Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

BARRY FIELD, the Conservative MP representing the Isle of Wight, is
concerned about carbon dioxide emissions from car exhausts. Recently, he
asked Douglas Hogg, the minister for trade and industry, to set out the
research findings from the Warren Spring Laboratory, comparing emissions
from vehicles with and without catalytic converters. (Warren Spring is a
DTI laboratory in Hertfordshire, concerned with providing technical services
to government, primarily in environmental technology.) Hogg replied that
Warren Spring had made no direct comparisons between catalyst and non-catalyst
versions of popular makes and models of cars. Catalyst equipped versions
of these vehicles had not been available. The DTI’s experience of catalyst
cars, he said, was confined to specialist imports and manu facturers’ prototypes,
with relatively new catalysts.

Hogg said that his department would measure emissions from production
catalyst cars as they become available. The DTI’s experience with relatively
new catalysts showed a conversion efficiency of 80 to 90 per cent for carbon
oxides, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Warren Spring had done no work
as yet on degradation of catalyst performance with age in use.

I hope that the DTI will soon be in a position to provide the kind of
information that Field requested. Given current interest in catalytic converters,
I would have thought that research on their effectiveness was a matter of
priority.

* * *

I ASKED Patrick Nicholls, a junior minister at the Department of Employment,
to comment on New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ’s leader ‘Back to the future’ (27 January),
which raised once again the problem of the shortage of women in science.
I have now received his reply.

Nicholls agrees that there are too few women in scientific posts, particularly
at senior levels, and that there should be no barriers to women wanting
to return to scientific work. However, he says, there is a more fundamental
problem in that, in the past, ‘girls and women have not gained the appropriate
qualifications to take up scientific jobs in any great numbers’. To some
extent, he says, this has been due to girls’ personal choices, possibly
influenced by their parents and peers.

Nicholls says that the government has been trying for some years now
to widen girls’ horizons and ensure that they are aware of the opportunities
in science through education and career services, and that this strategy
has borne fruit. In the past 10 years, he says, there has been a steady
growth in the proportion of girls studying chemistry to examination level:
about 1 in 4 in 1988 compared with 1 in 6 in 1979. In addition, 1 in 5 girls
took physics in 1988 compared with 1 in 8 in 1979. The proportion of women
on engineering courses at universities and polytechnics has also risen,
he says, from 7.8 per cent of total students in 1982-83 to about 11 per
cent in 1988-89.

The proportions remain small, but it is encouraging to see a rise. Having
persuaded more women to study science, the next step, surely, is to ensure
conditions of employment that will allow them to maintain their interest
in their subsequent careers.

* * *

DAVID CLARK, Labour’s spokesman on agriculture, has been asking ministers
about pesticide residues in food. In particular, he wanted to know whether
the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food had tested for the presence
in food of ethylene biothiocarbonate fungicides and ethylene thiourea.

John Gummer, the minister for agriculture, told him that the government’s
working party on pesticide residues had indeed tested for these substances,
and had published its findings in March last year. He added, however, that
results of tests for residues of these substances had recently been published
by Friends of the Earth and Parents for Safe Food. The tests were carried
out by an independent analyst on a range of foodstuffs. Although most samples
had negligible or no detectable residues, a few showed levels which, ‘while
giving no cause for concern on health grounds were above predicted levels’.
The MAFF was repeating the tests on the samples used by the analyst, and
on further samples, and would publish the results.

It’s a heresy to say it, but I wonder if there are not other priorities
than becoming over-concerned about our food, and contemplating its exact
contents.

* * *

I AM NOT normally enamoured of awards such as ‘Man of the Year’, and
refused to go to The Spectator when it gave me a parliamentary award in
1987. But I do applaud The Scotsman for its choice of Scot of the Decade.
A scientist! Sir James Black, FRCP, FRS, modest and charming father of beta-blockers.
Has any single man in Europe done more good for the world in the 1980s?
I can’t think of anyone.