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In a world where choosing the right technology becomes ever trickier,
thank heavens for the European Parliament. In an admirable, if minuscule,
effort to emulate the 200-odd experts working for the US Congress’s Office
of Technology Asses-sment, it has since 1987 paid five people to run STOA.
This stands for Scientific and Technological Options Assessment, but it
is also the ancient Greek name for the porticoes where philosophers held
forth.

STOA has commissioned numerous authoritative reports on subjects ranging
from nuclear fusion and bioethics to air traffic control systems and crop
pollination in the European Community.

You may be forgiven if you have never read any of these documents. STOA
has no mailing list, and employs no one to bring the existence of its works,
let alone the works themselves, to the attention of the public. The recent
report on bioethics was delivered only to MEPs – one copy each – and even
the Parliament’s staff had great trouble getting any more.

Not to worry. Feedback managed to acquire a recent list of STOA’s publications,
which advises that ‘all documents are available’ in room 4/36 of the Parliament’s
Schumann building in Luxembourg. ‘Anyone is welcome to consult them at any
time,’ STOA adds generously.

* * *

The search is on for Mr and Ms Average. One man and one woman will be
selected to represent the whole of humankind in a $10 million project
which will immortalise every cubic millimetre of the lucky Adam and Eve
as 50 gigabytes of digital information.

There’s only one catch. The archetypal pair must be prepared to be actually
cut into millimetre-thick slices, so being dead is an advantage – indeed,
a prerequisite. Candidates must also be aged between 20 and 60, less than
6 feet tall and of average weight. They must have been healthy when alive
– candidates who die after an illness (which would have affected the state
of their bodies) are not acceptable. Race and ethnic origin are unimportant.

Once sliced, photographed and transferred onto a computer, Adam and
Eve will form the centrepiece of the US National Library of Medicine’s
‘Visible Human Project’ – the most comprehensive digital record of the human
body. Rather than dissecting cadavers, doctors, students and anatomists
will be able to use a computer instead of a scalpel to ‘dissect’ an image
of the human body on the screen. Using a different program, they will
even be able to put back together the ‘dissected’ body.

* * *

The good old Milk Marketing Board is to be privatised and will be renamed
Milkmarque, an altogether more glamourous sounding name, as you will surely
agree. It is instructive, though, to look up ‘marque’ in the dictionary.
According to at least one definition, a marque is a royal licence granted
to a private citizen to arm a ship and employ it in the capture of merchant
ships from other nations. In other words, a privateer.

Well, well, what a coincidence. But no more than that, Feedback trusts.
After all, privateers were rapacious pirates, intent on profit at any cost
– quite unlike the benevolent ladies and gentlemen who will be ensuring
the continued efficient supply of one of our most basic foods.

* * *

In the coming White Paper on science, the demise of the Advisory Board
for the Research Councils, for years the centre of power in British research,
seems assured. David Phillips, the chairman of the board, has had his expiring
contract extended – for a whopping six months.

* * *

Which is longer than France’s science minister Hubert Curien is likely
to hold down his job. Curien was so convinced that his Socialist party would
be defeated in the country’s national elections that he started canvassing
high-level support for a new job weeks before polling day. It seems that
he wants to be the next chairman of CERN, the European particle physics
laboratory near Geneva.

* * *

This is absolutely serious. English Nature has teamed up with the Royal
Society for Nature Conservation’s Wildlife Trusts Partnership, its junior
wing WATCH, the Countryside Council for Wales and The Vincent Wildlife
Trust to bring you . . . National Dormouse Week.

Between 27 October and 3 November the aim will be to ‘raise public interest
in the dormouse and the problems of its conservation’. There will be a national
survey of dormice, and schemes to provide nest boxes on sites of key importance
for dormouse conservation.

In a slightly surprising ‘Note for Editors’ on its press release, English
Nature explains: ‘National Dormouse Week is devoted to the conservation
of the common dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius), not the edible dormouse
(Glis glis).’

* * *

Readers continue to send in examples of wayward attempts by computer
spellcheckers to add poetic flourishes to dull copy. We particularly liked
hearing about that well-known high street bank renamed ‘Broccoli’s Bank’
by one spell-checker, and ‘Parsley’s Bank’ by another.

Then there was the chemist whose spellchecker proposed changing the
word ‘flocculent’ to ‘flatulent’, and the electronics engineer named Geoff
Haynes who had his name changed to ‘Goof Heinous’ by the spellchecker, and
who has not been known by his real name since.

Here at New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ we’ve had our own share of checker waywardness.
For a long time our spellchecker insisted on ‘bosom’, ‘buxom’ or ‘boatswain’
for the word ‘boson’. None of these ever seemed quite right for the group
of elementary particles which have zero or integral spin and which obey
the rules of Bose-Einstein statistics.

Our present spellchecker has mastered some physics, but it has yet to
grasp the subtleties of American-Panamanian politics. It insists that it
was President Carter and General Toerags who signed the Panama Treaty in
1977, instead of Carter and General Torrijos.