Hazy data on smoking "SCIENCE

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week's New Scientist may come as a disappointment.

Following the controversy about the 'Ultra-Low Tar' cigarettes that aren't, New Scientist decided to look further into the way that official cigarette tar league tables are established.

SO readers may recall that cigarettes are tested using a robot smoking machine, programmed to take a puff of two seconds' duration, once a minute. These puffs are 35 cubic centimetres (cc) in volume (about a mouthful).

New Scientist was intrigued to know the reason for this particular method, and asked scientists at the laboratory of the Government Chemist. They thought the test was based on observaod back to the labs of American Tobacco in 1936. Here, scientists led by J:A.Bradford had developed a machine to take regular puffs of a cigarette until it had burned to a • standard length.

Bradford then looked for some research to determine the size and frequency of puffs, and found a paper written by a German. B.Pfyl. Pfyl had measured the volume of smoke inhaled per puff for the massive number of seven people.

He had found it to vary between 29 and 61 cc. Bradford decided to use puffs of uniform size, and chose 35cc. He then assumed a puff lasting two seconds, once a minute.

This guess remains the basis for cigarette testing by the British government nearly 50 years later, when cigarette size and design have changed drastically!

Meanwhile, more reliable research is available. Une study, in 1980, looking at 517 medical patients, found an average puff size of 43.5 cc, lasting slightly more than 2 seconds, once every 25.8 seconds. These people were, on average, inhaling three times as much smoke per minute as assumed in the official test.

More smoke This means that more of the smoke from each cigarette goes into the lungs, instead of straight into the atmosphere, as with less frequent puffing. The different rate of burning will also affect the type of tars present in the inhaled smoke.

Of course, it may be that these 517 people are no more representative of the average than the seven in the 50-year-old German study. After all, they were medical patients - perhaps because of their smoking!

But all this goes to show so the tar tables underestimate risk for all but a minority of smokers.

Instead of (or as well as) the most realistic tar tables, smokers need the fullest information so they can -assess the risk associated with their own particular way of smoking.

FOOTNOTE: In California, with 10% of the US population, lung • cancer has overtaken breast cancer as a cause of death. in women. This year some 4100 women will die, a rate of 30 per 100,000. This is due to increased cigarette smoking.

ASTRONOMERS have discovered bizarre facts about Triton, one of the moons of Neptune.

Unlike our moon, but like some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Triton has an atmosphere. However, it is unlikely that life could survive there, as the gases present are nitrogen and methane, both rather inert substances.

Furthermore, as Triton is 30 times further from the sun than us, it is so cold that there are oceans of liquid nitrogen, probably with 'land' and 'icebergs' made of solid methane.

And finally Triton has such an odd orbit that once every 650 years it gets completely cut off from the sun's rays and its atmosphere liquefies and shrinks to a tiny volume. 325 years after such a super-winter, Triton gets an unusually high dose of sun, and the oceans evaporate to expand the atmosphere to 1000 times its minimum size. ly exaggerating his role - for making a stand. I can't understand any of this.

Perhaps the key to the whole dispute is in Alan Thornett's final two paragraphs: "Jack Cleary should be playing up (his emphasis) the significance of BL, not playing it down" - because it has "a significant and long-established tradition of Trotskyism within it"

When he accuses me of playing down BL, he means I don't agree with some things he says in his letter, such as that the BL management is "the single most important industrial asset the capitalist class have". "The very fact that it was BL who sacked the 15 in this way was absolutely not by chance. It may have come up in a 'haphazard' way, but it was not dealt with as such. It was dealt with with all the authority BL management has amongst the employers, and they were all strengthened by it"

Not Cowley management, he asserts, but only the central BL management (possibly, from what Alan Thornett says elsewhere, after consulting the Cabinet) could decide to sack 13 sitting ducks who had little chance of BM Box 5355, London WCIN 3XX play down, first understand.

First work out and define what is happening and your owr objective place in it - and ther map out what you can do tc affect what happens next. The fact that there is a Trotskyist tradition' at Cowley has nc proper bearing on what we are discussing.

A BL-centred or Oxford-centr ed view of the world is inevitably a distorted one - as useless as the view that the sun revolves arounc the earth, and pretty close tc being its political equivalent.

'Story-lining' for clear presen tation is very important: but if i is not woven around a framework of determinedly objective assess ment of how things in the work really stand, then such story weaving is the weaving of ideolog ical cataracts on our own eyes.

On this issue Alan Thornet has mistaken the art of weaving facets and impressions of reality tgether into a plausible story around the axis of one's own pre conceptions, for the job of mak ing an objective Marxist assess ment of reality. These are very different arts:

JACK CLEARY, London

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-Socialist Organiser no: Î52 October 277983 Pagê14 HELMONELI e STUFF

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tions on people during the '60s. However, NS traced the meth-