Sir

Understandably, following the outrages of 11 September 2001, the main scientific periodicals have covered its impact on aspects of science and the response of scientists to the fears that it generated. The annual News reviews in Nature (Nature 414, 836–841; 2001) and Science both headline its aftermath, in terms of the impact on security and the economic downturn that the attacks have helped to accelerate. Their central theme is that the world changed on that day. It did not.

For two thirds of the world's population, 'business as usual' involves an ever-widening gap between hope for the future and expectation of any relief it will bring from poverty, disease and disaster. Fear of falling victim to natural calamities — and those generated by the lifestyles of a highly privileged minority — remains as strong as ever. Despicable as the perpetrators and those who motivated their actions were, the attacks arose from the growing powerlessness of hundreds of millions of dispossessed people. Global communications ensure that they are confronted daily by what they lack, leading to a deep sense of unfairness and victimhood.

Scientists, whose work is enmeshed with emergence of the possible, should dwell on how they might help close that growing human fault line, as you discuss in your Opinion article “Timely messages for the South” (Nature 415, 1; 2002), rather than raging at or cringing before the monstrosity that they have helped to nurture. Assisting the dispossessed to secure safe, dependable water supplies; to improve their agricultural yields; to rid themselves of endemic disease; to gain access to cheap energy and transport; and above all to acquire knowledge and the ability to solve their own problems is not a problem of cosmological or genomic proportions. It is a simple, human duty.