As for Matrix Churchill, which she also cites, lead defendant Trevor Abraham’s Counsel, Gilbert Gray QC, has made clear that the true cause of the wrongful prosecution was Alan Clark’s failure, until cross-examination, to tell the truth about his own role in encouraging manufacturers not to give truthful descriptions in export documents. In commenting on my stated belief that in the more serious cases an independent mind is needed as a safeguard against abuse, she adds a sly innuendo that barristers were responsible for recent miscarriages of justice.
The truth is that in countless cases every year, barristers are exercising their independent judgement whether the evidence is sufficient for a case to proceed, whether a plea to a lesser charge should be accepted, or whether potentially helpful evidence should be disclosed to the defence.But of course it is not on the basis of evidence provided by barristers that cases proceed, they have to work on the material provided to them.So, for example, in the Guildford Four trial, the decision of the Court of Appeal to quash the convictions of the Four was based solely on the alleged fabrication by Surrey police of their confessions (as Sir John May concluded in his painstaking inquiry into the case). Sir: In Polly Toynbee’s account (10 April) of the decision of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee that independent lawyers (barristers or solicitors) should alone be permitted to present cases in the higher courts, she includes a false slur on the integrity and independence of mind of prosecuting barristers. That is what the Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre has been set up to achieve.Professor Michael Rutter is honorary director of the MRC Child Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, in London.. Psychiatrists have long been puzzled by the observation that schizophrenia is much commoner in people in the UK of Afro-Caribbean origin. The finding that it is not more common in those actually living in the Caribbean points strongly to the operation of some sort of environmentally mediated, psycho-social risk.This whole field of research points to some important issues for which some sort of environmental explanation is likely to be required. For example, the rise in recent decades in frequency of suicide in young males (but not in older people) cannot be attributed to genes – the gene pool does not change that quickly.
Similarly, the explanation for the US murder rate being 15 times that in the UK will not be due to genes (it is more likely due to lack of gun control).If the challenge of understanding how the interplay operates is to be met, genetic researchers, psychosocial researchers and developmental researchers must work together in ways that has happened all too rarely in the past. This genetic influence seems to operate, in part, by creating a vulnerability to environmental stresses.A more striking example is schizophrenia, a mental disorder that involves a strong genetic component. The potential of genetic research lies in the discovery of how causal processes work and not in individual prediction.A crucial feature of genetic studies lies in their power to demonstrate the true extent of environmental influences of behaviour. A few examples serve to illustrate this little-appreciated strength of genetic research. A study of twins, which makes it easier to identify genetic and environmental influences, has shown that much of the genetic risk of people having major depressive disorders lies in the genetic influence on the development of neuroticism, or emotionality. Only very rarely will it make sense to think of gene therapy to replace supposedly “bad” genes.
As several genes are involved and because they are influential only alongside environmental factors, genetic discoveries should not be used to label individuals. It may lead to mountaineering, or the stock market or scientific discovery, or crime. The next challenge, then, is to discover circumstances which lead this trait to have beneficial outcomes rather than adverse ones.Three consequences follow Genes cannot be divided into “good” genes and “bad” genes. First, sensation- seeking is only one of several factors that might be behind anti-social behaviour; in no way does it constitute the cause Second, seeking novelty is not in itself a bad thing. It is significant that she ended her book with a chapter on Kleist by the Swiss genius, Robert Walser, another poet of the incomplete and the indefinable, a wryly comic portrayer of failure and inadaptation who spent the last 30 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals.
