manner of a ship, and it had cracked across when the swell lifted the centre, leaving the two ends comparatively unsupported. We were now on a triangular raft of ice, the three sides measuring, roughly, 90, 100 and 120 yards. *

Last week's advisory by Environment Canada came hard on the heels of a Canadian study highlighting unprecedented expanses of open water in the Polar sea; resulting in a fairly reasonable prediction of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean; an occurrence much accelerated from previous forecasts.

"The risks of early failure, of cold injury and of needing to be rescued are too high to justify settingout", 49-year old Jim McNeill reluctantly admitted.

At 7:00 a.m. lanes of water and leads could be seen on the horizon to the west. The ice separating us from the lanes was loose, but did not appear to be workable for the boats. The long swell from the north-west was coming in more freely than on the previous day and was driving the floes together in the utmost confusion. The loose brash between the masses of ice was being churned to mudlike consistency, and no boat could have lived in the channels that opened and closed around us. *

Mr. McNeill, a former firefighter, has changed professions; now organizing endurance trekking tours through his Ice Warrior enterprise. On a previous occasion with the intention of mounting the same trajectory in 2003, he suffered a bout of flesh-eating disease in his ankle, effectively putting a stop to that trip.

Three years later, a second attempt to reach the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility was cancelled as a result of disintegrating ice conditions, and problems encountered with the group's equipment.

Soon after breakfast the ice closed again. We were standing by, with our preparations as complete as they could be made, when at 11 a.m. our floe suddenly split right across under the boats. We rushed our gear on to the larger of the two pieces and watched with strained attention for the next development. The crack had cut through the site of my tent. I stood on the edge of the new fracture, and, looking across the widening channel of water, could see the spot where for many months my head and shoulders had rested when I was in my sleeping-bag. *

The lead scientist associated with Ice Warrior made note of the fact that an Environment Canada meteorologist had advised against the planned journey given the "horrible" deterioration of the ice cover. The disappointment of the group must be vast, given their recently-completed four weeks of training on the Svalbard Islands, Norway.

The three boats were a mile away from our floe home at 2 p.m. We had made our way through the channels and had entered the big pool when we saw a rush of foam-clad water and tossing ice approaching us, like the tidal bore of a river. The pack was being impelled to the east by a tide-rip, and two huge masses of ice were driving down upon us on converging courses. *

Nothing can truly deter the stalwart-determined, and Jim McNeill and his expedition crew are prepared to launch yet another attempt - if ice conditions permit - in 2011.

Man proposes, Nature disposes.

* 1912 - from South, Sir Ernest Shackleton; Antarctica

Who Sue Whom?

The Province of Ontario is finally on the cusp of enacting its promised legislation banning pesticide use. About time. Overdue, in fact, to take substantial steps to reduce the toxic substances that overwhelm our environment, and in turn, our health and that of all living things as well. The Take Charge on Toxics campaign, representing a coalition of health, environmental and labour groups breathes a sigh of relief.

"Assuming it has strong regulations (the legislation) will improve Ontarians' health by phasing out the toxic chemicals that make people sick", according to the executive director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. "It will also help Ontario businesses compete in a world market where people are increasingly demanding non-toxic products", Gideon Forman stressed.

Bill 167, the Toxics Reduction Act, will require regulated facilities to track and evaluate the use and release of toxic substances to develop a strategy for reduction. It will also halt the stubborn insistence of home-owners in their green-lawning tracks, those lawn-proud individuals heedless of the harm their use of lawn pesticides wreak on the environment and their neighbours.

Scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine have released findings from a study closely linking birth defect risks associated with season of conception. Indicating that women who conceive in the spring or summer when pesticide exposure is high may run a higher risk of giving birth to a baby with a birth defect. Chemical exposure has been linked to all manner of human diseases.

But the companies that provide lawn treatments, along with the producers of those pesticides and herbicides keep lobbying against legislation meant to control their use. Insisting that there is safety in their use. Citing the fact that Canada's Health Canada pest-management regulatory agency had declared 2,4-D safe if used as directed. That is a caveat.

The Province of Quebec was the first in Canada to outlaw pesticide use. Once that precedent was set, municipalities elsewhere in Canada began to take charge of the situation, one after another enacting municipal legislation against their use. That speaks of responsible government, despite the hordes of nay-sayers. Use of pesticides has been linked to various types of cancers, reproductive and neurological problems.

We know next to nothing about the cumulative effects of pesticides in the human body. We do know how harmful pesticides are to wildlife, from insects to birds to larger mammals, inclusive of household pets. Children exposed to pesticide use are
vulnerable to neurological-behavioural impairment and have a higher risk of developing childhood leukemia.

We should celebrate our freedom from the use of pesticides, where neighbours insist on their right to spray chemicals that waft over to lawns not their own; that waft into houses through open windows; that are carried by pets' paws and children's shoes into the homes of those sensitive to the presence of those chemicals. The run-off of the chemicals penetrate ground-water and flow into streams and rivers, killing fish.

And here comes U.S. Dow AgroSciences, slapping the Government of Canada with a suit under the North American Free Trade Agreement, insisting that Quebec's ban on lawn pesticides containing 2,4-D be repealed. And oh, by the way, they'd also appreciate an additional little gesture of legal chastening: $2-million in damages - U.S. funds, of course.

Dow's suit claims the pesticide ban represents an "expropriation" of Dow investments. Accusing Canada of breaching "basic due process, transparency, good faith and natural justice". Isn't that enough to make you hysterical? Laugh and cry, simultaneously. Transparency, good faith and natural justice?

Dow feels it has the right to expropriate the good health of our environment, impacting deleteriously on our health, that of our pets, and our wildlife. Reminding one somewhat of the maliciously deliberate steps by tobacco manufacturers to entice people into habitual chemical slavery to their cancer-causing products. Weren't they sued by government?

While Dow accuses Canada of breach of NAFTA obligations, seeking damages "without limitation", covering loss of sales, profits, goodwill, investment and other product-related costs, would it not be sensible for Canada to set in motion a class action suit charging Dow with loss of life, costs of health care, and ill will against Canadians?