LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Leaving results unpublished adds to

Regarding Nancy Parduhn’s letter (T.N.M., Feb. 4/91) about our Gold Probe product, while some of the points of information provided by Parduhn are most interesting, many do not pertain to our kit. We have invested a great deal of technical effort and more than $600,000 in the development and verification of our product. We have worked closely with industry and government groups, and have performed more than 9,000 separate analyses. We have carried out field studies in North America, Turkey and New Zealand. Our data indicates that our product can be used, at least in the environments we have tested it, to locate potential gold deposits.

I can sympathize with Parduhn in that she is a leader in the use of the plate count technique for the enumeration of viable Bacillus species in soil, and she is more than aware of the requirement for expert interpretation of this data. Our kit, however, is fundamentally different from the procedure Parduhn uses. It may in part measure a fraction of the bacterial population that the traditional plate count technique cannot detect.

Evaluation of our field data and laboratory experiments have led us to the conclusion that two types of reactions occur that induce sporulation of the B. cereus bacteria. To date, we have not published our findings and so it is easy to see why those in this area of development may be skeptical of our claims for a “black box” type of kit.

We do not claim that results will be unequivocal in all cases and indeed the Gold Probe results will be subject to similar limitations and interpretations as soil geochemistry. To date, this product has worked in all of its test locations from arctic to desert conditions but more data is required. Bryan E. Imber President CBR International Biotechnologies Sidney, B.C.