Retorts

Egg on the Face?

There are times I get disturbed about hollow media releases of so-called science.

The latest issue (October 1998) of Lincoln University's Outlook has a piece about "Young scientist sets the pace". I don't wish to denigrate Anna Pilbrow personally, but take issue with the university that is using her for dubious publicity, just as did ECNZ before. She is said to have invented and been granted a provisional patent on a process for manufacturing continuous hard-boiled egg. I can well believe that she had an original idea; its time was ripe. But others had thought of it before her. The product is not original. It was advertised in Food Industry News (June 1989, page 5) and had been manufactured at CCD egg processing plant in Cranford Street, Christchurch, quite a few years before that.

Nor are extrusion-cooking processes novel in food manufacture. I believe the first extruder was for manufacture of chewing gum, and extruders have found their way into most aspects of the food industry since. There is a wide range of enrobing extrusion cooking machinery on the market, and many textbooks of the subject.

I'm left wondering what novel process has been invented by Anna that warrants a patent being granted. I'm wondering why the university isn't giving Anna publicity about her process. Please, Jon Hickford and the Biochemistry Department, give us real information, not empty teasers. Do a real service to technology and to Anna. We get too many releases about what researchers are going to do, and too few about what they have done.

Peter Meredith, Plant & Microbial Science, University of Canterbury