© 1999 Macmillan Magazines Ltd

correspondence

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Sir — Your article on the fundingdifficulties of Seattle’s Burke museum, andits bid for independence, illustrates acommon problem faced by universitynatural history museums (Nature 399, 189;1999). The article also mentioned the 100-year-old Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum ofNatural History — the largest repository ofOklahoma’s heritage. As I was offered thedirectorship of the Burke and have beendirector of the Sam Noble museum for 17years, my views may be germane.

Today, university presidents are selectedfrom a rotating pool of administrators whono longer have a deep understanding of aparticular campus. They do not possess anyspecial institutional loyalty. If they avoidoffending the governing board, raiseenrolment, and increase income, they willsucceed. Soon they will move to a moreprestigious position. A museum’s futurehinges on decisions made by these transientadministrators, but what can heritage meanto such a person, and how can such atransitory bureaucrat be expected to deal

with the special needs of an enduringinstitution?

The intangible value of scholarship bymuseum curators, educational benefits forstudents, and public outreach are smallchange for administrators focused on costsand benefits. Their concerns are the highcost of storing collections, the low fundingfor museum research, the decline of taxon-based classes that require specimens, andthe low public profile of campus museums.Does the museum produce credit hours tojustify more funds? Does it make money?Does it have public support that couldcause political problems? The answer toeach is usually ‘No’.

Nevertheless, one hears remarkablesuccess stories. The University of Oklahomahas built an outstanding $44 millionbuilding (www.snomnh.ou.edu), althoughOklahoma is a poor state. We, too, were toldthat a new museum was impossible, but wetook the project to the people and drew ontheir power for support.

University museums, as keepers of the

nation’s heritage, must develop a long-termstrategy that calls on their constituents tounderstand and support their purposes. Itis dangerous for a museum to pull awayfrom its university. Will a private boardunderstand the importance of collectionswhen not used for teaching and research?Will it only be interested in exhibits? Will itsee the need for curators?

University museums provide leadingscholars in disciplines from systematics toconservation. They train the scientists oftomorrow. Museums must not lose sight oftheir unique role — to preserve andinterpret heritage, contribute knowledge,and educate students and the public.Leaving the university violates themuseum’s raison d’être. The presentadministrators will soon be gone, but thepeople — the ultimate supporters — willremain. Museums are forever.Michael A. MaresSam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History,University of Oklahoma,Norman, Oklahoma 73072, USA

Bureaucrats pose threat to museums

What price ‘prestige’in publishing?

Sir — I support Mark Riley in his protestagainst the outrageous price increases ofsome journals, but I do not think that all theblame rests with the commercial publishers(Nature 399, 623; 1999). They are in thebusiness of making profits. We should askourselves why the scientific community letsthese people run our research journals totheir, rather than our, advantage.

The answer is in the fallacious system of‘journal prestige’ which scientists havecreated. Nothing stops us fromcommunicating our research resultsthrough less costly systems, such aspreprints, electronic self-publishing, andsmall-scale journals run by interest groups.

But, unless a paper is published in a‘prestigious’ journal, it does not count formuch for grants, promotions, invited talks,and so on. This is how we let commercialpublishers keep a grip on our throats. It iswithin our capacity to change it, if we wish.And, unless we do so, the commercialpublishers cannot be blamed if they run ourbusiness as they see fit.

Although perceptual changes will bedifficult to achieve by legislation fromabove, some much-needed adjustment inthe research community can be started atthe grassroots level. For example, any‘official’ use of journal prestige ranking

Icelanders opt out ofgenetic database

Sir — In a News article1 the ethicalguidelines for a Swedish biobank werecompared to the lack of ethicalconsiderations in the Health SectorDatabase (HSD) law in Iceland. TheIcelandic project, proposed by deCODEGenetics, Inc, fares poorly in thecomparison, mostly because the lawpermits the granting of an exclusive licenceto a single company to do genetic and other

should be resisted or drastically minimized.Our obsession with numerical ranking ofalmost everything has gone too far andoften brings more harm than good.

Second, the research funding systemshould encourage publication in localjournals. In Canada, for example, it isconsidered almost a disgrace to publish inthe ‘Canadian Journal of XYZ’ in somedisciplines. Pressure to publish in onlysome celebrated journals has become anunhealthy obsession fuelled by the rewardsystem in academic institutions.

Finally, the idea of discount publishingat the lowest possible commercial ratesshould be considered.Alexander A. BerezinDepartment of Engineering Physics, McMasterUniversity, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4L7

research on the whole-population database,without requiring informed consent.Instead the term presumed consent isintroduced, leaving an opting-outpossibility for those who fill in the correctforms.

Jeffrey Gulcher and Kari Stefansson ofdeCODE object to the comparison2. Someinaccuracies in their letter deservecorrection. First, they state that, accordingto the HSD law, medical information can belinked to genealogy and geneticinformation only with informed consent.But informed consent is not mentioned inthe law3. No ethics committee will have theauthority to require consent, unlike in theSwedish project.

Second, they state that “the bill grantsdeCODE the exclusive right to market thisanonymous database outside Iceland, butnot the exclusive right to use the database”.This is also incorrect. Although the HSDlaw was sponsored by deCODE thecompany is not mentioned in it, and thelicence has not been granted yet. Moreimportantly, the database will not beanonymous since it will contain personalidentifiers which, although encoded, can beused to identify individuals4.

Third, the law grants the licensee theexclusive rights to create and operate thedatabase, and says nothing about the accessof other researchers, contrary to whatGulcher and Stefansson claim.

Fourth, the authors say that “deCODEobtained its licence to construct and run the

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708 NATURE | VOL 400 | 19 AUGUST 1999 | www.nature.com

‘Snowball Earth’ theorystill stands

Sir — George Williams1 defends the high-obliquity hypothesis for low-latitudeglaciation near sea level during theProterozoic2. He criticizes the ‘snowballEarth’ hypothesis3 on the grounds that globalglaciation would be accompanied by drasticlowering of sea level. Sea level is loweredwhen ocean water is sequestered as land ice,but the volume of land ice that would exist ina ‘snowball Earth’ is uncertain because thehydrologic cycle would be severely reduced ifthe oceans were frozen over4.

There is clear evidence for emergence andhiatus during the Marinoan glaciation (~600Myr ago) in Australia5, “expressed by anerosional disconformity, in places with large-scale channelling”. The incised channels are~150 metres deep6, which would represent aminimum for the lowering of sea levelassuming the land was depressed by glacialice. This exceeds the lowering of sea levelaccompanying any Phanerozoic glaciation.

Williams1 points to the presence ofseasonal freeze-thaw structures7, which hesays could not form near the Equator

health-care database through thedemocratic process”. But importantchanges were made to the bill in parliament,without debate. For example, the bill nowallows the licensee to connect the medicaldatabase to a genetic database, withoutrequiring informed consent. The warningsof nearly all the independent expert groupsthat were asked to comment on the bill wereignored3. Our small society was not able towithstand deCODE’s expensiveinformation campaign.

Now the state-controlled banks havepurchased almost half of the US venturecapitalists’ original investment in deCODE,increasing concern about the close tiesbetween deCODE and the government.

The European Union’s Data ProtectionCommissioners recommended that theIcelandic authorities should reconsider theproject in the light of the EuropeanConvention on Human Rights. This wasnot done, and the consequences are lack ofconsent, lack of traditional ethics controland lack of freedom to withdrawinformation entered into the database.

More than 11,000 Icelanders have optedout of the HSD database. Many doctorshave promised not to send informationabout patients to the database, so we believeit will not be created as originally envisaged.Sweden’s UmanGenomics seems to bedoing a much better job.Pétur HaukssonMannvernd, Association for Ethics in Medicine andScience, PO Box 94, Reykjavik 112, Iceland

Sir — Gulcher and Stefansson’s letter2 is astriking demonstration of the corporateculture of companies such as deCODEGenetics and British Biotech, and theirdifficulty in telling the story straight5.

To assert that the HSD law was approvedthrough a democratic processunderestimates the steamrollering power ofa large government majority. Warningsfrom the Icelandic Medical Association,local and international geneticists, andprivacy experts were ignored. The speed ofthe Icelandic legislative process precludedbalanced and informed analysis of acomplicated issue. It is sheer spin-doctoringto suggest that this over-speedy, ill-thought-through legislation expressesinformed community consent.

Using encrypted identifiers for acomprehensive dynamic databasedescribing the health status, genealogy andgenotype of a population without informedconsent opens up an ethical Pandora’s box.Skúli SigurdssonInstitute of Cultural Studies, Humboldt University,Sophienstrasse 22a, 10178 Berlin, Germany1. Abbott, A. Nature 400, 3 (1999).

2. Gulcher, J. R. & Stefansson, K. Nature 400, 307–308 (1999).

3. http://www.mannvernd.is/english

4. Anderson, R. Br. Med. J. 319, 59 (1999).

5. Nature Biotechnol. 16, 491 (1998).

Corals resist extinctionby global warming

Sir — Coral reefs form complex ecosystemsthat easily reflect changes in environmentalconditions. It is therefore alarming thatmany reefs show signs of bleaching, whichcan be interpreted as the beginning ofdegeneration. Peter Pockley reports thatexperts ascribe the degeneration to globalwarming, and predict the disappearance ofmost reefs within a century (Nature 400, 98;1999). This prediction may be based onbiological considerations, but it seems tocontradict geological data.

Coral reefs have survived geologicalperiods with considerably higher — andothers with considerably lower —temperatures than we face now or in thenear future. The reefs also survived sea levelfluctuations between more than 10 metresabove the present level and more than 100metres below. So it appears from geologicalhistory that corals — like most organisms— are well capable of adapting to changingenvironments, even though they may beless flourishing during a period of change.

The geological past shows that globalwarming in itself is not a threat to reefs.A. J. (Tom) van LoonGeocom, P. O. Box 336, 6860 AH Oosterbeek,The Netherlands Visit heaven and hell

ahead of schedule

Sir — It is surprising to read thatcreationists in Kansas are lobbying the stateboard of education to include their views inschool science teaching1. A literal reading ofthe Bible can sometimes be absurd, and itcontains many numerical data that reflectonly the views of an earlier age. Thesenumbers can be the origin of funnycalculations2. A colleague and I published asquib in which, using paragraphs from thebiblical books of Isaiah and Revelation, thetemperatures of heaven and hell werecalculated as 504.5 and 716.6 K respectively3.

The calculation was discussed widely inthe media. In the UK Sunday Times (9August 1998), a geophysicist suggestedpossible locations, based on our results.Hell might be the hydrothermal vents onthe bottom of the ocean, and heaven couldbe the thermosphere. It must be satisfyingfor creationists that such places can now bereached, thanks to the work of scientists.Jorge Mira-PérezDepartamento de Fisica Aplicada,Universidade de Santiago de Compostela,E-15706 Santiago de Compostela, Spain

1. Dalton, R. Nature 398, 453 (1999).

2. Peil, K. Nature 399, 522 (1999).

3. Mira-Pérez, J. & Vina, J. Physics Today 51 (7), 96 (1998).

because of low seasonal temperaturevariation. In fact, periglacial ice-wedgestructures occur at 20 °N latitude in Hawaii8

and near the Equator on MountKilimanjaro in Tanzania9. They areattributed to diurnal freeze-thaw cycles andmay be shallower than those associated withthe Marinoan glaciation7. Ice-wedgepolygons are less well developed than linearice wedges in the mountains because ofsurface slopes.

The ‘snowball Earth’ theory accounts forother features of the Neoproterozoicsedimentary record3 — banded ironformations, post-glacial cap carbonates,and large carbon-isotopic variations. Thehigh-obliquity hypothesis provides noexplanation for these features.Paul F. HoffmanDepartment of Earth Sciences, Harvard University,Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA1. Williams, G. E. Nature 398, 555–556 (1999).2. Williams, G. E. Earth Sci. Rev. 34, 1–45 (1993).3. Hoffman, P. F. et al. Science 281, 1342–1346 (1998).4. Hoffman, P. F. & Schrag, D. P. Science 284, 1087a (1999).5. Preiss, W. V. Geol. Surv. S. Aust. Bull. 53, 438 (1987).6. Dyson, I. A. & von der Borch, C. C. in Incised-valley Systems:

Origin and Sedimentary Sequences (eds Dalrymple, R. W. et al.)209–222 (Soc. Sediment.Geol. Spec. Publ. 51, Tulsa, OK, 1994).

7. Williams, G. E. Precambrian Res. 32, 233–242 (1986).8. Gregory, H. E. & Wentworth, C. K. Bull. Geol. Soc. Am. 48,

1719–1742 (1937).9. Downie, C. & Wilkinson, P. The Geology of Kilimanjaro (Dept

Geol., Univ. Sheffield, Sheffield, 1972).