Re: "Plant Neurobiology Sprouts Anew."1 Your readers should know that E.J. Lund and colleagues in the Department of Biophysics at Austin, Texas, published a book entitled Bioelectric Fields and Growth University of Texas Press) in 1947. Also, while Tompkins and Bird's The Secret Life of Plants (Harper & Row, 1973) did sell well and influence the thinking of the lay public, its message was effectively debunked by a subsequent article entitled "The not-so-secret life of plants."2 This article

Brian Everill (The Scientist, April 1, 1996, page 13) errs twice in his reply to my letter of Feb. 5, 1996 [page 13] on cooperation between scientists and bioethicists. First, by extracting a clause and a phrase from my letter, then combining them in inverse order, he creates a pseudoquotation. What I actually wrote was " . . . just as bioethicists must learn the scientific facts about a subject before venturing ethical pronouncements on that subject, scientists ought to learn something about e

Too often, bioethics courses equate bioethics with medical ethics, omitting questions related to the environment and parts of genetics. Even in the latter field, not all dilemmas relate to medicine; let us remember, for example, the ethical dilemmas resulting from the recent introduction of transgenic plants and farm animals. Fifteen years ago, I began offering a course in bioethics to upperclass majors in biology at Yale University. My colleagues were reluctant to sponsor such a "soft" course

The article "New Gene Technologies Could Reap Rich Floral Harvest" [The Scientist, Aug. 20, 1990, page 8] tells us that "A discipline that flourished for 30 years after plant hormones were first discovered in the 1920s, plant biology languished for a generation (my emphasis) until the late 1970s, when molecular techniques were first applied to plant systems." To me, this statement reflects either na9ve ignorance of recent history or a type of "molecular arrogance" based on the premise that the