A piece in Ian Jack’s The Country Formerly known as Great Britain (p.143) reminds me that Field Marshal Wavell (1883-1950), published a popular anthology of poetry in 1944 called Other Men’s Flowers. This had a certain novelty value and the book’s continuing sales success (still in print today) may owe something to the surprise factor. The contents are the predictable canon of safe, mostly pre-1900 poetry – the kind that a stiff-upper-lip English military man might like.

Wavell is generally regarded as bit of a flop: an old-fashioned soldier. He was not a charismatic war leader and was replaced by Montgomery before the crucial battle of El Alamein. Wavell might have been an awkward stick and his taste in poetry uninspiring but he had one flash of pure genius: on 23 April 1941, he had scribbled a note, a facsimile of which is preserved in the War Office files:

Is it a wild idea that a tank could be camouflaged to look like a lorry from air by light canvas screens over top?  It would be useful; during approach march etc

Please have it considered.

This was more than considered it was implemented as the Sunshield and hundreds of them were used in elaborate decoys before the great battle of El Alamein. Sunshields were erected and at night tanks moved into position under them. Where the tanks had been, they were replaced by dummies. Churchill didn’t have much time for Wavell: meeting him was like “being in the presence of the chairman of a gold club”. But when the battle was won, Churchill paid tribute to “a marvelous system of camouflage”: “The 10th Corps, which he [the enemy] had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.”

The story of Wavell and the Sunshields and other war ruses is told in Dazzled and Deceived.

The story of the hour is the prospect of curing mitochondrial diseases by implanting a third person’s mitochondrial genes in an egg during IVF. It’s controversial because it raises the spectre of human genetic engineering and would require new legislation to legalise it. But a bit of background will help us here.

Mitochondria are the cell’s batteries, little structures inside every cell that provide our energy. They have a most curious property in that they have their own DNA, separate from the rest of our DNA, that is only inherited from the mother. The other oddity about the mitochondrion is its genesis. It is now virtually certain that mitochondria were once free living single celled creatures. Life in those days – we’re talking of around 2 billion years ago – consisted only of single-celled creatures: life was a matter of one cell engulfing another and digesting it: the war of the cells. It wasn’t a pretty world, by our standards, and this went on for about 1 billion years before multicellular organism began to evolve. But sometimes, instead of one cell consuming another, both cells found an accommodation: one continued to live inside another and both benefited: symbiosis. This also happened in the line that led to plants: the green of plants comes from the photosynthetic chloroplasts, also once free-living organisms.

Over time, many of the genes in the mitochondria have been lost or been incorporated into the host genome – only 37 remain. But the mitochondria are vital – if they seriously malfunction, life is not possible.

So when genetic modification of mitochondria is proposed what we are really talking about is not human genetic modification but a form of bacterial modification: the bacterium just happens to be part of us. We don’t scruple to tinker with our most basic bits of plumbing. If the heart is failing we implant a pacemeaker. This is not considered to be dehumanizing. But tinkering with our genes is thought by some to transgress human integrity. This is illogical. The team in question is at Newcastle University and the head, Professor Doug Turnbull, put it succinctly: "What we've done is like changing the battery on a laptop: the energy supply now works properly, but none of the information on the hard drive has been changed”.

Photosynthesis is the most important chemical reaction on the planet. It powers all the living energy systems on earth, allowing plants to grow, animals to move and cycles of weather to support life. It produces the biomass needed to feed the animals (including us) and also provides us with all of our materials, bar minerals and metals. Finally, through fossil biomass it provides most of our transport, home and industrial energy.

The pressure on natural photosynthetic systems and exhaustion of fossil stocks make direct mimicking of photosynthesis a key goal. The reaction is purely electrochemical- there is no vitalist living magic about it, so we ought to be able to copy it.

There are many current strategies but the most promising and imaginative is Carlo Montemagno’s. He has harnessed modules from three totally separate living systems – the universal ATP energy motor from bacteria; the light harvesting pigment bacteriorhodopsin from Halbacterium salinarium and a remarkable foam from the Tungara frog. Lest you think that since these are all from living systems, life is required, Montemagno has created the same effect using block copolymers instead of the foam. The advantage of the foam is that one can now envisage huge vats of foam photosynthesis plants, with the glucose being drawn off for further processing.

These separate systems work happily together, with light and simple phosphates, to build biomass. Industrialised, these light-harvesting biomass-creating foams could operate in barren regions, leaving fertile land for food production.

In March, Montemagno’s foam won the $50,000 Earth Award.

It is high time we learnt this trick. Rather shamingly,another animal has beaten us to the goal of exploiting photosynthesis. The sea slug Elysia chlorotica  feeds on algae and it has evolved to incorporate some of the algal genes, allowing it to live without feeding. The slugs are appropriately green in colour. .

We don’t have to turn our own bodies green but the slugs show that the plants’ trick can be harnessed outside the plant context. Perhaps we should pension off the world “sluggish” and get ourselves up to pace with light harvesting.

 

Jonathan Latham's Guardian article today suggests that genes are mostly NOT responsible for diseases. He cites the relative failure of the Human Genome Project, now in its 10th year since partial completion, to produce medical benefits.

This attitude is highly irresponsible, feeding a fear of things genetic (as in GM food) that is second only to thing nuclear. People forget, or never knew, that genes don’t simply set you going as a human, with your parental inheritance etc. They are active all the time in every cell making the chemicals the body needs to function normally. In a healthy person, only a limited number of the 25,000 or so genes are active in any one type of cell. That way they can make just the chemicals needed to metabolize sugars, or create the light-sensing pigments of the eye, or grow nails or protect against infections. If a gene gets out of control a body function may be compromised or cancer may result.

As far as the human genome project goes, it is well known that a limited number of serious diseases are caused by a single gene errors (so-called snips – single nucleotide polymorphisms). Some of these are :Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis type 1, Marfan syndrome, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease,  Hemophilia A, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome as well as common and less serious conditions such as male pattern baldness and red-green color blindness. These are the low hanging fruit

Many other serious diseases – such as diabetes, heart diseases – Alzheimer’s, are multi-gene diseases and much harder to understand. Of course many conditions are caused by infective organisms or environmental toxins but these all still have to interact with the body’s genetic mechanisms. You can’t study these without taking the gene cascades into account.

I fear that Latham’s article will encourage the obscurantist tendency and greatly hinder medical research.

Libya has caught the RAF on the hop. In the cuts, most of the Tornadoes and all the Harriers were to be stood down, leaving the Typhoon as the prime front line aircraft. But the Typhoon was designed as an interceptor and there have been no dogfights in Libya – attacking tanks and other armour on the ground is the task. The Eurofighter, expensively designed as a state of the art dogfighter, was already in the process of being clumsily adapted for ground attack because the RAF's designated ground attack plane, the US F35 Joint Strike Fighter is late and won’t be here for several years.  

It has been obvious, at least since the Gulf War in 1991, that in most likely combats ground attack is vital and dogfights more or less a thing of the past. Yet the government persisted with a policy that created this enormous hole in the RAF’s capability.

James Hamilton Patterson's magnificent Empire of the Clouds – how Britain lost its once great aircraft industry – reminds me that we’ve been her before. In 1945, the government decided that no new fighter plane would be needed till 1957. Within 5 years they were fighting the Korean War and had to buy 428 (yes 428!) Canadian-made versions of the US F86 Sabre. There followed an appalling tale of cancelled projects, every botch-up unimaginable, from then on, up to the Typhoon disaster.

Perhaps naming the Eurofighter Typhoon was a jinx? The first Typhoon, the Hawker plane of the second half of WW2 was a fearsome ground attack plane, wreaking havoc on German lines after D Day. Admittedly, the original Typhoon was also designed as an interceptor and adapted but that was easier in the days of string and sealing wax. Today, if you want a ground-attack plane it is better to design one.

What did it feel like to win the Warwick Prize? I feel I have to borrow Joyce Cary’s words from The Horse’s Mouth: “A rapid glow, resembling a measles rash, broke out all over my body. And I said to myself. This is not only fame it is self-satisfaction. I shall now be able to leave off my winter vest, at least for the summer”.

I first became interested in mimicry over 25 years ago when I was editing natural history encyclopaedias. The most interesting creatures seemed to be those that were trying to be something else – butterflies like leaves, plants like stones, alligators with little wriggly worms as a lure inside their gaping mouths. I started to see mimicry everywhere and developed the theory that the sperm whale’s impossibly slender lower jaw was a mimic of the tentacles of the giant squid it fed on. The squid were lured by this appendage and were no match for the leviathan.

I published the article in New Scientist and Heathcoat Williams later republished it in his book Whale Nation. The cetologists have kept mum on the subject to this day. In that Horse Mouth mood after the prize, I was idly googling when the sperm whale jaw article popped up, in facsimile. New Scientist’s archive has been digitized and is available, free, online in this evocative form, ,mimic the print issue. I was able to read again all my early efforts which eventually led to Dazzled and Deceived. That’s self satisfaction – even if it did take two and half decades.