FOR MANY of us it is traditional on this day to wonder (a) when you will stop receiving a St Valentine’s Day card from your mother and (b) whether science has anything useful to say about sex, love and relationships. I can’t predict the former but I remain convinced by the latter. In the past year alone research has furnished insights into the spectrum of sexuality by revealing that 1 per cent of the population is asexual.

These are people who, while often being in marital or close relationships, have never really wanted sex with anyone. Some have emerged from the closet as “glad to be A” militants whose asexual orientation deserves the same status as “hetero” or “homo”; others remain imprisoned by their guilt at being sexless in a sex-obsessed society.

The work that underpins such insights may, however, be under threat. Today, sex research — especially in the United States — is sometimes perceived as an unwelcome, unwarranted, amoral science against which the public must be protected. The fears follow threats by Congress to close several important studies that receive public money. The move has been fuelled in part by the use of pornographic videos to aid investigations. Dr Gilbert Herdt, from San Francisco State University, told The New York Times: “I have been in this field for 30 years, and the level of fear and intimidation is higher than I can ever remember. With the recent election there’s concern that there will be even more intrusion of ideology into science.”

The anti-sexology lobby is well organised. The right-wing Traditional Values Coalition — supported by 43,000 churches — campaigned against the use of $100 million of public money to fund sexual behaviour research and circulated a “hit list” of 150 researchers. As a result, academics say they are forced to disguise their studies. For instance, sexual behaviour is relabelled “fertility-related behaviour” and ladies who work in massage parlours are euphemistically called “high-risk women”. And woe betide any investigator who wishes to study deviant practices such as paedophilia.

Such hostility, they caution, means that questions that are crucial to public health — such as why a hardcore of people avoid safe sex, or what causes some men to lust after children — go unanswered.

• UNLESS YOU scour the newspaper foreign pages regularly, you may not know of the rollercoaster that is the Global Polio Eradication Program. Exactly a year ago, countries were preparing to celebrate stamping out the disease for good, making it the second scourge, after smallpox, to be consigned to history. Religious chiefs in northern Nigeria, alas, had other ideas. In 2003 rumours spread that the polio vaccination programme was a Western plot to infect Muslim girls with HIV or render them sterile. Unsurprisingly, take-up rates plummeted and outbreaks occurred in 12 neighbouring countries that had been polio-free. The glitch, Scientific American reports, has left 700 children paralysed. Estimates of infection are worryingly high — as many as 180,000.

  Now, though, thanks to a concerted effort, the rollercoaster is back on the rails and the number of polio cases is falling. During the past three months 80 million children have been immunised by one million volunteers and the target date for global eradication has been set for the end of 2005. It is a satisfying victory for Dr David Heymann, a veteran epidemiologist who gained the trust of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a group of 56 Muslim countries. The sourcing of the vaccines from Malaysia, a Muslim country, has helped to mollify Nigerian opponents. “If countries don’t do it now, it won’t happen,” Heymann says. “This is the best chance we’ll ever have.”

• IT’S GOOD to see that a combative spirit remains alive in the dustier corners of Piccadilly. The latest issue of Geoscientist discusses how the Geological Society of London should mark its bicentenary in 2007. One correspondent’s idea is to try to acquire the prefix “royal”.

  The advantages, he argues, would be threefold. First, it would be “a mark of appreciation by a grateful monarch and nation” for the billions poured into Her Majesty’s Treasury from the exploitation of North Sea oil and gas. Secondly, the regal association would be good publicity for geology. Thirdly — and my favourite — is that “it would irritate the hell out of the geographers”.

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