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‘Normally what happens,’ begins the man from the Port of London Authority, but then he stops, because our conversation concerns the legal ownership of dead whales, and it’s just not one of those topics that comes up all that often. ‘Well, look, with whales, there’s no such thing as ‘normally’,’ he concedes. ‘But in the past, when whales have come ashore, they’ve tended to be washed up dead on crown property. This time, the circumstances were slightly different.’
   The truth is that, for much of yesterday, nobody seemed clear about who had the final say over the fate of the bottlenose whale that paid a brief, entrancing and ultimately fatal visit to London last weekend. But following the demise of the creature - known variously as Willy, Wally, Pete and Gonzo, each one implacably asserted by its advocates to be the whale’s ‘actual’ name, as if a passport or a library card might yet be discovered, providing confirmation - it was a question in urgent need of an answer.
   Alan Knight, chairman of the British Marine Divers Rescue Group, which co-ordinated the attempt to save the whale, thought it might be Her Majesty’s Receiver of Wreck, an obscure office in Southampton to which treasures found in shipwrecks off the coast must be reported. But the Receiver of Wreck was in no mood to receive the Thames whale. ‘The crown isn’t automatically entitled to all whales, dolphins, porpoises and sturgeons,’ a spokeswoman noted. (She sounded calm: if she was appalled by a mental image of several tonnes of bone and blubber turning up in the lobby, she didn’t let it show.) ‘That only applies to whales, dolphins, porpoises and sturgeons that died on crown or public land. This whale actually died on a barge in the middle of the river.’
   The crown’s rights regarding wild animals are a complex thicket of ancient laws, so we turned for illumination to David Barber, Swan Marker to Her Majesty. But he’s a swan man, through and through. ‘I’m responsible for Her Majesty’s swans,’ he explained, ‘and a whale doesn’t fall under my jurisdiction. If a swan is to die, should the queen wish, it can be claimed as crown property. No other creature can be claimed as such.’
   That is how we found ourselves, eventually, in conversation with Martin Garside, the man from the Port of London. The barge on which the whale met its convulsive end was a Port of London vessel - the Crossness - and even if death had occurred in the water, the Port would probably have had jurisdiction: it owns much of the foreshore of the Thames from London to the coast. The whale’s post-mortem, which was still under way yesterday, took place in Gravesend at a Port of London jetty. And so, yesterday afternoon, it was by mutual consent of the Port of London and the Zoological Society of London, whose scientists were performing the post-mortem, that a decision was reached: the whale’s body would be given to the Natural History Museum. The museum is now expected to clean the bones, put the skeleton on display, and incinerate most of the rest, after research samples are taken.
   This outcome probably serves the public good, in some high-minded fashion. But after the emotional intensity of the weekend, a bunch of bones in a museum seems like a pretty dry and dusty kind of memorial. Could we not, even at this late stage, seek to persuade the whale’s custodians to dream a little? To think the kind of big thoughts worthy of an 18ft whale?
   What about stuffing it, for example? ‘Technically, it’s feasible,’ says James Dickinson, of the UK Guild of Taxidermy. ‘Practically, it’s a no-no. In theory, it’s got a skin, you should be able to remove the skin, remove the fat, create what we call a form’ - out of fibreglass, perhaps, or papier-mâché - ‘and then put the skin around the form.’ Size itself isn’t an issue - ‘elephants have been taxidermied,’ Dickinson notes - but with a whale, the exercise would be close to pointless. As there’s no hair on a whale and the skin would lose its colour anyway, you may as well just make a cast and paint it grey.
   Couldn’t we at least display the bones on the fourth plinth, London’s premier site for non- permanent works of public art? Marc Quinn’s sculpture, Alison Lapper Pregnant, is due to be retired in April 2007, to be followed by a work called Hotel For The Birds, by the German Thomas Schütte. But 18 months after that, the space will be free again. The bones would somehow have to be incorporated into an outstanding piece of contemporary art, says Sue Davies, of Sponsorship Consultants, which handles publicity for the Fourth Plinth Commission. ‘But by then I’m assuming a lot of people will have forgotten about the poor whale.’
   So, hopes fading, we turn finally to the possibility of giving London’s whale some kind of decent burial. ‘It’s a bit of a grey area,’ says a spokesman for Rossendale pet crematorium and memorial gardens, in Lancashire, Britain’s busiest resting-place for pets. Buried pets are technically classified as landfill, but that’s not how they think about it at Rossendale. ‘We’re licensed to do burials and it’s full honours, with a coffin and a little silver plate,’ the spokesman says. ‘But when you’re talking about something the size of a whale, it’s different ... We do get large dogs. Your very big dogs. But I think we’d have to say, with a whale, it’s not within our remit. We would, most politely, tell you that you couldn’t do it here.’ He sounds as if he wants to help. But he can’t. Not with a whale. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘if you were to bring your little cat or dog ...’
   — The Guardian

They already use basic tools, have rudimentary language and star in TV commercials, but now scientists have proof that chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than other great apes.
   Genetic tests comparing DNA from humans, chimps, gorillas and orang-utans reveal striking similarities in the way chimps and humans evolve that set them apart from the others.
   The finding adds weight to a controversial proposal to scrap the long-used chimp genus ‘Pan’ and reclassify the animals as members of the human family. The move would give chimps a new place in creation’s pecking order alongside humans, the only survivor of the genus Homo.
   The biologist Soojin Yi’s team at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta compared 63m base pairs of DNA from different species, where each base is a letter in the animal’s genetic code. They then analysed the DNA to look at what evolutionary biologists call the molecular clock, the rate at which an animal’s genetic code evolves. The speed of the clock shows how the span of a generation has changed over the millennia.
   The tests showed that even though humans and chimps split from a common ancestor between 5m and 7m years ago, the rate at which their genetic codes were evolving was extremely similar, differing by only 3%, and much slower than gorillas and orang-utans.
   A slow molecular clock suggests that the time between generations is long, something that has historically set humans apart from the great apes. Team member Navin Elango said: ‘We found that the chimpanzee’s generation time is a lot closer to that of humans than it is to other apes.’
   According to the scientists, whose study appears today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the finding suggests some human traits only emerged 1m years ago, a fleeting moment on evolutionary scales.
   ‘This study provides further support for the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees should be in one genus, rather than in two different genera, because we not only share extremely similar genomes, we share similar generation time,’ said Dr Yi.
   Doubts over the chimp’s position in the evolutionary tree have been around from the start. In 1775, when scientists first got around to naming the chimpanzee, they noted the similarity with people and placed them next to humans under the genus Homo. But by 1816 chimps had been pushed out into their own genus, Pan, which has survived to this day.
   In 1991, the Pulitzer prize-winning ecologist Jared Diamond called humans ‘the third chimpanzee’, setting us alongside the common chimp (Pan troglodytes) and its less aggressive but astoundingly promiscuous cousin, the bonobo (Pan paniscus). By 1999 confusion over the biological status of chimpanzees prompted scientists in New Zealand to join forces with lawyers to petition the country’s government to pass a bill conferring ‘rights’ on chimpanzees and other primates. The move drew derision. Roger Scruton, the moral philosopher, asked: ‘Do we really think that the jails of New Zealand should henceforth be filled with malicious chimpanzees? If not, by what right are they to be exempted from punishment?’ New Zealand granted great apes legal protection from animal experimentation. British Home Office guidelines also forbid experiments on chimps, gorillas and orang-utans.
   In 2003, researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit again ignited the debate when they found that 99.4% of the most critical DNA sites are identical in human and chimp genes, prompting the lead researcher, Morris Goodman, to declare that chimps and humans should be brought together under the same umbrella genus, Homo.
   ‘There have been discussions about whether chimpanzees should be afforded more protection and this might make things a bit clearer in peoples’ minds about whether they should have rights of some kind. In terms of life on Earth, chimps and humans are really not that different to each other,’ said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. Practically, he adds, reclassification could raise the chimp’s profile and potentially improve their conservation.
   ‘It seems a bit human-centric to want to put chimps into the ‘Homo’ genus and not reclassify humans as ‘Pan’. But these things are arbitrary, once you’ve divided it into species. It would become a more political decision than anything else,’ he said.
   — The Guardian

When Monsanto introduced the world to genetically modified crops a decade ago, the biotech advancement was heralded as the dawn of a new era that could reduce world hunger, help the environment and bolster struggling farmers.
   Now, biotech beans, cotton, corn and canola are profit-drivers at Monsanto and are lifting the fortunes of rival companies like Swiss-based Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences LLC, a unit of Dow Chemical Co. The gains are largely due to a broad US acceptance of crops that have been genetically altered to withstand weed killers and insects, and backers say, generate higher yields.
   But as the industry celebrates its 10th anniversary, the early promises of biotech crops remain largely unrealised, and many countries have banned the technology amid concerns about potential danger for human health and the environment.
   ‘GM products have not lived up to those early exaggerated expectations,’ said Joel Cohen, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. ‘We now have a series of very dependable, reliable crops using this technology. But there is still a large precautionary perspective.’
   
   One step forward…
   Indeed, for nearly every step forward, there is a step back. Last month, cereal giant Kellogg announced it would start using a healthy low linolenic oil derived only from Monsanto’s biotech soybean in its biscuits, crackers and other food products.
   But less than two weeks later, rival Kraft Foods, the world’s second-largest food producer, said it would stop supplying all genetically engineered food products, including additives, to China due to a lack of market acceptance. Pepsico and Coca-Cola have made similar pledges.
   There have been other recent setbacks, including a decision in November by Swiss voters to ban the planting of biotech crops for five years, and the recent revelation in Australia that a biotech pea caused health problems in research mice, forcing cancellation of that project.
   In 2004 Monsanto was forced to withdraw a biotech wheat it planned to sell in the United States and Canada because of strong market opposition. Other failed projects include Monsanto’s delayed-ripening tomato and a healthier potato.
   ‘Genetic engineering has not delivered on any of its promises for human health benefits,’ said Margaret Mellon, director of the Agriculture and Biotechnology Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. ‘There are a lot of failures scattered at the side of the road.’
   Other critics say biotech crops have created more problems than they’ve solved, creating herbicide-resistant weeds, for instance.
   Backers say biotech crops are good for the environment because they can reduce the amount of chemicals needed to grow healthy crops. Opponents say chemical use increases many times because of weed resistance and other problems.
   And they say that farmer profits tied to better yields get eaten up by the higher prices they pay for biotech seeds. Critics say the technology has not eased hunger because many poor countries are unable or unwilling to adopt it.
   
   Genie out of the bottle
   Still, acreage planted with biotech crops around the world is increasing and this year topped more than 1 billion acres (404.7 million hectares) sown to soybeans, corn, cotton, canola and other crops.
   In the United States, 52 percent of all corn, 79 percent of upland cotton and 87 percent of soybeans planted in 2004-05 were biotech varieties, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
   An industry report is expected to show good growth not only in the United States but in many other countries. Barriers in Europe are slowly lowering and new products in the pipeline should help improve acceptance, biotech backers say.
   ‘We’re now 10 years into it, on a billion acres in 17 countries,’ said Dow AgroSciences vice president of plant genetics Pete Siggelko. ‘There will be some continuing bumps in the road, but we are starting to see a balance of very good news and growth. The genie is way out of the bottle.’
   Cotton, corn, soybeans and canola, all first rolled out in the 1995/1996 growing seasons, remain the top biotech crops but the future should bring new crops, biotech backers say.
   Iran became the first country to commercialise biotech rice in 2004, approving a pest-resistant variety.
   And Syngenta last year announced a new strain of ‘golden rice’ that produces up to 23 times as much beta-carotene as previous varieties. The rice will be available for free to research centres across Asia.
   Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, said there is currently ‘enormous investment’ in agricultural biotechnology in China, Argentina, Chile and other countries, and genetically modified rice was likely to gain approval in China in the near future, a move that could shift acceptance globally in favour of biotech food.
   ‘We haven’t seen anything that has been dramatically new in a while,’ Fernandez said. ‘But I think we’re starting to see signs of more movement forward.’
   — Reuters