If Charles Darwin were alive today, he would be “appalled” at the impact human beings have had on the natural world in the past century. But he might have been impressed by email and the electric light. And he would have been thrilled that fossil discoveries during the past few decades proved him right on his idea that humankind originated in Africa.

Speaking at Iziko Museums earlier this week, Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes said that during his life Darwin saw the “super fecundity” of nature, its overwhelming abundance and its ability to survive.

“There was little awareness of the human impact on the natural environment (in the mid-19th Century), even though there was a lot of industrial pollution and mining damage relative to the time,” Keynes said.

“(Today), he would have seen just how humans have been able to destroy almost every place in the world. There are few places left that are truly pristine.”

Keynes joined Darwin biographer Prof Janet Browne and local scientists in a panel discussion to consider what about the modern world might have surprised Darwin, if he were alive today, and what might not have. The discussion was part of a lecture series which recognised the humanity of the naturalist who was born 200 years ago, and published the groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection exactly 150 years. The discussion was hosted by the Africa Genome Education Institute and the University of Cape Town (UCT) Division of Human Genetics.

Please download the complete presentation by Dr Wilmot James.

• Darwin200final_script_291008.pdf
• IOOCT3008.pdf

Radio astronomy

I have learnt the little science I know at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) when I spent 2003-2004 there as their Moore Visiting Professor in the Humanities. Caltech manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the agency responsible for unmanned space flights like the Mars Rovers.

It is also is one of leading science institutions in the world, having produced 25 science laureates (South Africa as a whole has produced 4, to give the figure some perspective). It is on the high end of physics, biology, chemistry, enginee-ring and astronomy.

It is there that I first met the South African astronomer Tony Readhead. Readhead runs an extraordinary observatory in the Andes. He made his expertise available to the South African astronomy community, helping with our bid for the Square Kilometer Array (SQA) for example.

The SQA will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. It will consist of thousands of dishes and collecting devices acting as one and covering a square kilometer. The competition is down to Australia and South Africa. The outcome will be announced by 2012.

Reporting discoveries...

The model of science journalism is the New York Times’ Tuesday edition. Four pages of the best science journalism usually accompanied by more topically directed health coverage. Quality is superb, because the journalists have science degrees and know what they are writing about.

There are other newspapers – West European largely – that also take science journalism seriously. Science breakthroughs make great news. Some developments, like the 2008 announcement of the particle physics laboratory called CERN, were spectacular.

Public interest in science coverage is for the high-tech junkies and for those individuals interested in health-related breakthroughs. This is why science and health journalism usually go together. More recently, with climate change issues on the rise, environmental science is increasingly popular.

In 1993, after four years of research, Napoleone Ferrara had a breakthrough while studying tumour-development in mice. He had discovered an inhibitor for tumour angiogenesis, the process by which cancer grows uncontrollably in the body.

Gordon Ide had identified that new blood vessel development was essential to providing oxygen and nutrients for tumour growth back in the early 1900s. Ferrara was first find to a molecular inhibitor for vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a main protein involved in inducing angiogenesis.

Genentech, where Ferrara worked, immediately set about the lengthy process of clinical trials on a number of related cancers. Calamity struck in September 2002, when the drug, now called bevacizumab, failed to meet its primary efficacy endpoint of progression-free survival in a phase III breast cancer trial.

In 2004, they finally hit success. A trial consisting of 925 patients diagnosed with previously untreated metastatic colon cancer indicated that patients on bevacizumab had a median end-point survival time of five months longer than those without. This was the best result ever seen in a Phase III trial for any drug.

The FDA approved bevacizumab, now under the name of Avastin, for colorectal cancer treatment on 26 February 2004.

Unintended consequences

Autumn is here. The angle of light fall is different. The quality appears sharper perhaps because there is more moisture in the air.

Nature smells differently this time of the year. The fragrance of Table Mountain is unmistakably that of autumn.The smell is the sum total of all of natural olfactory molecules pumped out this time of the year by the varieties of fynbos. Add the smell of the earth and of natural decay. The most striking to us is the wonderfully medicinal aroma of buchu. The normal seasonal changes in their biochemistries prompt the expression of greater or lesser smells.

There is a website that gives instructions about how to make a house smell like Autumn. Take orange peels, marigold flower heads, dried apples, cloves, cinnamon chips, allspice and orange essential oils, cook them, dry them and stuff the stuff into sachets. I think it is safe to say that we are talking here of the smell of Autumn in North America.

So, there is as usual normal natural variation in the smell of Autumn. They all though signal to the human body to prepare for the coming of winter. As for all other organisms that must modify their lifestyles seasonally, our bodies respond powerfully and viscerally to these natural cues even though we may not be aware of them.