Letters
By Science News
Snack addicts
The experiment outlined in “Junk food turns rats into addicts” (SN: 11/21/09,
p. 8) seems to have overlooked an ingredient list. The junk foods fed to the rats were junky, to be sure, but which foods were the most addictive? Many junk foods are filled with alarming amounts of things like monosodium glutamate. Were the rats more responsive to the MSG-laden foods? Did they crave salt over sugar? Fat over starch? This article left me hungry for specifics.
Drew Massey, Los Angeles, Calif.
In the study, researchers fed the rats a mishmash of junky foods (think bacon-wrapped cheesecake covered with frosting), so any ingredient’s individual effects were hidden. The researchers noticed that rats seemed to like foods laden with both fat and sugar most, making these ingredients the “likely culprits,” says Paul Kenny, a coauthor of the study. “It seems like sweetened fat is the way to go.” But to really nail down which ingredients may be the most addictive, scientists need to separately test each of the ingredients. — Laura Sanders
Memories of McClintock
Tina Hesman Saey’s article “Corn genome a maze of unusual diversity” (SN: 12/19/09, p. 9) reports that “The [maize] genome project discovered some new families of transposons, revealing a total of 1,300 such families in maize.” When I read those words, I couldn’t help but sense the specter of Barbara McClintock floating between the lines of the story and behind the work of the multi-institution genome project. It was McClintock, working alone in an isolated laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor and using the techniques of classical genetics on maize, who obtained the first data that pointed to the existence of mobile genetic elements. What a far cry the $30-million-dollar maize genome project is from the skepticism that greeted McClintock’s data and conclusions.