Suspension of the Hippocratic Oath for some doctors...an ethical dilemma

So reads the Pentagon statement to doctors...

Leave your professional ethics behind when you come to work with us, and torture your patients if we ask you to. In exchange, we will keep quiet about what you’ve done, and will ensure that the ethics bodies responsible for policing the medical profession won’t get the evidence they need to act against you.

"The Torture Doctors"

An expert panel concludes that the Pentagon and the CIA ordered physicians to violate the Hippocratic Oath

by

Scott Horton

November 4th, 2013

Harpers

The Hippocratic corpus, which requires that a physician “first do no harm” to his patient, lies at the heart of medical ethics. Now, an important independent study of the conduct of doctors engaged by the CIA and Defense Department at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility has concluded that the U.S. government forced these doctors to systematically violate their oaths by aiding in the torture and abuse of patients in their care. The study also makes clear that CIA and Defense Department officials were conscious of the ethics guidelines their policies would violate, and took measures to exempt medical professionals in their service from ethics requirements. The DoD and CIA also consistently refused to cooperate with state ethics boards investigating the unethical conduct of physicians at Guantánamo, effectively leaving the boards unable to act.

The two-year study, whose findings were issued in a report called “Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the “War on Terror,” was conducted by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, and was supervised by a board of nineteen preeminent physicians, lawyers, and health-policy experts. After  extensively surveying publicly available information, the report’s authors concluded that health professionals at Guantánamo had “designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees.”

The report acknowledges that the Obama Administration has made changes to the Guantánamo system, but expresses serious concerns about systematic and ongoing ethics lapses in the detention center’s notorious force-feeding program. The Pentagon, it notes, “continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct” with respect to interrogation, hunger strikes, and the reporting of abuse. Doctors and nurses at Gitmo are required to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, who are placed in extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day, which the report’s authors conclude (as the American Medical Association did earlier this year) violates basic ethical rules.

The report leaves little doubt that intelligence services and the Pentagon have offered doctors a sort of pact, amounting to: Leave your professional ethics behind when you come to work with us, and torture your patients if we ask you to. In exchange, we will keep quiet about what you’ve done, and will ensure that the ethics bodies responsible for policing the medical profession won’t get the evidence they need to act against you. What this equation leaves out, of course, is the patients — both those who were abused, and the ones these doctors might treat in the future, who have a right to know who is treating them. A doctor who is willing to torture his patients can hardly be counted upon to render the highest standards of professional care, even without the CIA standing over his or her shoulder. Or, as one of the study’s researchers, Columbia University professor of medicine Gerald Thomson, put it:

The American public has a right to know that the covenant with its physicians to follow professional ethical expectations is firm regardless of where they serve. It’s clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice. We have a responsibility to make sure this never happens again.

Teens and ethical sci-fi

"Ethical Sci-fi in YA Lit"

by

Guest Blogger

November 12th, 2013

The Hub

I can still remember the way I felt reading the last sentence of Ender’s Game by 2008 Edwards Award winner Orson Scott Card some twenty years ago.  Indeed, each subsequent reading has left me with a similar sense of profound sadness, self-reflection, and an inexpressible ache to make the world a better place.  I’ve since read other novels that have inspired equally, if not more complex emotions but, at the age of twelve, Ender’s Game was the first time I can recall being so deeply affected by the underlying message of a book.  The story made me think not only about the ways in which human beings willfully harm others but also about my own complicity within that.  It was an exercise in compassion—a mirror in which I could see myself, others, and society itself more clearly.   As an avid sci-fi fan, I strongly believe that the best sci-fi, the kind that stays with you, succeeds in doing just that.  It makes you think both about yourself and about the world you inhabit.  It entreats you to reconsider the status quo and challenges you to question where we are headed as a species.  And like Ender’s Game, the very best sci-fi manages to both entertain and raise ethical issues.

As Ender’s Game finds itself in the limelight again due to the recent movie adaptation, I thought that this would be a good time to celebrate other ethical sci-fi titles. Books, whose main purpose, more than to entertain, are to explore issues that plague society today and to push us to ponder their future impact.  Think 1984 versus Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Let’s start then with a sci-fi classic in the making, M.T. Anderson’s excellent book Feed (a 2003 Best Books for Young Adults and Ultimate Teen Bookshelf selection).  On the surface, the book appears to be a simple love story gone wrong.  Boy meets girl, they fall in love, he can’t handle the complications of her life, they break up.  However, Feed is also a masterful study of the negative effects of consumerism, our dependency on technology, and our inability to “unplug.”   The love story allows us to feel more deeply the ramifications of this dependency on both consumerism and technology, as does Anderson’s remarkable narrative voice.  Indeed, it’s impossible to read the final chapters without experiencing a dawning horror of what could await us.  When recommending this book to others, I often say that of all the sci-fi I’ve read, it most accurately portrays the future that looms ahead. Interestingly, Feed has also been in the news recently in conjunction with Google Glass, an invention that arguably is bringing us closer to that very future.  As sci-fi becomes reality, read Feed to better understand the implications of our current relationship with technology.

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith received strong reviews when it came out earlier this year but I find that many have not yet read it.  More’s the pity, as the book deftly examines issues of race, class, and privilege in America.  Set in a ravaged New Orleans in 2025, the book reads as a commentary on Hurricane Katrina and our collective responsibility in how the US government responded to it.  The book begins with timeline of past and future hurricanes that ravage the Gulf Coast resulting in an outbreak of Delta Fever that decimates the population.  The government’s response is to “quarantine” the area, a euphemism for essentially abandoning an entire population to its death.  The strength of the book lies in its examination of the human will to survive at all costs… and the costs are disturbingly high.  From an ethical standpoint, Orleans calls into question inherent assumptions about race and privilege and forces us to consider whom America considers worth saving and whom it is willing to sacrifice.  Not for the faint-hearted, this is definitely a book for older teens and adults and is well worth reading, particularly as it hits so close to home.

Having mentioned 1984 at the start of this post, I would be remiss in not discussing Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  The most didactic of the novels discussed so far, Little Brother devotes itself whole-heartedly to the ethics of power—how it’s used, who uses it, and how to take it back.  The book centers on a group of techno-savvy teenagers grappling with the increasing infringements on their civil liberties after a terrorist attack.  Doctorow’s unflinching portrayal of interrogation, torture, and the psychological aftermath of both will inspire a great deal of reflection and discussion about the rights of citizens and the responsibility of governments.  If you’ve ever had the good fortune to hear Cory Doctorow speak, this novel captures the passion he brings to the stage—part primer, part adventure, part unabashed tirade, Little Brother is Doctorow at his best.

Given the recent uproar over the newly released Ender’s Game movie due to Orson Scott Card’s controversial political views, it is perhaps ironic that I wrote this post on the topic of ethical sci-fi.  And yet, whether or not readers agree with the author’s personal views, Ender’s Game continues to change the minds and worlds of the young people who read it.  Its dual themes of empathy and the ethicality of war remain as relevant today as they were when it was written almost twenty years ago.

And maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: as a young teen, Ender’s Game made me question the world around me and my place in it.  In opening that door, it led me to many other ethical sci-fi books from The Handmaid’s Tale to The Dispossessed to 2312.  I don’t know if I can claim to be a better person for having read these books (although I hope so) but I can certainly say that I am a more critically engaged one.  That critical engagement allows me to continue to embrace the message of Ender’s Game while also acknowledging the complex nature of the author/audience relationship and the ambiguity of authorial intent.  Here’s hoping that some of the books above will be similarly thought-provoking for you!

Help digitize a century of astronomy photographic glass plates

"Help This Astronomer Digitize 100 Years of Irreplaceable Space Photos"

Now, the historic astronomy images are on glass plates in a building. But what if they were digital and on the internet?

by

Lindsey Kratochwill

November 11th, 2013

Popular Science

In the mountains of western North Carolina, on a campus once used for tracking astronauts in space, there lies an archive full of astronomical data. The data comes in the form of photographic plates from the past century, which hold images of the night sky. Many have yet to be explored, and contain images such as comets before they were discovered, spectra images of emission stars, and all-sky surveys dating back to 1898.

"It's a stamp of the sky. And unless you can time travel, you'll never see it otherwise," Michael Castelaz tells Popular Science.

Castelaz is the science director at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute , the nonprofit that houses the 220,000 photographic plates in four rooms in the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive. This presents an obvious dilemma of location: Scientists from far-flung places such as the Czech Republic or even Denver have to either ask the staff in North Carolina to take a look at the photographic plates they hope to analyze, or get on a plane and take a trip to the archives themselves. That's one reason why PARI has decided to digitize its archives—which constitute 1/5 of all astronomical plates in North America—as a part of the Astronomy Legacy Project.

These days, we're accustomed to easy access to astronomy images. We can get our fix every day here , and even a simple Google image search. But for much of the 20th century, it wasn't so easy. Until the invention of the charge-coupled device made digital imaging possible in the late 1960s, astronomers were relegated to using the analogue version: glass plates. Astronomers had to sit at telescopes for hours, and then go through the rigors of actually developing the images onto photographic plates.

"We calculated it would have taken about a million hours sitting at telescopes to make all of the plates," Castelaz says of the archives at PARI. That's a lot of labor involved to allow these plates to languish in storage. The largest astronomical plate archive belongs to the Harvard College Observatory, which houses more than half a million plates and has been working on a similar digitization project over the years called Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard— a project Popular Science covered at length back in 2011.

So like any good organization strapped for cash, PARI turned to Kickstarter to raise money to purchase a scanning machine, which they will then use to digitize and make the archive open to an even wider public than those who are able to visit in person.

"The plates are well taken care of, but as a service to the community—in a broad sense, not only astronomers, but anybody—we really feel the need to digitize them, get it right, and get it out into the world," Castelaz says. The Astronomy Legacy Project is hoping to raise $67,000. At the time of writing, 215 backers had pledged a total of $10,851. You can help them out here .


Pluto photographic plate

Leonid meteor shower diminished by a full moon this year

"Leonids 2013 — Leonids Meteor Shower Peaks November 16 2013"

Planetsave

The Leonids meteor shower will be reaching its peak this year late night on November 16, 2013 (early morning November 17, 2013). The famous meteor shower, that appears to originate out of the constellation of Leo, is expected to reach a peak rate of around 10-20 meteors an hour this year — quite a bit down from the heights that the Leonids can hit, but should still make for a pretty good show.

Something to keep in mind though — there will be a Full Moon present in the sky on the night of the peak, so the actual number of meteors than can be easily seen will probably be on the lower end of the predicted peak rate. For those who won’t be able to make it out on the night of November 16/morning of November 17, it’s worth noting that the following night should put on a nearly equally good show.

The best time to watch the meteor shower will be between about midnight and an hour or so before dawn. But you should be able to see at least a few earlier and later than that as well.

While this year’s show is expected to be anything spectacular, spectacular is what the Leonids are known for — having produced some of the greatest meteor storms of the past three hundred years. In 1966 peak rates reached as high as several thousand meteors a minute, as seen from dark, rural locations — apparently appearing almost like falling rain, by some accounts. It was reported that because of the great number of meteors all appearing to originate from the same portion of the sky that many observers felt like they had to grip the ground to avoid falling over — with the Earth apparently appearing to be plowing through space at a great speed (as it is), rather than appearing stationary as it typically does to human perception.

Some general tips for meteor shower watching:

• Find the darkest sky that you can, preferably far from city lights — dark, rural locations are ideal.

• Get comfortable — a reclining chair, warm clothes, blankets, pillows, etc.

• A cup of warm coffee or hot chocolate tends to make the experience more enjoyable.

Acceptance without scrutiny...sientific statements

"Science and Its Skeptics"

by

Gary Marcus

November 7th, 2013

The New Yorker

Science has been taking a lot of punches lately. A recent cover story for The Economist argued, with cause, that “modern scientists have done too much trusting, and not enough verifying.” A few days ago, the science writer-provocateur John Horgan wrote a dark reflection, in Scientific American, on a litany of failures in science that he has seen over his thirty-year career. Reporting on an “archaeological dig into the strata” of his career, which he says justifies why he’s “so critical of science,” Horgan finds himself struck

    by all the “breakthroughs” and “revolutions” that have failed to live up to their hype: string theory and other supposed “theories of everything,” self-organized criticality and other theories of complexity, anti-angiogenesis drugs and other potential “cures” for cancer, drugs that can make depressed patients “better than well,” “genes for” alcoholism, homosexuality, high IQ and schizophrenia.

All of this is true. String theory hasn’t yet lived up to its promise (and may never). Complexity theory hasn’t, either. People still get cancer and the antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.s help far fewer people than the early hype suggested. The locution a “gene for X” is, in most cases, a verbal sloppiness that leads only to false expectations. Scientists, and those who would report on them, have sometimes promised more than they can deliver.

Yet some depressed patients really do respond to S.S.R.I.s. And some forms of cancer, especially when discovered early, can be cured, or even prevented altogether with vaccination. Over the course of Horgan’s career, H.I.V. has gone from being universally fatal to routinely treatable (in nations that can afford adequate drugs), while molecular biologists working in the nineteen eighties, when Horgan began writing, would be astounded both by the tools that have recently been developed, like whole-genome-sequencing, and the detail with which many molecular mechanisms are now understood: reading a biology textbook from 1983 is like reading a modern history text written before the Second World War. Then there is the tentative confirmation of the Higgs boson; the sequencing of Neanderthal DNA; the discovery of FOXP2, which is the first gene decisively tied to human language; the invention of optogenetics; and definitive proof that exoplanets exist. All of these are certifiable breakthroughs.

The problem with some of these critical observations is not that they are wrong, but that they are one-sided. When Horgan writes that “the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years—and one that caught me by surprise—is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten,” it’s not just that he is arguably overstating things, it’s that he’s missing half the story.

There is a crisis in replicability, as both Horgan and The Economist suggest (and as I noted last December). But there is also a huge, rapidly growing movement to address it. When I revisited the topic a few months later, I reported at least five new efforts focussed on increasing replicability. Since then, the list has continued to grow. There were at least three new announcements in the last few weeks: a new initiative to validate the fifty most important studies in cancer biology; a new pilot program that allows critical comments to be published at pubmed.gov (one of the leading portals for scientific research); and a new badge system for papers that share their materials and data, designed to promote replicability, at a leading journal. As the Cambridge (U.K.) scientist Rogier Kievit put it to me in an e-mail: “the avenues for (constructive) criticism of science are so much better now than they were even five years ago…. The half-life of nonsensical findings has decreased enormously, sometimes even to before the paper has officially been published.” The wholesale shift in the culture of how scientists think about their craft is at least as significant a meta-story as the replicability crisis itself. But the prophets of doom never let their readers in on this happy secret.

It is absolutely correct for onlookers to call for increased skepticism and clearer thinking in science writing. I’ve sometimes heard it said, with a certain amount of condescension, that this or that field of science “needs its popularizers.” But what science really needs is greater enthusiasm for those people who are willing to invest the time to try to sort the truth from hype and bring that to the public. Academic science does far too little to encourage such voices.

At the same time, it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before. You can both love science and question it. As my father, who passed away earlier this year, taught me, there is no contradiction between the two.

Indian space missions...up, up, and away--a good thing

"Mythbusting India's Mars Mission"

by

Morris Jones

November 6th, 2013

SpaceDaily

The successful launch of India's Mars Orbiter Mission is a major step forward for an advancing Asian space power. The global space community has applauded the flight, which will help the world to better understand the red planet.

It's thus surprising to see such a high tide of denouncements and misjudgements for this mission circulating in the media and online forums. Weeks ago, we saw naive criticisms of China's upcoming Moon rover by a Chinese scientist in the Hong Kong press. Now India is in the line of fire with even more dubious comments. What's going on?

Some of this seems to stem from surprise. India has operated one of the world's most advanced space programs for decades, but it has largely escaped the limelight. This has partially been due to some bad communications strategies, but it's also because the program has been more focused on utilitarian goals than headline-grabbing feats in space. India operates its own space launch vehicles and builds its own satellites.

It is also one of a small number of nations to have successfully recovered a satellite from space. Indian satellites are used in communications, weather observation and land management. This vast nation would be much worse off without the benefits of its space program.

The high-profile Mars mission has served as a wake-up call to many people who don't pay much attention to spaceflight. They should understand that this Mars mission is simply another step in a large, long and diverse space program. India has been in space with force for decades. If this mission serves as a wake-up call for the world, so be it.

There are criticisms that money spent on the mission could or should be spent elsewhere. Such dubious claims have been made for every nation that has ventured into space. Generally, these theories have been proven to be somewhat bunk. Stopping space missions does not stop poverty. They also neglect the true economics of the mission. The Mars Orbiter Mission uses a moderately priced, existing launch vehicle design.

It also recycles an existing spacecraft body design, with modifications for deep space. While it is not as sophisticated as other current Mars missions, the pricetag for the Mars Orbiter mission is measured in the tens of millions of dollars. This is truly Mars exploration on a shoestring budget. India's Mars program promises to return useful engineering and scientific data for a price that puts other space agencies to shame!

The science looks good, too. There have been some criticisms of the decision to include a methane detector on the mission. Recent results from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover suggest that methane gas will be hard to find in the Martian atmosphere, and the Indian detector will return a negative result. This expectation is sometimes presented as if there is no point in flying the methane experiment on the Mars Orbiter Mission.

Again, this is silly. Science is not a treasure hunt. It is the quest for truth, even when the truth is not as inspiring as our expectations. The Indian mission will nicely complement the ground data from NASA's rover. Two independent results from different missions in different places will forge a stronger case. There is probably no methane on Mars, and the data from these two missions will settle the question.

In addition, there are four other scientific payloads on the mission, including a colour camera. All of them are worthwhile. The heavy focus on the Martian atmosphere by this mission also offers more bang for the buck.

The fate of the Martian atmosphere, which is believed to have been thicker in the past, is one of the hottest questions in planetary science today. Like NASA's upcoming MAVEN mission, itself largely focused on atmospheric questions, India's orbiter will help to resolve other mysteries besides the hunt for methane.

Good science. National pride. Technical advances. Inspiration for the world. India's first step towards Mars is worth the price.

The Shinkolobwe mine--uranium

"Tracing the Congolese mine that fuelled Hiroshima"

On a quest to trace the origins of the Hiroshima atom bomb, writer Patrick Marnham travelled to the Congolese mine that supplied its uranium, and found the Geiger counter still clicking

by

Patrick Marnham

November 4th, 2013

The Telegraph

 Until the discovery of nuclear fission, uranium was an ore of very limited use, and in 1939 it was also in very limited supply. There was one mine in south-western Colorado in the region of a town called Paradox. There was another that had a small but good-quality production at Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and there were the Joachimsthal mines in Bohemia.

Uranium’s primary use had been as a dye for the ceramics industry; it produced lemon-yellow, orange and green colouring at various concentrations. When Pierre and Marie Curie identified radium as a source of radiation and demonstrated its use in treating cancer, for which they were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, uranium mines were presented with a second market: radium is a by-product of uranium. Prices reached $3 million an ounce in 1919 and Paradox and Joachimsthal were doing well until 1922, when a newly discovered mine in the Belgian Congo came on stream.

This mine, Shinkolobwe, had been identified as a source of uranium by the English geologist Robert Sharp in 1915, who made his discovery by chance. He was working for Union Minière du Haut Katanga and looking primarily for copper. One day, while prospecting near Elisabethville, he climbed a low hill to take his bearings and noticed that the earth on the hilltop was stained with several colours. One was yellow, which he associated with uranium. Sharp had heard that local men used coloured mud to decorate their bodies. He was told that ‘Shinkolobwe’ means ‘the fruit that scalds’. He sent the rocks for analysis and they turned out to contain uranium at 80 per cent, the purest concentration in the world. There was so much pure uranium at Shinkolobwe that the mines at Joachimsthal and Paradox in Colorado simply stopped producing it.

On our last night in Kinshasa before flying to Katanga, a Belgian acquaintance from Brussels joined our party. Bob had been one of President Mobutu’s vets in charge of his large menagerie of exotic animals. He was really a horse doctor but had adapted to dealing with lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas and leopards. When Mobutu was overthrown, Bob, who had been born in Katanga in the heyday of the Belgian colony, had lost everything. I asked him what he thought of Mobutu. ‘He was a strong man, a leader. He knew how to hold his country together.’

We were sitting in an Indian restaurant on the top floor of a tall building. Around us we could see the few lights of the city, we could hear no noise from the sparse traffic; the darkness covered the unrepaired wreckage of a civil war that had ended 12 years before. It had taken quite a time to reach the top floor. The city’s electricity supply was unreliable and nobody seemed keen to trust the lift. The lobby was protected from the street by scarred steel doors that looked as though they were designed to withstand missile attack. I asked Bob how much he had lost all those years before, when Mobutu had fled the country and the raggle-taggle army had emerged from the forest and pillaged Kinshasa. ‘About US$15 million,’ he said. ‘I was lucky to get out alive. I don’t like Kinshasa. “Ça peut péter à tout moment.” It could go up again at any time.’

 On the way out, back at ground level, he noticed a hole in the wall of the lift shaft and peered through. Then he turned on his torch. ‘Have a look at this.’ Hundreds of bright little eyes peered back into the torchlight. ‘Rats. It’s the bottom of the rubbish chute. Hasn’t been cleared for years but the restaurant kitchen is still using it.’

Next morning our driver ‘Papa’ Thomas drove us out to the airport and I told him that since we were catching an internal flight to Katanga I expected no entry or exit controls, no customs, no problems. Papa Thomas smiled happily when I took this optimistic line. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. Papa helped me with the luggage and we crossed to the door of the Kinshasa Passenger Terminal. The door seemed to be closed but Papa pushed through the crowd and there was a man in uniform saying, ‘L’entrée est payante.’ I am not sure who he was. I think he was a luggage porter who had decided to block the door. ‘I refuse to pay,’ said Bob. Matter of principle. ‘How much?’ said Papa. ‘US$5,’ said the porter.

‘I refuse,’ said Papa. ‘These messieurs can afford US$5, and you refuse to pay?’ said the porter. ‘No. I refuse to come in,’ said Papa.

‘I’m coming in,’ said Bob. ‘Mission officiel, nothing to pay, no question,’ and he waved a document headed Ordre de Mission and bearing the stamp of the Ministry of Culture. The porter gave way, we waved goodbye to Papa Thomas and together with most of the people outside were swept into the terminal. The ordre de mission got us past the baggage porter but that was the limit of its authority. In the departure hall there was turmoil on all sides.

‘No suitcases to be checked in unless they are padlocked.’

‘Padlocks to be purchased from the porters.’

‘All checked baggage carries charges.’

The crowd surges backwards and forwards – passengers, relations, pickpockets, airline officials, all closely involved in the ritual of ‘checking in’. Faced by the addition of 16, 17 and 19 kilos, the procedure grinds to a halt at the weighing machine, until I tell them my luggage weighs 52. Is it 52? I have no idea. It looks like 52 so we go with 52. Passengers start shouting different figures from all sides. So much for the payload at take-off. For some reason we seem to be the only blancs on the flight. Bob, who was a pilot as well as a horse doctor, passed the time in the departure hall by analysing the previous week’s disaster at Goma, when dozens of people had died after a scheduled flight failed to take off and ploughed into a shanty town.

He said that the airfield at Goma is at 1,200m above sea level, so jet engines run at only 70 per cent efficiency. One third of the runway at Goma was out of action due to a lava flow from a nearby volcano which had never been cleared up. Congolese loadmasters habitually took bribes to overload the planes – fact. So the pilot probably found himself with an overloaded plane that refused to lift on a short runway, and the plane skidded off the end of the runway into a shanty town that was not supposed to be there, killing dozens of Rwandan Hutu refugees.

Our flight with Hewa Bora was not a great success with Bob. As the crowded passenger cabin became fully loaded his state of alert increased. Standing at his seat he surveyed each new arrival, mothers, children, large men with briefcases, as though they were raving mad to be seeking accommodation on this already over-packed aircraft. When the doors eventually closed he set off up the gangway and I saw him push his way into the pilot’s cabin. He returned grim-faced. ‘No whites on the flight deck.’ We taxied towards take-off with the brakes creaking and banging. As the Hewa Bora DC-9 lumbered into the air, Bob remained on full alert. ‘He used the entire runway. What’s more his discs are shot. There’s no doubt the landing’s going to be terrible. There are always problems on the runway at Lubumbashi...’

Despite Bob’s gloomy forecast we landed in one piece and exited the plane through the rear door, beneath the tail. At the foot of the steps a worried-looking mechanic was holding up a bucket to catch a thin fluid stream that was pouring out from above his head and smelt of aviation spirit.

There are many ways to crash a plane in Congo. And the reason why the Democratic Republic ‘holds the world record for air crashes’ – to quote Africa News – has nothing to do with the nationality of the pilot. You can leave a lava flow across a runway (Goma today) and then attempt to take off during a rainstorm along a flooded runway and stall one of your engines – the real reason for the Hewa Bora crash in 2008 (31 dead). Or you can ignore instructions and attempt to land during a violent storm and crash the plane short of the runway (Hewa Bora at Kisangani, 2011 – 101 dead), or even on it (Kinshasa, 2011 – 33 dead, UN flight with Ukrainian pilot). You can under-fuel the plane so that it cannot divert to a safe airfield, but you are able to sell the fuel twice (Kisangani, 2011). Or you can fly in an ex-Soviet Union Antonov.

 In 1996 an Antonov failed to take off from Kinshasa and crashed into a local market, killing about 300. In 2003 an Antonov 26 failed to take off from Boende and killed 35 people in the town. In 2006 an Antonov 26 crashed when trying to land at Lubutu, in eastern Congo: 11 people were killed. In 2007 four Antonovs crashed in Congo killing more than 100 people. Alternatively you can fail to check the hand baggage at Kinshasa (2010) and allow a passenger to carry a small crocodile on board, packed into a large sports bag. The crocodile escaped from the bag during final approach to Bandundu causing a stampede of passengers and cabin crew on to the flight deck where the Dutch pilot and his co-pilot, from Gloucestershire, lost control of the L-410 Turbolet – and all on board, except for one passenger and the crocodile, were killed.

Finally you can take off from Kinshasa, in May 2003, with a full load of passengers and land perfectly safely at Lubumbashi but without any passengers at all, since they have all been sucked out of the depressurised cabin somewhere over the rain-forest. No one has ever discovered how many people died on that occasion since an accurate passenger list had not been compiled.

After a while one comes to think of air travel in Congo as just part of the black comedy of daily life, an existence that people accept as routinely hazardous, where each completed day becomes a further excuse for joyful celebration. In a land where planes crash because airline officials have stolen the fuel, you need to be resourceful to survive. We called on an old colonel, Franz Couttenier. Franz was not born in Elisabethville (now renamed Lubumbashi) He set out from Poperinge in West Flanders as a child, one of a family of nine who were attempting to travel overland to Australia. When they passed by the Belgian Congo they decided to stay. Couttenier now lives in a splendid house with a large garden in an unfashionable part of the city. It is unfashionable because it adjoins the main army barracks. He said that he had acquired his house cheaply because everyone else was too frightened to live there. ‘If the army want to shoot me,’ he said, ‘they only have to lean out of their window. They don’t even have to get out of bed.’

Of the original nine children, Franz was the only one left. Some departed after independence, the remainder after the fall of Mobutu. Three of his four children had moved back to Belgium and his wife wanted to go too. But he still had the family farm, 5,000 hectares of good land reclaimed from forest at the heart of the copper-mining belt. He grows maize and raises cattle; he has recorded the lowing of his cattle as his mobile ring tone. He said that by rights Congo should be paradise.

‘Nothing to do with mining but because of the agriculture. Agriculture is a renewable resource. The Congo river crosses the equator twice, so there is no dry season and no low water. And we have incredibly rich soil that is unexploited. Yet today the fields are abandoned and we import food. ‘We have the world’s worst form of government, a dictatorship without a dictator. No strong man. We have miners who have never run a mine and bankers who have never run a bank. Money-laundering and diamond smuggling are well established and drugs will follow. I am not sure what will happen after that. You can never tell in Africa. The Africans are good people, but we never really know them.’
The first farm that Franz Couttenier’s father owned in Congo was at Shinkolobwe, and bordered the domain of the uranium mine. He grew up beside the mine. The current status of this mine is one of the ongoing mysteries of Katanga. It was officially sealed in 1960, although it remains one of the largest deposits of high-grade ore in the world. It also contains cobalt. The Shinkolobwe mine is not only sealed but heavily guarded, and yet it is known to be mined illegally and dangerously by artisan miners who scrabble around the entrance digging up what they can. There are frequent rumours of visiting businessmen in Congo being offered suitcases full of black-market uranium ore.

A United Nations report in 2006 found that 15,000 amateur miners were living in the village of Shinkolobwe and using ‘informal’ or manual methods to mine cobalt from what was supposed to be a sealed uranium mine. Shortly before the UN inspection took place the regional authorities had destroyed the mining village and les creusers (the illegal miners) were dispersed. But rumours of black-market uranium being offered for sale soon started again. Hacking into a flooded uranium mine to remove the ore is a dangerous occupation, but at Shinkolobwe children were said to be employed by the black-market traders, and tunnel collapses were frequent.

It took us three years to get permission to enter Shinkolobwe. Eventually help came from an unexpected quarter. We had dinner with a building contractor who lived by a lake in Lubumbashi. The lake was teeming with tiny frogs. Pretty lake, no mosquitoes, but full of bilharzia. I asked our host if this was the lake where a European ambassador had once been eaten by a crocodile while taking a nocturnal stroll. He said there were no crocodiles and anyway that sort of thing only happened in Kinshasa.

 The building contractor said he knew the governor of Katanga very well and would have a word. We heard no more. Then one morning the telephone rang and it was our friend who said that Governor Katumbi had called him at 7.30am and that he was displeased. The governor had given our friend a rocket because the cinéastes had not yet paid a courtesy call. We were to be at the palace in one hour.

The meeting lasted less than 10 minutes. The governor listened to Manu and summarised our project as ‘un document historique’, and said it should be seen by every schoolchild in Katanga. The visit would be organised by the Ministry of Mines and could go ahead at our convenience.

We spent the night before we set out for Shinkolobwe in the guesthouse of a Franciscan convent that was attached to a girls’ boarding school. At 5am the convent bells rang out to rouse the girls. I had not been woken by school bells for 50 years. The girls had breakfast, went to chapel and started lessons at 7am. Our police convoy set out for Shinkolobwe at 9.30.

There were five vehicles in the convoy: the lead car contained a major of police, followed by the Atomic Energy Agency car driven by Leonard, who was equipped with Geiger counters. After 10 minutes we stopped at police headquarters to take on six more policemen. The mine was supposed to be sealed but was said to be infested with creusers who could become aggressive if interrupted.

We reached the mine at 12.20pm after twice losing our way in the forest. On one gentle bend Leonard managed to overturn the Atomic Energy car. Eventually we found the right path by following the wide tracks of a lorry, presumably one that was normally laden with bootleg cobalt and uranium. The trees opened out and we found ourselves in a rather overgrown clearing containing several twisted steel skeletons that marked the site of the world’s most celebrated and most secret uranium mine.

There is no shortage of rumours about Shinkolobwe. We had been told that it was staffed by child miners, that it was heavily guarded by South African soldiers, and that the ‘South Africans’ were actually US marines. A Belgian professor of politics in Lubumbashi had identified the mine as the key to the situation in the Middle East and the target of Sudanese mercenaries working for Hezbollah, which was supplying Iran with uranium. The professor said that he had recently visited the site wearing a lead-lined suit. We had no lead suits but we did have paper face masks, thoughtfully provided by the Atomic Energy Agency.

The Shinkolobwe mine in its heyday was a single shaft that was entered at the summit of a low hill. The uranium lode took the form of a vertical egg and the shaft ran straight down through the centre of the egg with galleries running off to left and right at intervals. When the mine was sealed by Union Minière on its departure in 1960 the shaft was filled with concrete and a solid ferroconcrete cap was constructed over the summit of the hill. It did not take the creusers long to work out that the way to crack this abandoned golden egg was to forget about the central concrete shaft and attack from the sides. Fifty years later the result is a new landscape. The hill has disappeared. In its place there is a raised rim about two metres high encircling a crater about 10 metres deep. And lying at the bottom of the crater is the original mine shaft, now visible as a long concrete pillar that has snapped off and tumbled over. Today the mine is derelict and heavily overgrown, a tranquil relic of the bombs that liquidated two Japanese cities.

Everyone got out of the cars and the major led the way to the lip of the crater around the main shaft. As we started to film, Leonard, the unpredictable driver with the Geiger counter, said that we had a maximum of 30 minutes for the good of our health. He obviously had no idea about the length of the filming process. Manu’s voice rang out – ‘Silence. On tourne.’ Justin, our reliable driver, did not like the look of the Geiger counter and said that he would be getting himself examined by a doctor when he got home. It was a beautiful day. Towering white pillars of cloud against a deep blue sky. There were black martins hawking low over our heads, and white and blue butterflies in the wind that kept the tall grass rustling, a flame tree was in flower and there was a grove of umbrella thorns, all about 30 metres tall. These trees had had 50 years to grow since independence. Radiation seemed to make good fertiliser.

The first shots of the crater used up 20 minutes of our time, leaving us barely 10 minutes to shoot a water reservoir. Leonard said that the reservoir had the highest score on the site and issued more paper face masks as a precaution. The Geiger counter started to click and Leonard told us to move on. The director and crew disappeared to the far side of the mine to film the rusting steel girders, and did not reappear for 40 minutes. By the time we left, 30 minutes had become two hours.

In the forest on the road back to Likasi we came across the ghost of a graveyard lost in the trees. There were lines of rusty red iron crosses that seemed like miniature echoes of the rusty iron superstructure of the uranium factory. Each grave was neatly marked and of exactly the same size and design as though these people had all died at the same time. There were no names but these were clearly African graves because on each there was a white enamel food bowl; this was a precaution, placed there to feed the phantoms so that they did not leave the cemetery and return home looking for food. Each bowl had a neat hole drilled in the bottom to make sure that some profane traveller did not steal it and return it to human use. The fact that so many people had died and been buried in military order at the same time had the unmistakable air of a mining accident.

Days later, back in Kinshasa we said goodbye to Papa Thomas, who was sitting under a gum tree, looking over the Congo towards Brazzaville. There was a thick grey haze on the water but one could still make out the swirling flow just above the rapids, the heavy scattering of timber from the forest being swept on towards the sea, and the fishermen with the long poles standing in their pirogues and casting their nets. This was where it had all started, the point above the rapids where the river became navigable upstream, deep into the heart of the forest, and the place where Stanley set up his first camp. This had been the Central Station, later Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, where the king’s agents realised very quickly that ‘Anything – anything can be done in this country.’ And where their successors have been doing practically anything ever since.

Walking across the tarmac through the night to the A330 Airbus that had landed 12 minutes ahead of schedule, we could see flames and a lot of smoke pouring from the Arrivals terminal. The fire engine had already arrived. Then as we drew closer it became clear that the Arrivals building was fine.

It was the fire engine that was on fire.