Letter: Beyond imagination

Sir: Yet another article on a great scientific advance ("The secret of life", 1 December), this one apparently so important that it is likened to Galileo's finding that the earth went round the sun, or Darwin's understanding of our origins.

Those discoveries, however, had a tremendous and immediate impact because they were just about imaginable by ordinary people. As a small child, I remember an old aunt shaking with anger about Mr Darwin and the monkeys.

Now the vast majority of us have so small an understanding of genes and chromosomes - the words are well known but have no content - that news about them leaves us unmoved, and certainly not angry like my aunt, or excited.

We follow in the wake of these unending scientific "breakthroughs" feeling put-upon and weary. Something else to understand which we know in advance we shall not. Occasionally, to cheer us, we are told that a discovery has resulted in a great side benefit for us like (wait for it) non-stick saucepans.

The really great challenge for scientists is for them somehow to provide a few gifted expositors who could make their concepts real to our imaginations. At the moment what they do is hidden from us in a fog as dense as any magician's green smoke.

Scientists complain that they are underfunded, and I don't doubt them. But they will never be given the funds they need until we, who pay the piper, understand better what they are doing.

GILLIAN NELSON

Drumnadrochit,

Inverness