OF MICE AND MEN

Life is fraught with deadly hazards. Black pepper or spaghetti could cause staggering, convulsions, collapse, and death, as could a number of other fiendish substances such as margarine, egg yolk or cooking oil.

Our information comes from "Toxic Hazards of Common Materials" by C.J. Hilado and A. Hutlinger in Fire Technology (Natl. Fire Protection Assn.), August 1981. To test the toxicity of off-gases, the authors placed four Swiss mice, 25 to 40g in body weight, in a 1-gallon test chamber, to which they admitted the off-gases of the tested (burning) material, recording the times to staggering, convulsion, collapse, and death. One of the tables in the paper is reproduced at the top of the next column.

Unruffled by these results, the profit-greedy corporations continue to sell spaghetti and cocoa mix. Nader's health organizations have been seriously amiss in failing to sue the government for not proclaiming a total ban on any kind of food. Better active today than spaghetti-gassed tomorrow.

As for the mice, they can be put to better use than serving science, for there is an alternative energy source that has escaped the genius of Amory Lovins: mouse power.

Proposed by British Labour M.P. Ronald Brown, who has calculated that a mouse running in a treadmill can generate 70 milliwatts of electric power, mouse power could obviate the need for nuclear plants (at roughly 14,800 mice per installed kilowatt, we figure, just under 15 trillion electro-mice per 1,000 MW unit).

And it could do more: In his proposal submitted to the European Community Commission in Brussels, the Hon. Ronald Brown points out that the mice could be fed on the European Community's surplus butter and pork that is now being dumped below cost in the USSR. Like his transatlantic colleague Sen. Kennedy, Brown has kept labor intensity in mind, pointing to the permanent jobs opening up for the mouse-power maintenance personnel needed to feed the mice and to ship their droppings to biogas installations for yet more alternative energy.

Asked recently how Brown's proposal was faring, the ECC replied in the way of all government institutions: It is not at this time considering mouse power as one of Europe's energy sources, but could not rule out its consideration in the future.

[The mouse power item is based on a report in a German utility monthly, R WE Verbund, August 1981, from which we have also taken the cartoon above. Since Brown was a power plant superintendent before he was elected to parliament, we thought at first that he made his proposal tongue in cheek; but then we recalled that E.F. Schumacher, too, had been a member of the British National Coal Board before he presented the world with his Small is Beautiful, and now we are not so sure ...]