Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

America’s biggest biotechnology company, Genentech, has put the BBC
to shame by introducing benefits for ‘same-sex domestic partners’ – that’s
partners of gay employees to you and me.

Thanks to outrage from a number of backbench Tory MPs with ‘traditional’
values, the BBC recently pulled the plug on special, one-off payments for
staff who marry. The MPs raised objections when they found out that the
Beeb had extended the payments to gay couples. Auntie’s lily-livered response
was to withdraw the payments for everyone.

Genentech, by contrast, has introduced a whole range of benefits for
gay partners of employees, including health, dental and childcare payments,
and bereavement payments. ‘This . . . ensures that employees who are in
committed relationships, yet are legally precluded from marrying, have the
same access to benefits as employees who are married,’ says Kirk Raab,
the president of the San Francisco-based company. BBC take note.

Biomedicine has a lot to thank Nature’s editor John Maddox for, if the
joint winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is to be believed. Speaking
about AIDS and HIV in London recently, Kary B. Mullis, who shared the honours
with Michael Smith, described how he became disillusioned with his chosen
field of cosmology and turned to biomedicine when, after some minor alterations,
Maddox published Mullis’s theory of the Universe in Nature.

Mullis, a second year university student at the time, had gained the
inspiration for his theory while tripping on LSD in the late 1960s. Horrified
to see his paper published in such an eminent journal, he began to doubt
the bona fides of cosmologists and switched his attentions to more concrete
things. He went on to win his Nobel prize for the invention of the polymerase
chain reaction (PCR), the groundbreaking method for replicating segments
of DNA.

Earlier in the year, this column featured a number of items about the
digital manipulation of photographs. But none, we think, were as cheeky
as the Arts Planetarium in Amsterdam, which spirited away a whole observatory.

In one of the planetarium shows, Govert Schilling and his colleagues
used a panoramic image of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla
in the Chilean Andes. The image was digitally manipulated to fit the curvature
of the planetarium dome, and it looked magnificent – but it only covered
180degree. So they made a copy of it, ‘removed’ all the buildings of the
observatory, and ended up with a bare mountain landscape to cover the other
side of the planetarium.

Gareth Lewis was appalled when he discovered what the printer had done
to his new book You Don’t Have to Send Your Child to School. Along with
his own text, the book contained several pages from a contact magazine,
featuring advertisements in explicit language and pictures of naked men
and women in unorthodox positions.

Lewis, who published his book himself, had enlisted the services of
a printer after looking through his local Yellow Pages. He wasn’t to know
that the printer also dealt with contact magazines, until an error in collation
led to material from these being included in some of the copies of his book.

According to The Bookseller magazine, such errors are not unusual. Last
year a schoolteacher complained to HarperCollins after discovering that
several copies of a children’s book Harriet the Spy contained pages from
a sex manual featuring graphic illustrations of male genitalia in various
stages of arousal.

Germany has at last got the mountain biking bug, reports the Deutscher
Forschungsdienst, the German research service. Professor Manfred Votter
of the Technical University of Hamburg at Harburg, had noticed that owners
of such bikes were trying ‘daredevil feats on escalators and ramps’, and
decided to do some tests ‘to find out whether the bikes could withstand
such extreme treatment’.

Since the bikes were already withstanding this treatment, this might
seem a little pointless to some of us, but not to the good professor. His
team found that the greatest stresses were exerted on the frame, the handlebars
and the front fork – but not the back lamp bracket, the brakes or the gear
lever. Which is hardly surprising, but wait.

‘On uneven ground,’ report the researchers, ‘the fork particularly is
subjected to certain self-induced vibrations which under unfavourable circumstances
could become strong enough to cause the rider to fall off.’

In other words: it’s harder to stay on your bike if the road is bumpy.

We await the professor’s next project with interest.

Feedback has not yet had time to visit the Natural History Museum’s
exhibition ‘Dinosaur Safari’, which runs until 30 October. We are sure that
the giant model dinosaurs in the exhibition are, as the publicity tells
us, ‘the most realistic and impressive dinosaurs ever seen’. But we are
a little puzzled about the children’s ‘Dino’ events that accompany the exhibition.
These include fossil workshops, origami dinosaur making and ‘dinosaur brass
rubbing’. Feedback wonders which cathedral supplied these unusual brasses.

The innovative design of Cambridge’s new Isaac Newton Institute has
won almost universal acclaim from the mathematicians who visit it from around
the world. Corridors have been wiped out by clustering rooms around open
spaces. This gives the building a feeling of spaciousness and forces researchers
to talk to each other as they move around performing their daily functions.

But all this bonhomie has proved too much for one very eminent foreign
mathematician, who, with our well-known delicacy, we will not name. He complains
that every time he steps outside his office, he is greeted by a new colleague
eager to make his acquaintance. His inherent politeness and imperfect English
can then make a routine visit to the men’s room a matter of increasingly
high anxiety.

At the height of the BSE scare, environment secretary John Gummer made
his daughter eat a hamburger in order to show the world how safe British
beef was. Now Gummer has given his approval for the release in Oxfordshire
of a genetically modified insect virus that delivers scorpion venom to
caterpillars. Will he also spray his daughter with the virus, to show how
perfectly safe it is?