Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Dictionary of Science and Technology edited by Christopher Morris, Academic
Press, PP 2463, £68

How to define the word anus? That was the question I was asked several
years ago as a member of a panel, advising Longmans on a new generation
of dictionaries. An existing lexicon offered ‘the distal extremity of the
human gastro-intestinal canal’. Dreadful, said our chairman, Sir Radolph
Quirk, who preferred ‘the hole by which solid waste leaves the body’. In
the event, we settled on ‘the rear opening of the digestive tract through
which faeces are extruded’.

The challenge was, of course, to combine accuracy not only with conciseness
and lack of gratuitous words or ideas but also with clarity for the greatest
possible proportion of readers. Technical jargon should be used only when
a more familiar term does not exist – and this is a key principle by which
all dictionaries ought to be judged. Whether designed primarily for more
or less specialised users, the best reference books meet the needs of a
wide penumbra of readers, and do so with precision and economy.

Assessed against this criterion, Academic Press’s monumental and unquestionably
comprehensive tome does not fare well. Take, for example, the definition
of bacteriophage: ‘any virus that infects and replicates within a bacterium,
producing transmissible lysis or becoming lysogenic; usually species-specific’.
Look up ‘transmissible lysis’ and you will not find it. Look up ‘lysogenic
virus’ and you read: ‘a special type of virus bacterial cell interaction
maintained by a complex cellular regulatory mechanism’. Any the wiser?

Or try ‘penicillin’, which, we are told, ‘exerts a bacteriostatic and
bactericidal effect by interfering with the synthesis of peptidoglycan’.
In this case ‘bacteriostatic’, but not ‘bactericidal’, is defined on another
page, and we have to look elsewhere to discover that peptidoglycan is part
of the cell wall.

This is not impressive. The topics concerned are complex, but perfectly
amenable to simple description. Why not say that penicillin ‘impairs synthesis
of cell wall peptidoglycan, stopping bacteria from growing and killing
them’? In the same number of words, this avoids needless jargon and includes
important additional information.

Having dipped into the 2400 pages of this formidable book many times
in recent weeks, I feel sure that these criticisms are statistically valid.
Again and again, I came across dismaying lacunae, terminology that is barely
explained and gratuitous words that could have been profitably redeployed.

The entry for John Logie Baird credits him with colour television and
other innovations but does not state the crucial fact that he pioneered
mechanical rather than electronic scanning. Similarly, the entry for vaccinia,
and even an essay on virology (one of 124 ‘windows’ reviews by luminaries
in their fields), mention smallpox without saying that it has been eradicated
– one of the greatest achievements of medical science.

The compilers seem unaware that the paratyphoid elements in the former
TAB vaccine against typhoid fever were discontinued many years ago, or that
Sir Peter Medawar died in 1987. Indeed, they are spasmodically eccentric
in selecting people to include, and in what they say about them. Jocelyn
Bell, discoverer of pulsars, is cited in a compilation of key events in
the history of science but does not appear in the body of the book-which,
however, does include the non-scientist Christiaan Barnard. Gene synthesiser
Har Bobind Khorana is in both, once wrongly spelled and once correctly spelled.
The co-discoverers of restriction enzymes appear, but only Hamilton Smith
is credited appropriately. Daniel Nathans is said to have shared the Nobel
prize for ‘research on molecular genetics’. Amazingly, there are no entries
for test-tube baby pioneers Robert Edwards or Patrick Steptoe.

The criteria for including illustrations seem arbitrary, to say the
least. There is a chemical formula for niacin but not for ascorbic acid,
and drawings of elm and sycamore leaves, but not of beech or birch. The
electron micrograph of bacteriophage, without legend or even scale, is meaningless.

Offsetting these demerits, the dictionary certainly has the quality
of breadth. It includes 124 000 entries (excluding abbreviations), together
with windows essays, 2000 illustrations, 24 pages of colour plates, and
a chronology of science from 1400 to the present day. But is this weighty
volume really helped by the inclusion of topics such as squeegee, beach
party, printer’s error and handrail (‘a continuous, conveniently positioned
bar that is grasped by the hand and used by people for support on stairways,
balcony edges or gallery walkways’)? Do we benefit from photographs of objects
such as a sledgehammer and an adjustable wrench? I wonder.

Bernard Dixon edits Bio/Technology.