They pay modern publishers exorbitant prices for textbooks where all connection with the social and personal circumstances in which the science was created have

They pay modern publishers exorbitant prices for textbooks where all connection with the social and personal circumstances in which the science was created have been carefully removed.Science, moreover, lives in a sort of perpetual present. In this week's issue of Nature, the world's leading scientific journal, it is difficult to find a reference to any research earlier than 1980.Textbooks are usually not written by practitioners; they oversimplify for didactic purposes and often tend to perpetuate mistakes by the simple process of one generation of textbook writers copying from their predecessors. The papers in scientific journals represent glimpses of understanding of new science and are therefore often incomplete or sometimes wrong in some details. (Einstein's famous 1905 paper on relativity actually contains at least one minor slip-up.)So why does an original edition of the Principia matter? The short answer is that it doesn't. The ideas of gravitation and Newtonian dynamics are freely available to everyone - and they are incomparably more valuable than a pounds 67,000 book..

Remember the bit near the end of The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy accidentally splashes the Wicked Witch of the West with water and Baroness Thatcher's role model begins to liquefy, screeching "I'm melting, I'm melting", all the while? Well, after decades of identifying with the tripper in slippers, I now sympathise with the touchingly terminal WWW and her famous last words: "I'm melting, I'm melting". For that's exactly how I feel about my identity as a gay man. Once it was as sure as underarm deodorant, now it's evaporating or something. Call this a fairy's story, but once upon a time I could walk into any room, anywhere on this little ball of mud spinning merrily in space, and no matter how crowded, I would be able to tell who in that room was gay Truly. It is, to say the least, a startling coincidence that there have been several women consultants who've had allegations made against them - Wendy Savage, Helen Zeitlin (who was made redundant), Pauline Bosanquet and others - and who, after fighting their cases at huge expense, both financial and emotional, were all exonerated I have met these women. I didn't walk in and see witches but articulate, caring, competent individuals, very committed to their career and their patients.

I ask myself, why does this happen to these women?"Dr Peter Tomlin, of the Suspended Doctors' Support Group, points out that the number of allegations of incompetence proved is minute: only three in the past 10 years; also that the odds of suspension appear to be weighted against women consultants. "In only one in five cases of suspensions of male doctors are they proved guilty; but only 6 per cent of accusations against female doctors are ever proved justified. "Some male consultants have championed me and supported me greatly. But there are some individuals, both among consultants and managers, who seem to feel threatened by a woman competing at their level."Does she believe that women have a harder time than men if they do succeed in being appointed? "Not all of them, no, but very many. Although the intake of medical students is divided almost evenly between the sexes, women consultants are in a tiny minority - fewer than 10 per cent of the total.Dr Daly is keen to point out that she is far from being "anti-men". Last June, I won the right to appeal, which took another year.