The boys and their toys -- gender and war in Iraq

Although there has been much comment about the jingoistic nationalism, triumphalism and lack of balance in American news coverage in the war in Iraq, little notice has been given to a feature that oozed from just about every story -- the heavily macho undercurrent in much of the journalism. The following excerpt from the Daily Telegraph offers an interesting commentary on this dimension of the shabby reporting characteristic of today's brain dead news troops.


Kate Adie attacks 'macho' Gulf war coverage

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 19/04/2003)

Kate Adie, the former BBC chief news correspondent,
has criticised the "macho" coverage of the Gulf war,
which she said ignored rape, rarely sought out a
woman's viewpoint and patronised female soldiers.

Miss Adie, who made her reputation as a war
correspondent in the last Gulf war, said the conflict
was a determinedly "Boy's Own area", with tabloid
newspapers in particular retaining an 18th-century
view of women.

"Time and again I have been conscious of a
wholesale concentration on the technical, tactical
aspects of warfare, the anorak syndrome, small
boys' fascination with toys," she told a Royal Society
of Arts debate in Manchester.

"It means that those things which conventionally
interest the male audience are concentrated on, and
women disappear from a landscape in which tanks
are rolling and missiles shooting."

Miss Adie said women who were not soldiers were
frequently depicted as miserable, helpless victims. A
typical camera shot was of elderly women in
shadows sitting forlorn next to ruined houses.

"Women fade into the background of the actual
action but they might have opinions that they wish
to add. But there is noticeable embarrassment if
women intrude into what is conventionally a male
playing field still."

Questions on the origins of the SARS virus

The excerpt below comes from an essay published recently by the Institute of Science in Society.

SARS and Genetic Engineering?

The complete sequence of the SARS virus is now available, confirming it is a new coronavirus unrelated to any previously
known. Has genetic engineering contributed to creating it? Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins call for an investigation.

The World Health Organisation, which played the key role in coordinating the research, formally announced on 16 April that a
new pathogen, a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS).

"The pace of SARS research has been astounding," said Dr. David Heymann, Executive Director, WHO Communicable Diseases
programmes. "Because of an extraordinary collaboration among laboratories from countries around the world, we now know with
certainty what causes SARS."

But there is no sign that the epidemic has run its course. By 21 April, at least 3 800 have been infected in 25 countries with
more than 200 dead. The worst hit are China, with 1 814 infected and 79 dead, Hong Kong, 1 380 infected and 94 dead, and
Toronto, 306 infected, 14 dead.

A cluster of SARS patients in Hong Kong with unusual symptoms has raised fears that the virus may be mutating, making the
disease more severe. According to microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung, at the University of Hong Kong, the 300 patients from a
SARS hot spot, the Amoy Gardens apartment complex, were more seriously ill than other patients: three times as likely to suffer
early diarrhoea, twice as likely to need intensive care and less likely to respond to a cocktail of anti-viral drugs and steroids.
Even the medical staff infected by the Amoy Gardens patients were more seriously ill.

John Tam, a microbiologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studying the gene sequences from these and other patients
suspects a mutation leading to an altered tissue preference of the virus, so it can attack the gut as well as the lungs.

The molecular phylogenies published 10 April in the New England Journal of Medicine were based on small fragments from the
polymerase gene (ORF 1b) (see Box), and have placed the SARS virus in a separate group somewhere between groups 2 and 3.
However, antibodies to the SARS virus cross react with FIPV, HuCV229E and TGEV, all in Group 1. Furthermore, the SARS virus
can grow in Vero green monkey kidney cells, which no other coronavirus can, with the exception of porcine epidemic diarrhea
virus, also in Group 1.

Coronaviruses

Coronaviruses are spherical, enveloped viruses infecting numerous species of mammals and birds. They contain a set of
four essential structural proteins: the membrane (M) protein, the small envelope (E) protein, the spike (S) glycoprotein,
and the nucleocapside (N) protein. The N protein wraps the RNA genome into a ‘nucleocapsid’ that’s surrounded by a
lipid membrane containing the S, M, and E proteins. The M and E proteins are essential and sufficient for viral envelope
formation. The M protein also interacts with the N protein, presumably to assemble the nucleocapsid into the virus.
Trimers (3 subunits) of the S protein form the characteristic spikes that protrude from the virus membrane. The spikes
are responsible for attaching to specific host cell receptors and for causing infected cells to fuse together.

The coronavirus genome is a an infectious, positive-stranded RNA (a strand that’s directly translated into protein) of
about 30 kilobases, and is the largest of all known RNA viral genomes. The beginning two-thirds of the genome contain
two open reading frames ORFs, 1a and 1b, coding for two polyproteins that are cleaved into proteins that enable the
virus to replicate and to transcribe. Downstream of ORF 1b are a number of genes that encode the structural and
several non-structural proteins.

Known coronaviruses are placed in three groups based on similarities in their genomes. Group 1 contains the porcine
epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), canine coronavirus (CCV), feline
infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) and human coronovirus 229E (HuCV229E); Group 2 contains the avian infectious
bronchitis virus (AIBV) and turkey coronavirus; while Group 3 contains the murine hepatitis virus (MHV) bovine
coronavirus (BCV), human coronavirus OC43, rat sialodacryoadenitis virus, and porcine hemagglutinating
encephomyelitis virus.


Where does the SARS virus come from? The obvious answer is recombination, which can readily occur when two strains of
viruses infect a cell at the same time. But neither of the two progenitor strains is known, says Luis Enjuanes from the
Universidad Autonoma in Madrid, Spain, one of the world leaders in the genetic manipulation of coronaviruses.

Although parts of the sequence appeared most similar to the bovine coronavirus (BCV) and the avian infectious bronchitis virus
(AIBV) (see "Bio-Terrorism & SARS", this series), the rest of the genome appear quite different.

Could genetic engineering have contributed inadvertently to creating the SARS virus? This point was not even considered by
the expert coronavirologists called in to help handle the crisis, now being feted and woed by pharmaceutical companies eager to
develop vaccines.

A research team in Genomics Sciences Centre in Vancouver, Canada, has sequenced the entire virus and posted it online 12
April. The sequence information should now be used to investigate the possibility that genetic engineering may have contributed
to creating the SARS virus.

If the SARS virus has arisen through recombined from a number of different viruses, then different parts of it would show
divergent phylogenetic relationships. These relationships could be obscured somewhat by the random errors that an extensively
manipulated sequence would accumulate, as the enzymes used in genetic manipulation, such as reverse transcriptase and other
polymerases are well-known to introduce random errors, but the telltale signs would still be a mosaic of conflicting phylogenetic
relationships, from which its history of recombination may be reconstructed. This could then be compared with the kinds of
genetic manipulations that have been carried out in the different laboratories around the world, preferably with the
recombinants held in the laboratories.

A dark week in our common humanity

Here's a follow-up from Gray Brechin on cultural desecration in Iraq.

To all scholars, librarians, archivists, curators, humanists:

Deeply embedded in an article entitled "Iraqui elite pledge free nation," the San Francisco Chronicle (April 16) allotted two brief paragraphs to the burning of Baghdad's National Library and Koranic library. The article quotes Abdel Karim Answar Obeid, whom it identifies as "an administrator at the religious ministry, where thousands of Korans - many hand-written and some thousands of years old - were lost," as saying that books which survived the 1252 sacking of Baghdad did not make it through the early days of the U.S. occupation of 2003: "If you talk to any intellectual Muslims in the world," says Obeid "they are cyring right now over this." More than Muslims, of course, are crying at the scale and significance of destruction permitted within the past week by soldiers who, according to reporter Robert Fisk, stood aside while the libraries burned. But the editorial board of the Chronicle apparently considered the ruin of those undefended libraries just days following the looting of the National Museum too unimportant to merit an article or photograph of its own, and I suspect that the same is true elsewhere. If this could happen in Baghdad, then the pillaging of Mesopotamia's archaeological sites is probably proceeding as I write - just as international archaeologists warned that it would prior to the outbreak of war.

Like the social, economic, and long-term environmental costs of this war, the cultural loss is buried by prevailing triumphalism in U.S. mass media, as well as by Donald
Rumsfeld's assurance that the near total trashing of Iraq's cultural resources was an unfortunate accident and a regrettable "untidiness." And like the recent oil spill off the Spanish coast, I expect that even what has been reported will fade quickly from public consciousness as we in the U.S. move on to the next new thing. For those of us who use scholarly reseources, the loss is forever. I would like to call on museums, archives, and libraries everywhere to hang black banners or bunting of mourning for a
month from their buildings to remind the public of what has been forever and needlessly destroyed and to express the grief that we feel not only for those weeping Muslims but for our species. This is the very least that we can do to commemorate this exceptionally dark week in our common humanity.


Sincerely,
Dr. Gray Brechin
Research Associate Department of Geography
U.C. Berkeley