Immigrants: A threat or an opportunity?

North America, specifically the United States, has been a land peopled by descendants of Europe. At least, that’s how I perceived it to be. If you are ever in New York on St Patrick’s Day, check out the parade. It’s an endless procession of Irish descendants. The numbers could, of course, be attributed in part to the Catholic way of life!

One would imagine that the names of the inhabitants of the US would reflect their origins, such names possibly being Smith, O’Reilly, Van Dyk, Schreiber, LeBon, Franchetti or Lopez, with a solid sprinkling of good Jewish names such as Cohen and Levy.

During a totally arbitrary trip through cyberspace today I came across a most fascinating bit of info. I somehow found myself checking the list of finalists to the 2008 Intel Science Talent Search. It’s a competition run in the US every year to find and reward budding high-school-age scientists. These are 17- or 18-year-olds, and the stuff they work on and explore is beyond amazing.

While watching a video of interviews with some of the finalists, a particular project caught my eye and I searched for a more comprehensive list of participants and their particular topics. It was Graham van Schaik’s work that interested me. This 17-year-old experimented with pyrethroids, which are commonly found in household and agricultural pesticides.

The report stated: “His findings showed that realistic levels of pyrethroids promote significant cellular proliferation in human breast cells, a sign of cancer, and neurite retraction in rat PC12 neurons, a sign of neurodegenerative disease, like Alzheimer’s.”

This is something I have been pondering for a while. Why do we have so much cancer nowadays, especially among kids? Could it possibly tie in with the stuff sprayed on to vegetables or fed to livestock in modern food manufacture? Research such as that conducted by this young person could open up a whole can of worms, again, with regards to the fertiliser and pesticide industry.

It could become a repeat of a previous battle over a similar subject. After all, there was the fight to ban DDT. Thank goodness for biologist Rachel Carson, whose book on the harmful nature of the pesticides started an outcry that finally, after 10 years, led to the banning of this harmful chemical.

While looking for this youngster’s research, I had to work through a fair number of other names as the list was in alphabetical order. And what was very interesting, besides the awe-inducing talent and intelligence of these young people, were their names.

Out of the list of the 40 finalists there were far fewer of the types of names that I would have expected to find. Sure there was a Katherine Banks, a Brian McCarthy and a David Rosengarten. But they were in the minority compared with the names from the East — in other words, China, India, Korea and so forth.

Let me pick out some of the ones that are obvious examples: Ashok Chandran, Timothy Chang, Yihe Dong, Olivia Hu, Alexander Chi-Jan Huang, Chun-Kai Kao, Avanthi Raghavan, Vinay Ramasesh, Hamsa Sridhar, Shivani Sud, Ziaoyun Yin and Qiaochu Yuan.

Doesn’t that put a totally different spin on immigration and the value that people bring with them to their new country? Almost daily there is somebody spouting forth in the media about keeping immigrants out of their country, whether it is the UK, Europe or South Africa. If a country were prepared to open up its doors more readily to immigrants from the East, one wonders how that would affect its advances in scientific fields.