On Iraq, Israel's borders, Quebec, Republican voters, Turkey and turkey

The year's big issue, again
SIR ? The ghosts of Lord Raglan and Sir Douglas Haig must be roaming your corridors late at night, because I detect the spirit of Balaclava and the Somme in your rejection of the Iraq Study Group's report (?Don't do it?, December 9th). In striking contrast to your ?stay the course? position, the cry of sauve qui peut is now resounding through the offices of Republicans hoping to be elected in 2008, and congressional and popular support is eroding in line with the deterioration in our position on the ground in Iraq.

Maybe we should view superpower America as being a pitiful, helpless giant. The technical wizardry of the invasion was awesome, of course, but that is in stark contrast to the occupation, where an undermanned, underequipped army assigned to embody the neocons' nation-building dream has proved itself incapable of handling the job.

The prospect, then, is for some version of ?cut and run?, however well disguised, and however dishonourable. It would not be the first time in American history: Bill Clinton in Somalia, Ronald Reagan in Lebanon, and Gerald Ford in Vietnam come to mind?not to mention the 1876 election compromise that withdrew Union troops from the South, condemning Southern blacks to almost another century of servitude. And for a worst-case scenario, there was Britain's abrupt withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which forced millions to flee their ancestral homes, with roughly 1m dying in the attempt.

William Burke

San Francisco

SIR ? You argue that the announcement of an American withdrawal will weaken our leverage over the internal politics of Iraq. However, the opposite is equally plausible. As long as Iraq's leaders think America will keep its forces in the country indefinitely they will continue to refuse to compromise and turn a blind eye to sectarian violence. Maybe the prospect of American forces being pulled out will concentrate Iraqi minds. But because either option could fail, isn't it sensible for the United States to choose the one that will minimise costs and the loss of American lives?

Richard Greene

Hopewell, New Jersey

Marking the line
SIR ? It is incorrect to refer to the ?Green Line? as ?Israel's internationally recognised border? (?Rowing Rabbis (cont.)?, December 9th). The Green Line represents the ceasefire lines drawn up in 1949 after the Arab-Israeli war, and up until 1967 Israel's Arab neighbours never recognised this as an international border. Following the Six Day War, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 that called for Israel to withdraw from ?territories occupied in the recent conflict? (note it did not say all territories) in return for a permanent peace agreement and termination of all hostilities. It did not call for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line, nor recognise this as Israel's permanent border.

The language of the resolution was carefully drafted to allow for territorial adjustments as part of any peace negotiations, and this is reflected in the agreements that Israel eventually signed with Egypt and Jordan, the Oslo Accords signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Ehud Barak's proposals to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. The recent proposal made by Ehud Olmert to resume negotiations with the Palestinians is also consistent with this principle.

Raphael Lerner

Glencoe, Illinois

Not a nation apart
SIR ? You completely missed the subtle nature of the motion on Quebec passed by Canada's Parliament (?Nation bidding?, December 2nd). It recognised that the Québécois do form a nation within a united Canada, but because Québécois are French-speaking Canadians, tied to French culture and ethnic ancestry from France, the motion refers only to a people with no mention of provincial boundaries. Many Quebeckers are not Québécois. As such, the prime minister, Stephen Harper, has assuaged the pride of the separatists, yet given them no ground to further their ends of separating the province of Quebec from Canada.

Matt Hurst

Ottawa, Canada

SIR ? A few years ago I sat next to a young Quebecker on an aeroplane and she explained to me how she saw herself as living in a distinct society, but one which was not simply French. She had once visited Paris, where she had been treated to haute cuisine at a restaurant of the utmost elegance, causing her to feel part of something very superior to Anglophone Canada. After the meal she slipped down to the ladies' room and there, in a moment of horrified revelation, she had understood that she was also a North American.

Edward Lidderdale

London

Primary state of mind
SIR ? Regarding Lexington's thoughts on whether the Republicans can become a national party again (?A national party no more?? December 2nd). I'm a ?Live Free or Die? New Hampshire gun-owning libertarian fiscal conservative Republican-leaning independent who has voted a straight Democratic ticket for two elections in a row now. That makes me just the sort of voter Lexington had in mind. I have always found the way that the GOP won the South distasteful, but under George Bush the party has finally become an organisation I would be ashamed to support in any way. Karl Rove is not a genius and now his luck is running out. Perhaps the Republicans need to remember their first and greatest president, who proved conclusively that the South, for all its delusions, doesn't amount to much alone. Otherwise, we'll just have to bring back the Whigs.

Bruce Morley

Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire

A bird's tale
SIR ? Naile Berna Kovuk's indignation at Turkey being named after poultry is misplaced (Letters, December 2nd). The bird was actually named after the presumed country of origin, not vice versa. When first encountered, the turkey was confused with guinea-fowl, known then as turkeycocks. They were introduced to Europe from their native Africa via Turkey. The rest is (etymological) history.

Michael Metcalf

New York

SIR ? English merchants in Turkey discovered a most delicious bird to eat and exported it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a ?Turkey bird? or simply a turkey. There are odd names for a turkey in other languages as well, where the bird always seems to have come from somewhere else. In Turkey itself it is known as hindi (meaning from India), in Italy tacchino (peacock) or pollo d'India (India again); in Arabic it is called an ?Ethiopian bird?.

Tony Allwright

Killiney, Ireland

SIR ? The Poles call the same species indyk, perhaps after the French name for it, dinde (of the Indies). The Portuguese call it peru. The turkey is a truly global bird and should be used as a fitting symbol for the next round of World Trade Organisation talks.

Konrad Brodzinski

London

With Lasers and Daring, Doctors Race to Save a Young Man?s Brain

He picked up a sponge soaked in antiseptic and began scrubbing the shaved skull of Chris Ratuszny, 26, a mechanic from Lindenhurst, N.Y.

Mr. Ratuszny lay on the operating table, anesthetized and oblivious. His head jutted out past the end of the table, supported by four pins that had been screwed into his skull. The pins were attached, like spokes in a wheel, to a semicircular frame ? surreal but standard, the hardware typically used to immobilize the head for brain surgery. A thick purple line had been drawn from his neck to the top of his head, to guide the scalpels.

He was about to become the first person in the United States to undergo an operation involving the use of an excimer laser to treat a giant brain aneurysm, a dangerous ballooning of an artery that could burst and kill him or leave him with devastating brain damage. The aneurysm was too big for the most common treatments, which involve clips or metal coils; it required bypass surgery on an artery in the brain.

The laser is not approved for brain surgery in the United States, but Dr. Langer got permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use it on an emergency basis for Mr. Ratuszny (ra-TOOSH-nee) last Tuesday at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. The Dutch neurosurgeon who devised the laser procedure, Dr. Cornelius Tulleken, flew in from the Netherlands to help. He has performed the operation on about 300 patients in Europe.

Dr. Tulleken?s technique involves a seemingly small variation on the standard procedure and takes just a few minutes in an eight-hour operation. But it could make all the difference for patients like Mr. Ratuszny, said Dr. Langer, who traveled to Utrecht in 1999 to learn the procedure from Dr. Tulleken. The advantage of the laser is that it lets surgeons operate without clamping a major artery in the brain ? a step required in the standard operation, but one that can cause a stroke.

?It?s a high-risk operation in the best of hands,? Dr. Langer said.

He estimated that the laser could reduce the risk of stroke from bypass surgery for aneurysms to 12 percent, from 15 percent. But comparative studies have not been done. Some surgeons are skeptical, while others are eager to learn the technique, and it has begun to catch on in Europe, Dr. Tulleken said. A neurosurgeon from Chicago came to New York just to see how Mr. Ratuszny?s procedure was done.

The laser definitely makes the operation easier, Dr. Langer said, because just knowing that the brain arteries are still open takes enormous time pressure off the surgeon during critical parts of the operation. To him, that alone makes it worthwhile.

?If it was me, my head, and there was a new device that would allow me to have this operation without occluding an artery, that?s what I?d want,? Dr. Langer said.

Besides making operations easier, the laser may make surgery possible for some aneurysms that would otherwise be inoperable, Dr. Tulleken and Dr. Langer say. Hoping to get the device approved in the United States, Dr. Langer plans to direct a study of it at several medical centers in the United States starting in March. The hospital invited The New York Times to observe and report on the operation, whatever the outcome. Even if the device is approved, it is unlikely to come into widespread use, he said. It costs about $500,000, and giant aneurysms like Mr. Ratuszny?s are rare. Dr. Langer estimated that no more than 1,000 patients a year in the United States would need operations like Mr. Ratuszny?s.

The equipment is made by Elana, a company started by the University Medical Center in Utrecht, where Dr. Tulleken teaches. He owns no stock, he said but relatives do, as does Dr. Langer.

Three million to six million people in the United States have brain aneurysms but do not know it, according to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation in Boston. Aneurysms form when artery walls weaken, but the underlying cause is unknown. Most do not rupture.

But 30,000 people a year do suffer ruptures, with dreadful results. Half die within a month, and many survivors wind up with significant brain damage.

In Mr. Ratuszny?s case, the problem seemed to come out of nowhere. He had always been healthy. A soft-spoken, powerfully built man who works out, he has been a lifeguard at ocean beaches and served in the Army Reserves. Now, he works as a Lexus mechanic. He is recently divorced and dotes on his son, Sam, a 3-year-old with a mohawk who shares his father?s solid physique and knack for taking things apart.

One morning two years ago, when he was 24, Mr. Ratuszny woke up with an excruciating pain in his head. At first, the diagnosis was migraine, but when the usual drugs did not help, doctors ordered an M.R.I. scan.

By the time Mr. Ratuszny got home from the scanning center, he had five telephone messages waiting ? telling him to go straight to the emergency room.

He had what doctors call a giant aneurysm. A three-inch length of an artery had ballooned out to several times its normal diameter and coiled back on itself to form a tangled mass the size of a golf ball inside his head. The vessel was an especially sensitive one: the left internal carotid artery, which feeds the brain centers that control the right hand and create speech and personality.

Mr. Ratuszny was sent to Dr. Langer, the director of cerebrovascular neurosurgery at St. Luke?s-Roosevelt, Beth Israel and Long Island College Hospital.

The only way to fix such a large aneurysm would be to bypass it ? create a detour for blood to flow around it ? by taking a vein from Mr. Ratuszny?s leg and sewing its ends to the artery on either side of the aneurysm. Once the bypass was in place, the aneurysm could be sealed off with clips or stitches. It would gradually shrink.

But the operation was risky. The bypass would run from the carotid artery in the neck up over the brain and then down through the Sylvian fissure between the frontal and temporal lobes, to attach to a brain artery beyond the aneurysm. The standard operation would require cutting a hole in the brain artery and then sewing an open end of the bypass vein to the hole ? like making a T-shaped junction between pipes.

But to cut an artery, the surgeon must temporarily clamp it, or the patient will bleed to death. The clamps may have to stay on for a half-hour or even an hour. And that is where the risk comes in: cutting off blood flow to the brain can cause a stroke that leaves permanent damage.

Some patients can tolerate the clamping because they have other blood vessels that will fill in for the artery. But Mr. Ratuszny seemed to lack those collateral vessels. Dr. Langer thought he had a high risk of a serious complication like a stroke from the operation ? at least 10 percent to 15 percent. And yet the risk of doing nothing was even worse: for giant aneurysms, studies put the odds of rupture or death in one to five years at 50 percent.

Dr. Langer thought Mr. Ratuszny was a perfect candidate for Dr. Tulleken?s technique. Not only would it spare him the clamping, but it would allow Dr. Langer to attach the bypass directly to the left internal carotid, which he considered a better repair method than the standard operation. But the laser was not yet available in the United States.

Mr. Ratuszny?s aneurysm appeared stable, and Dr. Langer thought it would be safe to postpone the operation until the Food and Drug Administration allowed him to use the laser in a study. Mr. Ratuszny agreed to wait, hoping for a safer operation, even though the aneurysm was causing double vision and tremendous pain in his head that sometimes put him in the hospital.

Dr. Tulleken, gaunt and wry at 66, is a man of formidable eyebrows, and a fan of Spinoza and The New York Review of Books. He spends one day a week in the laboratory practicing microsurgical techniques, and he believes that neurosurgery should not be ?rude,? because the brain does not like being manhandled or having its blood supply clamped off.

This belief led him to devise a new technique. The idea is deceptively simple: instead of cutting a hole in the brain artery and then sewing a vein to it, he sews first and cuts later. That way, the artery does not have to be temporarily clamped, and blood flow to the brain is not cut off. A excimer laser is used to make the hole because it can be slipped into a tight space on the tip of a slender tube and makes a clean cut that stays open without burning nearby tissue.

Late in November, Dr. Langer was shocked to see that Mr. Ratuszny?s aneurysm had expanded markedly. It was pressing dangerously on his optic nerve and bulging into his nasal sinus, where it had actually eaten through a bony wall. Mr. Ratuszny?s left eyelid drooped, light hurt his eye and he had such severe pain in the eye, face, neck and head that it sometimes made him vomit.

The artery was stretched thin. Dr. Langer ordered Mr. Ratuszny to head for the hospital if his nose began to bleed, because it could be the first sign of a hemorrhage.

The operation could not be postponed any longer. Mr. Ratuszny?s father was prepared to take out a second mortgage on his house to pay to have the surgery in Utrecht, but the F.D.A. allowed Dr. Langer to use the device this one time.

A few days before the operation, Mr. Ratuszny said he was eager to get it over with. ?If that thing blows up in my head, it?s not something I?m going to survive,? he said.

Dr. Langer said, ?The best case is he goes back to work in about a month and can be a dad, for the rest of his life.?

At 2:40 p.m. last Tuesday, everyone in the operating room was ordered to put on safety glasses. A two-minute countdown was begun by Michael Münker, a physicist from Elana, the Dutch company that makes the laser-tipped tubes.

?Thirty seconds left,? he called. ?Fifteen seconds. Five seconds.?

It was not quite ?Star Wars.? The laser fired ? invisibly. All eyes were on monitors that showed a magnified image of the surgical field. As Dr. Langer withdrew the laser, a flap of tissue cut from the artery wall was stuck to the tube and blood began to flow. The artery was open.

Working through the microscope, using long forceps to grip a fine, curved needle, Dr. Tulleken began the delicate task of sewing the ends of a vein together to complete the bypass. A resident watched, awed by his deft hands.

By 5 p.m., Dr. Michael Tobias, a neurosurgery resident, was fastening metal plates to Mr. Ratuszny?s skull with a screwdriver to replace a 4-inch-by-2-inch oval of bone that had been cut out with a saw.

At 6 p.m., the anesthesiologist, Dr. Jonathan Lesser, prepared to wake Mr. Ratuszny, who had been under anesthesia for more than nine hours.

For brain surgeons, the biggest worry comes not during the operation, but after. They watch the waking patient with hope and dread, searching but not wanting to find signs of a stroke. Can he talk? Move his limbs? Respond to commands?

Almost as if he were afraid to watch, Dr. Langer rested on a stool, leaning against the wall, his head bowed. He seemed unaware that he was bouncing his foot in time with a beeping monitor, matching Mr. Ratuszny?s every heartbeat.

?This is the painful part,? he said. ?Sometimes you do everything right in neurosurgery and the patient doesn?t do well.?

He had predicted that Mr. Ratuszny would most likely have some speech problems after the operation from brain swelling, but that they would be transient.

?Chris!? Dr. Lesser called loudly, standing beside operating table. ?Open your eyes, big guy!?

It took a few more rounds of yelling, but Mr. Ratuszny began to respond. His left knee rose.

?They always move the leg you?re not worried about,? Dr. Langer said.

But within moments, Mr. Ratuszny was moving all his limbs and even raising his head and shoulders, as if he might bolt up off the table. Dr. Langer leapt from the stool to his side, and he and Dr. Tobias joined the chorus: Squeeze my hand! Stick out your tongue! Groggily, Mr. Ratuszny obeyed. He mumbled a few words in answer to questions, then began shivering violently. The doctors called for extra blankets.

?Chris, you did great,? Dr. Langer said. ?You?re all done, buddy.?

As predicted, the day after the operation Mr. Ratuszny did have some speech trouble: he repeated himself and had difficulty finding the right words. But he spoke fluently and laughed at jokes, and the problems began to diminish over the next few days. In his hospital room last Friday, three days after the operation, Mr. Ratuszny greeted visitors cheerfully and said his eye pain had already decreased. By Monday, he was up and about, despite a painful infection in one arm from an intravenous line. He couldn?t wait to go home, see his son and return to work.

China 'crackdown on online games'

Online games are popular in China's internet cafes

China is enforcing more monitoring of online games after some were found to contain banned religious or political material, a state news agency reported.

The announcement adds to government controls on Chinese newspapers, television and other media.

China has more than 23 million online gamers, generating revenues of more than $850m (£440m) a year.

Distributors must now obtain approval before releasing new games, reported Xinhua news agency.

Companies must also submit monthly monitoring reports, confirming developers have not added forbidden content.

The latest round of enforcement was prompted by "a rash of problems with imported online games, some of which contain sensitive religious material or refer to territorial disputes", Xinhua said.

It said some were criticised as pornographic or too violent.

Chinese officials said distributors concealed the content of the games when applying for approval, and operators sometimes upgraded games with improper content, Xinhua reported.

Tiptoeing through a spiritual minefield

WHEN expectations are abysmally low, almost anything can come as a pleasant surprise. Barring last-minute upsets, that seemed to be the conclusion people on all sides were drawing as Benedict XVI pursued one of the trickiest diplomatic missions ever undertaken by a pope.

You are not wanted! Don't come! Don't cause tension!? screamed a headline in Turkey's noisiest Islamist newspaper, Vakit, on the eve of the papal visit to Turkey this week. In case anybody was vague about the theological differences between the world's two largest monotheistic faiths, participants in an anti-papal protest held up a placard that spelled it out: to Muslims, Jesus Christ is not the son of God, he is a prophet of Islam. Cooler-headed Turks?the great majority?were embarrassed by the stridency of their pious compatriots, but some still resented the pope's visit because it gave hotheads such a perfect opportunity to sound off.

Against this gloomy background, the set-piece encounters between the pope and Turkey's leaders, secular and religious, brought sighs of relief all round. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the mildly Islamist prime minister, showed once again his gift for drawing back from the brink of crisis by agreeing at the last minute to meet the pontiff at Ankara airport. Mr Erdogan claimed afterwards that one of Europe's most prominent Turco-sceptics had been converted into a supporter of his country's European Union membership?at a time when that flagging cause needs all the help it can get (see article). Whether Benedict really has overcome his personal doubts about Turkey's EU membership is open to question; but the new Vatican line is that, if Turkey meets the necessary conditions (including respect for Christian rights) to join the club, that can only be good.

In a gesture of personal humility that Turks found impressive, the pope also called on the country's top religious bureaucrat, Ali Bardakoglu, who looks after Muslim affairs, at his office. It was a somewhat surreal encounter: each side fielded 11 officials, like a football team, while a Turkish actress, best known for her roles in steamy films and her startling changes of hair colour, served as interpreter. But it gave the pope a chance to say what he really believes about relations with Islam: that the two faiths should have an ?authentic dialogue? and get better acquainted, while avoiding the mistake of seeming to paper over their differences.

Behind the diplomatic politesse, however, lurk some hard, unresolved issues over Turkey's relationship both with other faiths and with its potential Western partners. The day after he met the pope, Turkey's president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, said that he was blocking several provisions of a law designed both to satisfy a long-running EU demand and to respond to one of the biggest grievances of the country's religious minorities.

As passed by parliament on November 9th, the law would have made it easier for non-Muslim religious foundations, and foundations controlled by foreign interests, to acquire property?or, in cases where it had previously been confiscated by the state, to reclaim it. Over the Turkish republic's 83-year life, property worth hundreds of millions of dollars?schools, hospitals and orphanages, for example?has been appropriated from non-Muslim religious communities, and in particular from the Greek Orthodox church in Istanbul. Attempts to regain it have generally been blocked by arcane procedural and legal manoeuvres.

The president's veto on parts of the bill will hardly be seen as a kind gesture towards Europe, or to local Christians. If the avowedly Islamist Mr Erdogan had blocked the reform, it would have been interpreted as a sign of Muslim antipathy towards Christians. Coming from the president, the gesture speaks of lingering xenophobia among Turkey's secular elite.

As he made his way round Turkey, the pontiff was no doubt mindful not only of the deep differences of opinion among Turkish Muslims, but also of some highly sensitive issues in intra-Christian diplomacy that were the original objective of his trip. He first planned to come to Turkey as a guest of Patriarch Bartholomew I, the 270th archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome. The goal was to pursue closer relations between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, in which the Istanbul-based prelate ranks as first among equals.

On the face of things, the papal visit is a much-needed boost to the morale of the patriarch, whose local flock has shrunk to only a few thousand, thanks to a steady exodus of Istanbul Greeks that started after state-sponsored pogroms in the 1950s. But extravagant gestures of fraternity between pope and patriarch still upset several other parties. The first of these are Turkish nationalists, inside and outside the state, who are always suspicious that the Orthodox prelate may compromise Turkish sovereignty by trying to establish a ?Vatican state? on the soil of their republic. Also watching warily are devout Orthodox Christians around the world, who stand ready to denounce the patriarch if he appears to backslide on any doctrinal points.

Perhaps the wariest observers are the Russian authorities, both lay and clerical. As the pope has quickly found, his declared wish for rapprochement with Orthodox Christians has opened up an old fault-line in the Orthodox world between the Russians, who see themselves as top Orthodox dogs by virtue of numbers and geopolitical power, and the Istanbul patriarchate, which enjoys an historic ?primacy of honour? among Orthodox sees.

In September, when senior bishops of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox world held their first formal encounter for many years, the Catholics were embarrassed to find themselves witnessing a big Greco-Russian squabble, laced with intricate arguments over the meaning of decisions taken 1,500 years ago. In a world where politics and religion inexorably overlap, such matters affect diplomacy too.

Take the thorny issue over whether the Istanbul bishop may style himself ?ecumenical? or universal patriarch. The Turkish state says no: his followers, including an influential lobby of Greek-Americans, say yes. A fresh spat broke out only this week when the Turkish authorities declared that the patriarchate's security badges for the papal visit were invalid because they employed the E-word. Officials in Ankara admit that they are under pressure from Russia on this issue of Christian nomenclature. The message from Moscow is that Turkey's present policy suits them just fine. Pity the pope as he tiptoes around this many-cornered fight.

Conflicting opinion is what drives scientific advance

When it comes to the public communication of scientific findings a further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track. Most academic research is therefore simply boring and eccentricity less tolerated. But any form of censorship encourages complacency and discourages innovation.

The Royal Society, Britain?s scientific establishment, has just released a report on public communication of scientific findings. Journalists in search of stories and scientists anxious for publicity and research funding issue early, oversimplified or downright misleading accounts of research. Unsubstantiated claims of a link between immunisation and autism have caused distress to millions of British parents. Korea?s progress in stem cell research seems to have been won at the expense of truth and ethics.

The Society?s answers are self-restraint and peer review. Peer review is the process by which professions review their own work. Articles submitted to journals receive critical assessment from referees experienced in the field. Peer review is a bulwark against cranks, crooks and incompetents. But too much reliance on peer review carries its own dangers. Every profession defines its own concept of excellence in inward-looking ways.

Successful academics learn how to trigger the buttons that win the approval of referees. The physicist, Alan Sokal, demonstrated this by the submission of a spoof article to the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996. The content was nonsense, but the form and jargon corresponded so closely to reviewers? expectations that the contribution was accepted. Professor Sokal?s purpose was to demonstrate that standards were lower and more subjective in softer subjects than in more scientific ones and, while he was right, the problem identified was more general. All subjects, from architecture to physics, from literary criticism to economics, develop what Thomas Kuhn called paradigms ? assumptions common to all practitioners and assumed to represent universal truth until a new paradigm displaces the old.

A further step down a well defined road wins easier acceptance than a deviation from the beaten track. Most academic research is therefore boring, and more so as scholarship has become more professional, eccentricity less tolerated and peer review multiplied through processes of grant awards and research assessment. The latest idea in Britain is to make these processes routine by shifting from the costly and fallible exercise of subjective judgment to a cheaper and objective system of quantitative metrics. This can only aggravate the problems.

Big advances come through the paradigm shifts and peer review makes this difficult. The line between the crank and the genius is sometimes a fine one and may only be apparent after time has elapsed. Many Nobel Prize winners had difficulty securing early recognition. The world of today favours the competent professional ? as judged by the standards of other competent professionals. In a sense this self-reference is right: the people to decide whether astrology is good astrology are other astrologers. But they are not the people to decide whether astrology itself is any good. Judgment of the rigour and relevance of professional standards and scholarly research can never be left to professionals and scholars alone.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, an elegant suspension bridge in Washington State, carried traffic for four months in 1940. In a high wind, the flat deck acquired a beautiful wave pattern. The oscillations grew larger and larger until the roadway finally disintegrated into Puget Sound.

The trade newspaper, Engineering News-Record, was forced to retract its suggestion that the designer, Leon Moisseiff, might have been responsible. The editors apologised for any inference drawn by ?the casual reader? that ?the modern bridge engineer was remiss?.

But the perspective of ?the casual reader?, though not a substitute for peer review, is as essential as the contribution of the little boy who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. Any form of censorship, including self-censorship and censorship by fellow professionals, encourages complacency and discourages innovation. The history of modern scholarship is that, more slowly than we would wish, truth and new knowledge emerge only from a cacophony of conflicting opinions.