'Catch' cancer? Yes, you can

March 7, 2009
DAEDALUS

By Andy Ho

A VERY close relative of mine has just come down with lymphoma. This is a cancer of the specific type of white blood cells called lymphocytes, which are part of the immune system.

Specifically, my relative has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma - indeed, a relapse of the disease he first had in 2006. Cancerous lymphocytes multiply very fast to crowd out healthy tissue and create lumps, which he recently noticed again.

The first time around, it was a very aggressive variant that spread to his brain. Yet he was cured, thanks to the efforts of the National Cancer Centre's doctors and nurses. Now it is back with a vengeance.

At lunch last Sunday, his 16-year-old son asked in a low voice: 'Can I catch it from Dad?' His mother had a benign breast lump two years ago and another one again recently. Though he had been assured by adults that cancers were not contagious, it seemed to him that tumours struck by households.

It is folk wisdom that you cannot catch cancer like a cold. However, a recent Johns Hopkins University study revealed that if you have had oral sex with six or more individuals, you are thrice more likely to get oral cancer. This is caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV).

Last month, the British Journal of Cancer reported that cancers of the anus, vulva and vagina have increased among 'baby boomers' because of increased HPV transmission among the age group that launched the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

All this is in addition to the fact that 99 per cent of all cancers of the cervix are caused by HPV, now the most common sexually transmitted disease. A recent study showed that 28.5 per cent and 50 per cent of first- and third-year United States female university students, respectively, who had had just one male sex partner were HPV-positive.

The HPV causes no symptoms and our immune systems generally clear it out of the body within two years. However, in 10 per cent of infected women, it persists to cause cervical cancer. In all these cases, the HPV genome actually gets incorporated into the human genome. It then switches off the human genes that make specific human proteins which suppress cancers from developing. When these proteins are not made, cancers erupt.

If sex can transmit HPV that causes cancer in an unfortunate minority, you can obviously 'catch' cancer, even if it takes time to develop. We do not want cancer patients treated like lepers of old. But this should not mean being skittish about taking the necessary steps - like being careful with food or eating utensils of a loved one with cancer - to prevent transmission, if any, of his or her disease.

Beside HPV, the World Health Organisation has identified other viruses that cause human cancers. These include the Epstein-Barr virus (lymphomas and nose cancer); hepatitis B and C viruses (liver cancer); human T-lymphotropic virus, types 1 and 2 (adult T-cell and hairy-cell leukaemia, respectively); and human herpesvirus 8 (Kaposi's sarcoma).

Take the case of an outdoorsy Secondary 3 boy named Cao Yuanchi from Raffles Institution who suddenly developed leukaemia within days of completing an Outward Bound School course in January. The leukaemia caused fatal bleeding in his brain. Did he catch something outdoors that triggered the fatal leukaemia?

Yet if you could catch cancer like that, oncology doctors and nurses should have extraordinarily high cancer rates. They don't.

However, this could be because, first, you probably do not catch cancer viruses from the air; and second, these professionals are meticulous in handling patient body fluids, the possible vehicles of transmission of cancer viruses.

Take the Epstein-Barr virus now known to cause Hodgkin's lymphoma in previously healthy people, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in those with suppressed immunity like organ recipients. It also causes nasopharyngeal carcinoma, the nose cancer rare worldwide but common in Singapore, Malaysia and south China.

Transmitted by saliva, it also causes glandular fever, nicknamed the 'kissing disease' for obvious reasons. Yet the hospital dietitian advised my relative's wife to cook bigger portions. Her husband would then have more to eat and, for the sake of convenience, she could just consume the leftovers. No risk of catching his lymphoma, of course, she added.

The Epstein-Barr virus causes yet another lymphoma called Burkitt's, which usually appears as a jawbone lump that can double in size within 24 to 48 hours. The virus' genome is detected in 100 per cent of these cases, which usually occur in equatorial Africa.

Elsewhere, Burkitt's manifests mainly as abdominal masses. This week, local colorectal surgeon Francis Seow-Choen revealed in The Straits Times that he contracted it in 1964 when he was seven.

He obviously survived, Burkitt's being eminently treatable even back then. Not so non-Hodgkin's, which has a survival rate of only 51 per cent five years after diagnosis. If its spread, or that of nose cancer, say, may be prevented by being careful with food and body fluids, why not say so?

In fact, almost one in every five cancer cases is caused by infections, mainly viruses but also at least one food-borne bacterium called Helicobacter pylori that causes stomach cancer. There are also two food-borne parasites, the Thai- and Chinese-liver flukes, which cause cancer of the ducts that serve to drain bile from the liver into the intestines.

The takeaway lesson here for family members? Don't be politically correct unto death.

andyho@sph.com.sg

Daedalus (meaning "cunning worker" in Greek) was the man who built wings so he and his son Icarus could fly. As Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and he crashed to earth. Daedalus is a weekly column on the triumphs and challenges of science and technology.

What the wild things are

March 7, 2009
CHIMPANZEES AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM

By Charles Siebert

IT'S common to hear, in the wake of someone's sudden lethal outburst, exclamations of shock along the lines of: 'He seemed so pleasant and mild-mannered.' But when those same sentiments are voiced in the aftermath of a chimpanzee attack like the one in Stamford, Connecticut, last month - in which a pet chimp named Travis mauled a woman, robbing her of her hands, eyesight and much of her face, and possibly causing brain damage - they raise serious questions about us, the primates with the so-called higher cognitive functions.

There is something about chimpanzees that has always driven human beings to behavioural extremes, actions that reflect a deep discomfort with our own animality, and invariably turn out bad for both us and them.

The first live chimpanzee to set foot on Europe's shores arrived in The Hague in 1641, on board a Dutch merchant ship returning from Angola. The only known visual record of this unwitting pioneer's existence is an engraving done that same year by the Dutch physician and anatomist Nicolaes Tulp. A leading figure of the Enlightenment with its emergent emphasis on objective observation and realistic representation, Tulp proceeded to compose one of the more surreal depictions of a chimpanzee imaginable. The creature - seated atop a boulder with its mostly hairless torso and limbs, tapered elfin hands and feet, and sweetly smiling face - looks like a potbellied forest nymph dreamily sleeping off a good drink. Not a chimpanzee so much as an ape-human hybrid.

The fact that Tulp refused to let his hand depict what his eyes were seeing goes to the heart of the threat that the chimpanzee's near-humanness has long posed to our consciousness. By depicting a nymphlike creature, he reinforced an age-old anthropocentric conception of human-like apes as mythic beings.

Travis' tragic end is a sadly familiar occurrence within today's equally distorting framework of trying to coerce evolution in a direction it didn't quite go for chimps, by making them be us: living on our turf and terms, dressing in our clothes, acting in our films and commercials, suffering in our research labs.

While researching a book about my days living in a retirement home for former chimp actors - chimps work as actors only until about the age of six, after which they become too strong and wilful; they then spend the rest of their lives, often 40 to 50 more years, behind bars - I happened to visit Mike and Connie Casey, the breeders who originally sold the baby Travis to Ms Sandra Herold.

Mrs Casey saw Travis' mother, Suzy, shot dead in 2001 when this chimp, too, escaped and got into a tussle with a dog.

Chimps are, like us, given to occasional violent outbursts, but they have exponentially greater strength. Chimps also have, like us, minds enough to lose and memories that can hasten the process. Wild chimps 'recruited' by poachers for entertainment watch as their mothers are gunned down - the only way a chimp mother would ever relinquish a child.

Chimps born in captivity are spared that experience, but they suffer the same premature separation from their mothers, isolation from their normal social groups and often mistreatment from trainers and keepers, all traumatic events that have been shown to cause deep psychological scarring and, as in human beings, can lead an animal to overreact to the slightest stimuli: the look in someone's eye, the colour of someone's hair or, as with Ms Herold's friend that day, hair done up in an unaccustomed style. These are, in short, deeply conflicted beings, evolutionary anomalies that only we could have created: chimps with names and yet no recollection of trees!

The most tragic example of this is Lucy, who lived in the late 1960s and early 70s. Raised from infancy to age 10 as a human child by the psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, Lucy made her own meals, mixed her own cocktails, flipped through magazines, slept on soft mattresses, raised a pet cat, learned sign language - and had no contact whatsoever with other chimpanzees. By the time she reached sexual maturity, however, she became more and more difficult to handle, and the Temerlins decided they had to let Lucy go.

They chose to send her to a place that was the complete opposite of what she knew, a refuge that reintroduces captive chimps into the wild. Lucy, it will perhaps come as little surprise, struggled mightily. She refused to socialise with the other chimps, to climb trees, forage for food, make nests. She took to waiting beneath trees for the others' crumbs to fall.

Eventually, Lucy adopted an orphan baby chimp and mothered him until he died three years later of a stomach parasite. She herself barely survived a bout of hookworm, then began to show enough positive signs of socialising with the others that they were all left for a time to their own devices.

A year later, Lucy's skeleton was found near the shores of the island refuge, without, some reports said, her hands or feet. The cause of her death isn't known, but speculation is that Lucy, always the first to greet human visitors, one day unwittingly approached a group of poachers, who readily seized upon their overeager prey.

Lucy, Travis and all the others died for the same reason that Tulp couldn't draw the actual being seated before him: our ongoing inability to see animals outside our own fraught frame of reference. The chimp that Tulp, in fear of science, preserved as a mythic human, Temerlin tried to make a human, in science's name. Lost in the shuffle of either agenda were the animals themselves, creatures we still can't regard and respect for what they are and just leave alone.

NEW YORK TIMES

Obama's baptism of fire

March 6, 2009
BANKING CRISIS

By Thomas L. Friedman

TWO signs of the times: First, a banker friend remarked to me that you know your bank is in trouble when its share price is less than the cost of taking money out of one of its ATMs.

Second, go to Google and type in these four letters: m-e-r-e. Before you go any further, Google will list the possible things or people you're searching for, and at the top of that list will be the name 'Meredith Whitney'. She comes up before 'merengue' and 'Meredith Viera'. Who is Meredith Whitney? She is a banking analyst who became famous for declaring last year, long before others, that Citigroup was up to its neck in bad mortgages and would not likely survive in its present form.

Do you know how many people have to be searching for you if all you have to do is put in four letters and your name pops up first? A lot! But I am not surprised. The United States banking system is in so much trouble that everyone is searching for the silver-bullet solution - and the person who can describe it. Alas, there is no silver bullet.

I'm worried. We've just elected a talented young President with many good instincts about how to propel our country forward, extend health care to more people, make our tax code fairer and launch a green industrial revolution. But do you know what I fear? I fear that his whole first term could be eaten by Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and the whole housing/sub-prime credit bubble we inflated these past 20 years.

I hope my fears are exaggerated. But ask yourself this: Why couldn't former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson solve this problem? And why does it seem as though his successor, Mr Tim Geithner, won't even look us in the eye and spell out his strategy? Is it because they don't get it? No. It is because they know - like Roy Scheider in the movie Jaws, when he first saw the great white shark - that 'we're gonna need a bigger boat', and they're too afraid to tell us just how big.

This problem is more complicated than anything you can imagine. We are coming off a 20-year credit binge. As a country, too many of us stopped making money by making 'stuff' and started making money from money - consumers making money out of rising home prices and using the profits to buy flat- screen TVs from China on their credit cards, and bankers making money by creating complex securities and leverage so more and more consumers could get in on the credit game.

When this huge bubble exploded, it created a crater so deep that we can't see the bottom - because that hole is the product of two inter-related excesses. Some banks are in trouble because of the sub- prime mortgage securities they have on their books that are now worth only 20 cents on the dollar because of widespread defaults.

And many other banks - the ones that took on the most leverage like Citigroup and Bank of America - are in trouble because of all the loans on their books that can't now be repaid, such as auto loans, commercial real estate loans, credit card loans and corporate loans. Most of the big banks have not marked down these loans yet because if they did, they would be insolvent. The sub-prime toxic securities will take billions to bail out; the loans could take trillions.

Climbing out of such a deep crater is going to be tricky. Any big step we try to take could trigger other problems - the full dimensions of which we don't understand. We need to create a 'bad bank' to buy and hold the toxic mortgage assets or have the government buy the first batch and create a market, but that would likely involve bailing out banks that have behaved very recklessly. It is a price I'd pay to save the system, but even doing that is very complicated. Buying securitised toxic mortgages is not like buying a yacht off the books of a bankrupt savings-and-loan society.

Nationalising Citigroup may sound good on paper, but putting it into receivership could trigger all kinds of defaults on derivative contracts that it has written. It may be inevitable, but we'd better understand all of Citigroup's counterparty risks so we don't inadvertently set off more falling dominos, � la Lehman Brothers.

At the moment, the Obama team seems to prefer a gradual attempt to nurse these sick banks back to health with repeated blood transfusions - US$30 billion (S$47 billion) more to AIG today, another US$40 billion to Citigroup tomorrow. And Lord only knows how much Bank of America will need after its weekend fling with Merrill Lynch has left it with Toxic Asset Disease. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury seem to be trying to give these banks enough capital to survive the next two years, as they de-leverage and de-risk their portfolios - and then hope for the best.

If they are right, President Barack Obama (and the rest of us) will just have a wrenching first year and then be able to gradually put the banking crisis behind him.

For now, though, the banks still threaten to consume the Obama presidency. Indeed, I'm sorry to report that if you just type two letters into Google - 'b-a' - the first thing that comes up is not Barack Obama. It's 'Bank of America.' Barack Obama is third.

NEW YORK TIMES

Marriage of art and craft

March 5, 2009
CREATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES

By Andy Ho

A RECENT report had Singapore topping the global innovation rankings, with the United States placed sixth.

However, most academic studies have the US in pole position. The survey in question was carried out by a non-profit organisation founded in 2006 by the lobbying arm of the IT industry in the US, so its motivations may be open to question.

Could Singapore have a more innovative culture than the US? At a recent seminar on how technology evolves, a speaker diplomatically evaded this question. Reading between the lines, however, his answer was probably that Singapore could not.

The speaker, Dr Brian Arthur, said that 'novel species' of technologies do not emerge through a process of small differences in technologies, accumulating over time in a Darwinian process of selection and adaptation. For instance, radar did not emerge over time through the accumulation of small differences among integrated circuit technologies.

Dr Arthur, visiting professor at the Nanyang Technological University's business school, argued that new technologies are constructed from existing ones - like snapping lego blocks together to give us new structures. Thus, Frank Whittle, who first conceived of jet propulsion in 1930, did so by marrying internal combustion technology with turbine technology.

This being so, the innovations that a culture can come up with will depend on its existing store of technologies. Compare a material culture consisting of stone and skins with one consisting of pulleys and steam power: Steam locomotives could not have emerged from the former.

If new technologies emerge on the basis of existing technologies, then technology is essentially self-creating, Dr Arthur claimed. First there were X-rays. Then came computers. Combined, they led to CT scans that imaged bone structures and MRI scans that imaged soft tissue in high definition. This is how new technologies 'bootstrap' themselves into existence, Dr Arthur theorised.

Furthermore, no known society has evolved great technologies without already being suffused with a deep culture of basic science, he observed. People must have many degrees of freedom to pursue scientific endeavours and society must invest in basic science, not applied science, without expecting dollar returns any time soon. In a word, it takes lots of time to get great technologies.

If we think of groups of technologies - biotech, imaging, computer graphics and so on - as different languages, then innovations are utterances in those languages. But for new and unexpected technologies to emerge by self-combinations, the speakers must know the 'grammar' - which is basic science. This is because new combinations of technologies are like poems. Unless you have mastered a language and acquired 'deep craft', you cannot aspire to be a poet. And just as poets must generally endure genteel poverty for years with patience, it takes time to produce great innovations in technology.

For technologies to combine so that new species of technology can emerge, one more thing is needed, which Dr Arthur rather infelicitously called 'the capture of phenomena'. For instance, there hasn't been any headway towards teleportation because there is no known phenomenon in real life akin to it to capture. So we cannot begin to think about what technologies could, if melded together correctly, teleport real people.

In contrast, we know that nuclear fusion is happening in the sun all the time, which is why it gives out heat and light. Thus, what inventors need to think through is which existing technologies may, if combined well, capture and stabilise the phenomenon called nuclear fusion so as to produce power in predictable and controllable ways for human use.

Or think of how one is to process DNA which exists in such tiny amounts locked up within cell nuclei. The technology to tease apart the double strands of the DNA helix and identify the parts holding the strands together was well-established. But it took Dr Kerry Mullis to think of capturing the phenomena of xeroxing and chain reactions to make repeated copies of mirror images of the strands, thus causing the quantities of any DNA to rise exponentially in-vitro.

In 1983, he invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which - together with digital imaging and intensive computational technologies - now enables even whole genomes of human beings to be sequenced. Although Dr Mullis shunned academic life after his PhD to write fiction, run a bakery and windsurf, he still managed to create PCR, for which he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But whether we are concerned about which technologies to marry or what phenomenon to capture, the culture must have 'deep craft' in basic science, Dr Arthur reiterated. Think about a cordon bleu culture of cooking. That won't emerge in Singapore just by printing a whole lot of cordon bleu cookbooks to drop all over the island from the air.

Deep craft in cookery - or anything else, for that matter - cannot be inculcated so easily. People must first value the craft highly, love it and desperately want to acquire it for themselves. Then only, after perhaps generations, will the craft become part of a culture's warp and woof.

So Singaporeans need time, space and freedom to develop a deep culture of science. Only then will we be as fecund in producing new technologies as China once was and the US now is.

andyho@sph.com.sg

Put the citizen in control of social benefits

March 5, 2009
REVIEW INTERVIEW

By Chua Mui Hoong

ONE day, an Aboriginal man told Professor Peter Shergold: 'You know, I've been sent on three or four training programmes but I still haven't got a job.'

There's a difference between training programmes to occupy the jobless, and training programmes to get them an occupation. It's an obvious point but one Prof Shergold said Australia learnt the hard way during its years of helping the long- term unemployed.

Prof Shergold, who used to be Australia's top bureaucrat, was in town last week to meet top civil servants and share Australia's experiment with using not- for-profit (NFP) organisations to deliver public services. One area he's familiar with is employment services - which is also high on Singapore's agenda as it braces itself for record unemployment in the wake of a global recession.

Said Prof Shergold: 'All our experience with people who are long-term unemployed is we had a tradition of sending them for different training programmes. They'd actually become experts at training programmes: they do this training programme, wouldn't get a job and they go to another training programme, and yet another training programme.

'So you've got to make sure that you're not paying for training programmes because someone enjoyed the training programme. You pay for the training programme because you think it's going to get somebody into work.'

He's saying this to drive home the point that even well-intentioned social programmes sometimes lead to less- than-optimal outcomes.

Prof Shergold, a former academic, trained in Britain and the United States. His career in the Australian public service culminated in his appointment as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister, a position from which he stepped down in February last year. He was also head of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) in Australia, where he pioneered contracting out employment services to non-government organisations.

'For 50 years, public servants all around Australia were delivering labour market programmes to the unemployed. They were the ones who were helping them to find jobs. You go into the CES office and there'd be postcards up on the wall about jobs and you'd go to someone behind the counter.

'Just over a decade ago, the government completely changed that by saying no, we're not going to have public servants do it. We will pay for (it) but we will contract it out.'

The service was taken over by the private and NFP sectors. Audits found they were more successful in matching people to jobs than the public service had been.

These days, the affable Prof Shergold, 62, is chief executive and Macquarie Group Foundation Chair of the Centre for Social Impact, a new collaborative centre set up by the Universities of New South Wales, Melbourne and Swinburne University of Technology.

He comes from a family of public servants: granddad was a bus driver on the government payroll, and dad was in the navy. But no, his own daughter looks unlikely to follow in his footsteps. The veterinary science student was impressed with her father's career for only one reason: that he got to meet The Terminator - the actor and Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger - said Prof Shergold.

He has a passion for harnessing the energies and resources of social NFP organisations to deliver services to the state, private sector, or even directly to citizens.

In Australia, NFP groups deliver a range of social services - such as job- matching, disability help, family counselling - to the state.

'Involving the not-for-profit sector in delivering government services has been a very good thing because they tend to have a much greater connection and much greater empathy with the clients they're serving. It's also given them significant funding.'

He added that this has changed the role of civil servants: 'The type of things that public servants do has changed - you now manage contracts, you manage projects. Most important - and public servants are still learning to do it - is to manage relationships.

'One of the difficulties is that, too often, they think their job is a legalistic one. So if a not-for-profit organisation has won this contract to deliver say, employment services or disability services, family counselling services, (the civil servants) become almost obsessive about the contract itself and start to become far too involved in the micro-management of the not-for-profit organisation.'

A strong advocate of empowering NFPs - and citizens - to be proactive in choosing the social services they need, Prof Shergold said some Australian states have gone further than contracting out services to the NFP sector to deliver.

There is a movement in Victoria and Western Australia to put the citizen at the heart of decisions as to how best he can be helped - whether it's an elderly person who needs home care, a disabled person who needs mobility assistance, or a jobless person needing help to get a job.

Called self-directed care, or co-production, it means essentially that the citizen has control over what programmes social service money meant to help him and his family is actually spent on.

A care coordinator works with the citizen to design a menu of care options in three ways. The first is an a la carte approach, asking the citizen to pick from a buffet of options already available, to decide on a customised menu of services that he would find most helpful.

Another way is to offer a mix of such options from an existing menu, plus funds to purchase other services.

The third, and most radical option, is to determine a budget which the needy citizen has at his disposal to plan the services he needs, and then let him plan how to use the money.

As Prof Shergold understood it, the Singapore Government's approach to employment assistance via Spur (Skills Programme for Upgrading and Resilience), which offers heavily subsidised training provided by a range of training service providers, is an example of the state contracting out public services to the not- for-profit and private sector.

One strength of that approach is that individuals get to choose their training. But Singapore might go further: 'Where co-production could go further, however, is that the individual may be told that this is the amount that's going to be spent on retraining but in fact what do you think is the best way that you can use this money to find employment.

'They may say, actually none of those training courses is really suitable for me but I know there is a job waiting for me if I can do that training. Or they may say, I talked to this employer and I think he'd be willing to take me on if I can use the money you would have given me for training as a wage subsidy and he's willing to sign up that he'll train me on the job.

'You could have someone who says what I want to do is to set up a small business. You don't just say yes. You would obviously say, well, what business? What skills do you have? Well, here is the money to go away and work out a business plan and this is where you go to do it.

'And so...you are actually putting that individual in charge of the problem.'

Will this increase social spending?

'There is interesting work already being done that when you tell citizens to organise the services they want on their own behalf, they actually use the money more efficiently and sometimes budget less for themselves than the government would have budgeted because they start to think, you know, how are we going to do this.'

muihoong@sph.com.sg

Air-powered car on show

March 5, 2009

GENEVA - CONSUMERS have grown used to the idea of cars powered with alternative fuels, from hydrogen to electricity. But running a car on air? French firm MDI says it can be done, and used the Geneva Auto Show to display a bubble-shaped 3-wheeler it plans to start rolling out later this year.

The AirPod can travel up to 137 miles (220 km) on a single 46-gallon (175-litre) tank of compressed air, producing zero emissions on the road, MDI spokesman Sebastien Braud said on Wednesday.

Drivers can recharge their air supply in eight hours by plugging the car into electricity outlets, or by going to special 'air stations' where the process takes only 2 minutes.

The AirPod will be trialed by airlines Air France and KLM at their bases in Paris and Amsterdam, starting in May, said Mr Braud. Another trial will begin in the southern French city of Nice in December.

The car will take some getting used to, and not just because of its novel power supply. Steering is done with a joystick, and the only doors open to the front and back. The two passenger seats are rear-facing and can be replaced with a cargo space.

Mr Braud said the AirPod solves the problem of most electric-powered cars - heavy and costly batteries. This allows the car to be sold at a comparatively modest 6,000 euros (S$11,700).

MDI is already planning a second model. The 4-wheeler OneFlowAIR cabrio will also run on compressed air, but can burn conventional fuels to extend its range.

Mr Braud dismissed the suggestion that consumers might find his air-powered models a little lightweight.

Pointing at the green offerings of several well-known brands at the Geneva Auto Show, he questioned why anyone who wants an eco-friendly drive would buy a heavy sports car.

'That three-ton, 300 horsepower electric over there? That's bioterrorism,' Mr Braud said. -- AP

A world awash in oil

March 4, 2009

NEW YORK - SUPERTANKERS that once raced around the world to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for oil are now parked offshore, fully loaded, anchors down, their crews killing time. In the United States, vast storage farms for oil are almost out of room.

As demand for crude has plummeted, the world suddenly finds itself awash in oil that has nowhere to go.

It's been less than a year since oil prices hit record highs. But now producers and traders are struggling with the new reality: The world wants less oil, not more. And turning off the spigot is about as easy as turning around one of those tankers.

So oil companies and investors are stashing crude, waiting for demand to rise and the bear market to end so they can turn a profit later.

Meanwhile, oil-producing countries such as Iran have pumped millions of barrels of their own crude into idle tankers, effectively taking crude off the market to halt declining prices that are devastating their economies.

Traders have always played a game of store and sell, bringing oil to market when it can fetch the best price. They say this time is different because of how fast the bottom fell out of the oil market. 'Nobody expected this,' said Antoine Halff, an analyst with Newedge. 'The majority of people out there thought the market would keep rising to US$200 (S$310), even US$250, a barrel. They were tripping over each other to pick a higher forecast.'

Now the strategy is storage. Anyone who can buy cheap oil and store it might be able to sell it at a premium later, when the global economy ramps up again.

The oil tanks that surrounded Cushing, Oklahoma, in a sprawling network that holds 10 per cent of the nation's oil, have been swelling for months. Exactly how close they are to full is a closely guarded secret, but analysts who cover the industry say Cushing is approaching capacity.

It's the same scene at the four other massive storage sites in the US, complexes on the East Coast, Gulf Coast, West Coast and near the Rocky Mountains.

Some oil is ending up in giant ships and staying there. On these supertankers, rented by oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, there is little for crews to do but paint and repaint the decks to pass time. -- AP

From tankers to floating storage tanks
MORE than 30 tankers, each with the ability to move 2 million barrels of oil from port to port, now serve as little more than floating storage tanks. They are moored across the globe, from the Texas coast to the calm waters off Europe and Nigeria.

'It gets expensive to do this,' said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp. 'If you're sitting on a bunch of oil and you're stuck paying storage and insurance, and you can't find a buyer, you may have to sell it at a discount just to get rid of it.'

On the other hand, as storage units on land have filled up, the companies that own the tankers have profited. Tanker companies charge an average of $75,000 a day, three times as much as last summer, to hold crude, said Douglas Mavrinac, an analyst with Jefferies & Co.

Demand for oil began to increase steadily in the early 1980s, and it went into overdrive in recent years as the Chinese economy surged. That changed when recession gripped the globe, and frozen credit markets made things worse. Inventories swelled.

Refineries in the US have cut way back on production of gas as the economy weakens and millions of Americans, many of them laid off, keep their cars in the garage.

The latest government records show US inventories are bloated with a virtual sea of surplus crude, enough to fuel 15 million cars for a year. Inventories have grown by 26 million barrels since the beginning of the year alone. Oil from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria is finding few takers, even though much of it is used to make gasoline in the United States.

There are so many players in the international oil market that no one has enough control to sway prices. Opec slashed production by more than 4 million barrels a day, and still the price of a barrel of crude languishes near US$40. At its peak, it traded at US$147 a barrel.

Experts aren't sure what will happen when it all that oil finally comes ashore.

One fear is that with oil prices so low, companies will slash drilling and production, setting the world up for an energy crunch that would send prices soaring. The number of oil and gas rigs operating in the United States has fallen a staggering 39 per cent since August.

Others say prices would plummet if companies forced millions of barrels onto the market at once.

'If everyone's running for the exits at the same time, they'll engineer a price collapse,' Mr Flynn said. -- AP.