Turkey's rich natural heritage under assault.

Response ROBINSON AND BAUMGARTNER REFERENCE recent studies showing that when individuals living in poverty receive new products such as bednets or water purifi ers at no cost, their use patterns are similar to those who have purchased the same products (1, 2). Robinson and Baumgartner suggest that the same may be true for cookstoves. We agree that, especially for the poorest of the poor who are not currently paying for cooking fuels or fully engaged in a market economy, this may well be true. We eagerly await similar studies to confi rm or deny this hypothesis for cooking solutions that offer improvement in indoor air quality, with the understanding that the effectiveness of the approaches will be specifi c to regional and cultural contexts. However, cookstoves and fuels are different from bednets and water purifi ers in a variety of ways. Cookstoves, unlike bednets and water purifi ers, are an essential household technology that virtually all potential consumers already possess in some form. In addition, the associations between cook-stoves and illness may not be as readily apparent as those between mosquitoes and malaria or impure water and diarrheal diseases. The health impacts from indoor smoke may be too far in the future to infl uence choice. On the other hand, more effi cient stoves can offer an immediate benefi t to users by reducing fuel costs, a savings to households that bednets and water purifi ers cannot make as readily. We agree that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) provide an excellent opportunity to answer questions about the relative effectiveness of different fi nance and dissemination approaches. RCTs, in combination with other research approaches, will be critical to understanding the interrelated social, behav-ioral, and economic determinants of successful implementation programs. WE READ WITH SAD AGREEMENT THE EDITORIAL " Turkey and science academies " (30 September, p. 1801), in which B. Alberts discusses the restructuring of Turkey's Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) in order to give the government direct control over it. In addition to destroying TÜBA's identity as an independent science academy, this remarkable decision was made without explanation or any public debate. As ecologists and conservation biologists working in Turkey, we have witnessed a similar level of increasing arbitrariness in environmental policy, where economic development has trumped all other concerns (1–4). Turkey hosts more than 3000 endemic plant species, has high diversity of other taxa, and is almost entirely covered by three …