Washoe's legacy and a call to compassion

I was deeply saddened by the recent news of the death of Washoe, a chimpanzee who lived at the Chimpanzee Human Communication Institute in Ellensburg, WA for many years. Her passing is cause to reflect and inspiration for an op-ed (Here with the header "Legacy for Washoe") that I wrote about Washoe last week.

Some people writing about her death have claimed that she changed what it meant to be human – that she changed our society. That, I suppose, is true – but there is more to that lesson. Washoe also helped us see what it means to be chimpanzee. When she spoke her mind, signing about her wants and needs, playing jokes or tricks, showing empathy, she embodied a message of compassion – one that we have not fully heard.

Her life "spoke" of chimpanzee-hood, humanity and compassion. Not in the figurative way that Kafka envisioned when he wrote of Red Peter. But literally - when she joked, fibbed, comiserated, threw tantrums - she challenged us all to think differently (bigger?) about the minds of nonhuman animals. She will be missed.

In light of the lessons taught by Washoe, her fellow signing apes, and all that we know about chimpanzees, we must now realize that how we currently keep and treat chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories is replete with ethical problems. It's time for the United States to join nations all over the world, from Austria to Liberia and New Zealand, that have banned experiments on chimpanzees. It is the right and compassionate thing to do. I'm sure that Washoe would have signed that she agreed.

For more information, see the tribute site, CHCI, Friends of Washoe.

Sneak peek: Editorial board on animal experiments and facilities at UW

The Seattle PI has published yet another editorial piece regarding the animal experimentation at the UW, including their ongoing probation with their accrediting agency, and investigations and criticisms from governmental investigators.

The PI begins by addressing the President and The Regents of the UW. The piece goes on to talk about the billions of dollars (and yes that's billions with a B) that the university has in its coffers:

“Some degree of animal experimentation figures into grants involving $250 million or more. It was institutionally neglectful or worse to let some facilities become so derelict as to prompt replacement demands from the national accrediting organization." [emphasis added]

The board is not about to let the U get away with actions it apparently thinks are despicable. The language is strong - and rightfully so. See the full text here:
Animal Research: Make the Grade .

Notable quote...nothing to do with primates, per se, but great for Earth Day.

"Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife by the millions to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the
billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."

-- C. David Coates

Putting a face on animal suffering: Part II

Last time I wrote about Paul Slovic's work on human empathy in the face of mass suffering, I tried to generalize his findings about human suffering to that of other animals. What does a human bias to respond to the plight of one or two mean for activism? Do the reasons for the bias matter?

Even if we don't have a full understanding of the reasons for this human bias to respond to the plight of a few but not the plight of many, there is plenty of evidence for the existence of the bias and an implicit awareness of it. I think the advent of the "poster child" by certain charities may be a response to the bias - which I'm going to call the JustOne bias.

Is it that the suffering of one inspires action, or that the suffering of many discourages it? If people fail to respond to mass crises, like Darfur or the plight of so many hens in battery cages, could it be because they don't think they can make an impact? On the other hand, do we naturally have an easier time putting ourselves in the shoes or paws of just one being? Or do the numbers put us off? Do the same constraints on our cognition that make the size of the Earth or its population difficult to comprehend make the millions upon millions of animals imprisoned in laboratories hard to comprehend?

Each of these limits suggests a strategy for coping.

1. Help people appreciate that even small actions can help. I think the 34 million friends campaign is a good example of this. This grassroots campaign tells supporters explicitly that they are seeking a specific, small contribution. They also use concrete illustrations of the good that the collective donations can do. Other calls to action use similar strategies. "For the price of a cup of coffee you can XYZ..." It seems to me that microfinance operations embody this principle through their very existence.



2. Identify a "poster animal" who represents the issue. I think it's a fine idea to have that one poster animal as a representative for others who share his or her plight. I do this when I talk about the devastating legacy of maternal deprivation by sharing stories about one particular monkey who I knew personally - AB. Who is that individual? Does he or she have a story? The individual might be one who is doing well and the call is to keep it that way. It can also be an animal who is suffering and in need of help. People have visceral and emotional reactions to pictures and videos of a terrified animal or an animal in pain. The goal is to help people empathize, not to overwhelm.



3. Help people visualize and empathize with the experiences of an animal. One of my favorite examples of helping people identify with an animal is a brochure about the suffering of laying hens, which when unfolded displays text that remind readers that hens are kept in cages roughly the size of the paper in their hands. When I talk about the chair restraint commonly used with monkeys in laboratories, I use the analogy of an airplane seat on short flight and then ask others to imagine with me how that would feel if it lasted for days...or if it never ended. Granted, the coach seat is a cake walk by comparison, but since most people have experienced it at one itme or another, it's a place to start.



4. Facilitate the appreciation of scale. The best example of this that I have ever seen is the video version of "If the world were a village" at http://www.miniature-earth.com/. I've watched it many times, asked students to watch it for classes and know exactly why it won so many awards. Watching it once again now, after finding the link for this entry, I can say it still stirs my emotions.

Tom Regan speaks eloquently about how we can be affected by that one animal, and by the the suffering of the masses. It seems an important challenge, then, is finding the balance between the two. Given the JustOne bias, we have to be careful to address scale in ways that don't overwhelm or reverse the effect of the other approaches mentioned above.

For a brief summary of Slovic's recent research findings, see "How do we stop genocide when we begin to lose interest after the first victim?"

Tip of the hat for a school north of the border

Dean @ York U speaks to students about animal rights and social justice
When I ask college students talk about their activism and advocacy on behalf of animals, I regularly hear stories about faculty who are disrespectful, combative, even openly hostile. I am troubled by such stories. But, despite my disappointment, most student activists remain undeterred; they can see beyond the bullying because they care so deeply about animals.

So imagine what a breath of fresh air it was to read about Dr. Joni Seager. Seager, a Dean at York University and a respected scholar on social justice and environmental issues, recently sat down with students to share her expertise and to talk about animal rights and activism. Tip of the hat to Dr. Seager.

“The foundations upon which systems of animal exploitation are based are being shaken and will continually be challenged as we gain a clearer picture of the inaccurate assumptions that support these systems,” Seager told the group. “There is a rich field of research waiting in animal rights, and I encourage you all to take up the issues that are meaningful to you and to help create positive change in our society.”

See the full article here: FES Dean Joni Seager highlights connections between animal rights and feminism

Essay on ethics, animals and great apes available on the web

The current issue of the open source journal BioScience includes an essay by Paola Cavalieri of the Great Ape Project

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Another age-long assumption that has been undermined is the agent-patient parity principle, according to which the class of moral patients – the beings whose treatment may be subject to moral evaluation – coincides with the class of moral agents – the beings whose behaviour may be subject to moral evaluation (Warnock 1971; Miller 1994). We have long assumed that (full) moral protection was only due to those beings (rational, autonomous, etc.) which can reflect morally on how to act, and can be held accountable for their actions. Beings which can be harmed but cannot act morally have instead been excluded from the moral community, or have been granted a much weaker moral protection, that allowed for their use as mere means to others’ ends.

The full text of the article, entitled "Ethics, animals and the nonhuman great apes," is available online in the open source journal BioSciences.

Putting a face on animal suffering - and why it's sometimes just one face

I noticed this gem from the AAAS meetings this week, and it made me think about animal suffering, advocacy and the whitewashing that often takes place in the media or public consciousness. I'll explore this topic in a multi-part post. This is part 1: one and only
A professor from the U of Oregon asks "How do we stop genocide when we begin to lose interest after the first victim?" His research suggests that public outcry over genocide and human suffering is partly a numbers game:

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

I think we see similar trends in animal protection. The billions of chickens slaughtered each year are never mentioned in the media. If we bring it up in conversation, people are as likely to roll their eyes as to gasp in dismay.

"We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off,"

Yet if one puppy is rescued from a burning building hundreds of people will clamor to donate and adopt. I have seen this chalked up to species differences - to traits that humans find more or less attractive. Sometimes I figure it's dissonance. In this example of differences between chickens and the puppy,the pain of the chickens has to be reconciled against the eating of said chickens. By contrast, the average person's feelings about dogs and his or her treatment of them is probably less disparate. I've seen some data on the species traits argument. But it appears that's is only part of it: we may have an inherent bias in favor of the individual over a group.

Slovic points to this bias as a major factor in responses to genocide. Though he uses examples of human genocide, the similarities to the plight of other animals logically fits in this framework as well. The article continues:

However, models based on psychology are unmasking a haze on the issue. One model suggests that people react very strongly around the zero point. "We go all out to save a single identified victim, be it a person or an animal, but as the numbers increase, we level off," he said. "We don't feel any different to say 88 people dying than we do to 87. This is a disturbing model, because it means that lives are not equal, and that as problems become bigger we become insensitive to the prospect of additional deaths."

[emphasis added]

We aren't talking about diminishing returns here, but an extinction or collapse effect.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

What does this mean for animal protection?

To be continued.

For a brief article about Slovic's research, see "How do we stop genocide when we begin to lose interest after the first victim?"

The long history of primate vivisection

Primate experimentation has a long and ugly history. An interesting short essay in this week's BMJ reminds us of these ancient roots.

Writer Wendy Moore gives us a history lesson in quackery featuring Claudius Galen, a Roman doctor who insisted that bloodletting restored internal balance and health. Moore writes:

"Letting blood at specific points was his favourite remedy for restoring balance; he once denounced a quack for letting blood from the “wrong arm.”

His daily dissections of apes, pigs, and sheep led him to numerous mistaken conclusions on the human body, which remained unchallenged until the 16th century."

And yet science and society remain chained and shackled by the fallacious conclusions of vivisection even today. This despite the fact glaring evidence of its failures:

• 99% of drug candidates fail without making it to human clinical trials


• Of those drugs "proven" safe and effective in animals, 92% (more for cancer meds) fail in human trials.


• Of those drugs that make it through human clinical trials and end up on the market, approximately 40% undergo major relabeling or are eventually withdrawn. This despite the fact that relatively few drugs undergo rigorous post-marketing evaluation.

Monkey madness in new documentary: The Living Weapon

As part of a new documentary called The Living Weapon, PBS has put up several web features. Among these are two declassified films showing primate experiments conducted by the US military.


The first film segment, nearly 10 minutes long, shows experiments where over 100 rhesus monkeys and an unknown number of squirrel monkeys are injected with Botulinum toxin. Even before the experiments begin, the monkeys appear fearful and anxious. After they are poisoned, they become weak, froth at the mouth, gasp for air. Most eventually die because they can no longer breathe.

The other film segment about primates shows an experiment where monkeys are poisoned with enterotoxin, which is a common cause of food poisoning.

"He becomes bewildered and depressed. And, as the intoxication progresses, the animal's depression intensifies leading sometimes to prostration," said the film narrator.

The monkeys appear to be tethered by chains around their necks. Before being sprayed with an aerosolized form of the toxin, the monkeys are put into a restraining box, leaving only their heads free.

The narrator notes that several of the experimenters were made ill during the early portions of the experiment because they breathed toxin from residues in the monkeys' fur. He also noted that some animals were killed by impurities in the substances used to poison the monkeys.


Watch declassified films of primate experiments at The Living Weapon website

Sneak peek: Morals do not conquer all in decision making

Beliefs we "protect" trump doing the right thing based strictly on outcomes. The authors use the example of "you can't place a value on a human life," but of course judges and juries do that all the time. How does this translate to the value we place on animal lives?

Morals do not conquer all in decision making:

"Is morally-motivated choice different from other kinds of decision making? Previous research has implied that the answer is yes, suggesting that certain sacred or protected values are resistant to real world tradeoffs. In fact, proposed tradeoffs between the sacred and the secular lead to moral outrage and an outright refusal to consider costs and benefits (e.g.'You can't put a price on a human life').

Previous theory in moral decision making suggested that if people are guided by protected values, values that equate to rules like 'do no harm', they may focus on the distinction between acting/doing harm versus not acting/allowing harm, paying less attention to consequences. People who make choices based on these values, thus show 'quantity insensitivity' relative to people without protected values for a given situation. "

Trauma early in life, disease later in life

A new study published this week reported a definitive link between early life trauma, i.e. child abandonment, abuse and neglect, and disease later in life. It wasn't the injuries from beating that were to blame. Authors indicated that it all boiled down to psychological stress, because, as the lead investigator put it, "...stress is the fear of pain."

While I might argue some subtleties of the last statement, the link between early psychological trauma and later health outcomes was very convincing.

Investigators found that adults who reported being abused or neglected as children had higher levels of an inflammation protein in their blood than did folks who had no such history.

To make matters worse, the research team indicated there were also implications for cortisol, a hormone that normally acts as a brake on inflammation. The result was high risk for conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

This is a case where investigators learned something about early life experience and health and welfare in adulthood through careful, longitudinal study of humans. Real people living real lives complete with all their confounding variables and covariates, are the best and only way to look at complex psychobiological issues like early life trauma. The new study is really quite impressive. One reviewer noted, "They have elegantly connected childhood stress to a real adult risk of disease." (See NewScientist below)

By comparison, other perhaps less creative and certainly less compassionate people try to create animal "models" of child abuse and neglect by subjecting baby animals to maternal deprivation or by purposefully taking healthy babies and putting them with aggressive adults. If the baby animals used in these terrible experiments survive, they suffer from a range of physical and psychological pathologies, conditions that are rarely acknowledged or treated. The outcome has many similarities to post-traumatic stress disorder.

People who run such animal experiments are unable to draw powerful conclusions or to translate their findings directly into clinical practice. Rather, animal experiments cause untold suffering for the animals, waste tax dollars on fruitless research, and divert resources from programs that could benefit humans and other animals affected by trauma and abuse.

In the end, the abuse and neglect experiments with animals relieve no human suffering and cause extraordinary animal suffering, making the entire endeavor morally bankrupt.

Link to abstract in PNAS here.

Other news coverage of the study:

BBC: Child abuse link to future health

NewScientist: Why childhood trauma brings ill health later on

Industry-funded "marketing material" passed off as scientific articles

PLoS Medicine has just published a study which found that essentially ALL reports from clinical trials in one European survey (40 over one year) were written by industry ghost-writers rather than clinicians (all if we use the most liberal definition of ghost-writer, nearly all if a strict definition is used.) Conflict of interest and financial disclosure policies should preclude such nonsense, or perhaps such reports should be marked as advertisement. (Or, for the sake of public health, tossed.)

This is deeply disconcerting:

This study is the first that has systematically examined the prevalence of ghost authorship using a cohort of protocols and corresponding publications. The authors conclude that "ghost authorship in industry-initiated randomised trials is very common, and we believe that this practice serves commercial purposes". They go on to urge that in order to reduce the prevalence of ghost authorship, existing guidelines such as those drawn up by the International Committee on Medical Journal Editors, World Association of Medical Editors and European Medical Writers Association, are followed. This action could increase the chance that publications accurately, fairly, and comprehensively reflect the data collected from trials

A related perspective by Liz Wager, an independent editorial consultant, who has been involved in drawing up guidelines for medical writers, discusses the implication of these findings further.

Full article available online, here, at PLoS Medicine: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040019

Pitt's cloned monkey embryos are abnormal - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Monkey embryos at Pitt are abnormal, but apparently scientific fraud is not. Pitt's strategy for dealing with the fraud? Clamming up. Charming way to instill confidence.

The stem cell line has twice the number of normal chromosomes...the work was "very publishable" though fraudulent. One or the other, people. Really.

From the article:

Results of the prior experiments, conducted in 2005, never made it to the hands of independent scientists, but Dahlberg called them "very publishable."

Park, who left Pitt in February 2006 to return to his native South Korea, has had eight stem cell papers retracted by leading scientific journals.


They include a fraudulent 2005 Science paper co-written by Schatten that claimed to have derived stem cells from cloned human embryos.

Since that fraud was uncovered last winter, Schatten, who heads the Pittsburgh Development Center at the Magee-Womens Research Institute, has refused to comment publicly.

Pitt's cloned monkey embryos are abnormal - Full article available here

Bound and gagged: the ambivalent vivisector

This week's issue of Nature includes a variety of content on animal experimentation, including the results of an anonymous poll of biologists (80% claimed to conduct animal experiments), editorial content in favor of animal testing on the one hand and more openness on the other, along with interviews with vivisectors aimed at revealing their "nuanced" views.

The editorial piece on the poll is predictable in its endorsement of vivisection, but does acknowledge that there are issues with the way it is communicated.

Animal research saves lives. That is the mantra often used to counter verbal and physical attacks on animal researchers and their institutions by animal-rights activists. And it is unquestionably true: animal research has made many valuable contributions to medical science.

However, the simplicity of the slogan barely does justice to the complexity of the issue. From a scientific point of view, for example, it is clear that certain animal models are useful: the neural prosthetics that promise to restore some independence to paraplegics, for example, arose from curiosity-driven studies of the primate brain (see Nature 443, 122; 2006). But others are imperfect: certain mouse models of cancer, for example, do not accurately mimic the disease in humans, and may even have hampered the development of some drugs (see Nature 442, 739–741; 2006).

May have hampered some drugs? Well that's the understatement of the year, don't you think? 90% of drugs are abandoned without going to human clinical trials. And of those that prove "safe and effective" in animal models, 92% (even more for cancer drugs) don't make it through clinical trials and on to the production line. Some 40% of drugs that do go to market ultimately undergo major relabeling for risks and side effects or are withdrawn entirely. Given all of that, all the Nature editors can muster is that animal models may have hampered the development of some drugs? At least they acknowledge there are some faults.

Onward.

The responses of anonymous invididuals show that there are indeed barriers in the "system" to expressing concerns about welfare, adopting the 3Rs, etc. One participant implies that she is forced to do unnecessary tests and/or tests that she apprently wishes she did not have to do in order to move vaccine candidates through the pipeline:

"As a researcher in the field of HIV vaccine development, I am placed in a very awkward position regarding the use of non-human primates," said one immunologist. "I personally feel uncomfortable with primate research yet I realize that without primate data, vaccine candidates are rarely forwarded to human trial."

Another investigator who uses human data where others continue to rely on animal experiments reports being eschewed and criticized by peers:

It can even be hard, some said, to express nuanced opinions (such as the idea that most, but not all, animal research is strictly essential) within the community of researchers, let alone with the public.

"I am more concerned that the scientific community, rather than the animal-rights movement, makes it difficult to voice a nuanced opinion on animal research," said one neuroscientist, whose research involves using imaging to study the brains of human patients.

It seems that even those who want to move towards epidemiological animal studies over "models" per se encounter resistance. One woman who is trying to use this approach because epidemilogical studies will provide better science and allow her to help individual animals in the context of clinical practice, told her story:

"Naturally occurring diseases might be a better reflection of what is going on in a human than inducing something in a mouse or a rat. People's pets that spontaneously develop these overwhelming infections need the treatment, and we would be more responsible because we are not actually creating diseases in animals."

Otto says she's had a hard time getting a hearing for her proposal from researchers resistant to change.

Another article in Nature's series also addresses the code of silence:

In some labs, at least, scientists feel pressured to keep quiet about the grey areas of debate, lest they undermine the official mantra

Heaven forbid that they offend NABR or some other industry front group. One respondent who spoke about the mantra brought up the issues of transparency and deception:

"I have heard animal-research advocates say that you have to say everything as nicely as possible, and that edges towards fabrication. They say that everything heads towards a cure for something and that all the experiments work."

This was also echoed in near the end of the editorial summary on the findings of the poll:

Many noted that a main difficulty in discussing animal research is in dealing with the fact that some animal models aren't perfect. "We have not addressed legitimate issues that animal rights groups have raised, ...a mouse is not a human and the question to be tested will not be fully answered," said one neuroscientist, who works on animals. "We need to admit this but point out that it is more complex than that."

What does and does not get said is a serious matter. So is how the issues are framed - and how people talk about vivisection. I will further explore the HOW in a separate entry - sequel if you will. :) Watch for it.

Desmond Morris on primate experimentation

An insightful and incisive take on the issues.

From DM's commentary:

Why does intelligence matter? The objection to using any animal in experimental research is that it experiences pain, both physical and mental. As far as physical pain is concerned, there is really no difference between a rat and a chimp. They both possess a highly sensitive nervous system, capable of sending intense pain signals to the brain when they are being hurt. To prevent physical pain to experimental animals, one would have to stop all animal research tomorrow.

The separation of apes from other animals reflects our concern that they, being so similar to us, must also be able to experience horrific mental pain, and this is what makes us feel the need to exempt them from medical research duties. We envisage that, like a human torture victim, they must be able to sit in their cells awaiting the next test, with all the anticipatory dread that we ourselves would feel.

This brings us to the ultimate dilemma. If a human terrorist knew when and where a bomb would explode, killing a thousand innocent people, would we have the right to inflict pain on him to save them? If a severe experiment on an ape was the only way we could save the lives of a thousand sick children, would we have the right to carry out the procedure to save them? If the terrorist and the ape are both capable of experiencing intense physical and mental pain, what is the difference? Should we not treat them both in the same way? And do we really want to live in a culture that accepts torture, just so long as it is for a good end?

This question is an important one:
And do we really want to live in a culture that accepts torture, just so long as it is for a good end?

The fact is that few animal tests have anything to do with medicines, and of those that do, many fail. Accepting torture because there is the slimmest of chances that it might do some good - <1% href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/desmond_morris/2006/12/post_787.html">The Guardian"

What if the monkey on his back is monkey experimentation?

More rhetoric about primate testing is expected to come out of a UK commission momentarily. The press is already anticipating the response of the anti-vivisection community:

Those in favour of monkey research say the neural circuitry involved in diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's cannot be properly investigated without the use of primates.

Opponents insist primates are poor models for human disease and research on monkeys has failed to produce treatments for any leading killers, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and malaria.

They point to the Northwick Park drug trial disaster as an example of how misleading primate research can be. Six volunteers given the leukaemia, rheumatism and multiple sclerosis antibody drug TGN 1412 almost died in March after tests on monkeys appeared to show it was safe.

If everything is so fine and dandy with the primate model (or any other animal model for that matter) why do they suppose the Duff Commission called for an EU-wide database of animal test results? It certainly wasn't to track success.

For full news item, see The Guardian.

Dubious drugs and devices due to double dipping

If you work for the government, your duty is to the public and as such, you must avoid conflicts of interest that might interfere with that duty. The rules are strict. I know because I was a federal employee at one time.

It seems some feds are breaking the rules. A scientist from the NIH has entered a guilty plea to criminal charges made because he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Pfizer. It seems more convictions might be on the way:

Another senior researcher, Thomas J. Walsh, head of the Pediatric Oncology Branch at the National Cancer Institute, may be of increased interest to federal prosecutors now that Sunderland's case has been concluded, a government source said. Walsh engaged in "serious misconduct" by accepting more than $100,000 in consulting fees from drug and biotech companies, according to an internal NIH document obtained by the Los Angeles Times. He accepted fees from 25 companies and has led government-sponsored research involving some of those companies' drugs, according to the document.

Vicki E. LeDuc, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Baltimore, told The Scientist she could neither confirm nor deny that prosecutors planned to pursue criminal action against the researcher. Walsh did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously denied wrongdoing. "We have not heard anything from prosecutors," his attorney, H. Bradford Glassman, told The Scientist on Friday.

NIH scientists are balking at the rules, but in a climate where ethical conduct is on the minds of many - perhaps from post-Hwang paranoia - their whining seems especially arrogant. Government scientists make a fair wage, have good benefits and secure jobs. If they don't like what they get in exchange for their work, they can always go to the private sector. (Hooray for free will) If my tax dollars pay their salaries, I expect them to do the best and most ethical science possible. They are duty bound to do so.

For more details, see The Scientist.

Some of my previous posts on scientific misconduct:

Ethics rules send NIH scientists packing

Former FDA chief charged with conflict

Journal editor quits over conflict of interest

(how about that alliteration in the title, eh?)

New Resource: Editorial Policies: Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journals

In the last year, I have written about scientific misconduct a few times: High profile cases, response of the media, views from the world of bioethics, and the roles of publishers, journals, editors, and authors. I have also reported suspected misconduct and made successful (and unsuccessful) requests to Editorial Boards to adopt or revise their guidelines on author conduct.

The Council of Scientific Editors today announced the release of their own recommendations, in the form of a whitepaper for all of the scientific and publishing community. I am very pleased that this document is available to provide guidance and hope that everyone will take notice.

There is language specific to animal experimentation in the section where misconduct is defined:

"3.1.1 Mistreatment of Research Subjects

Researchers have an obligation to the subjects they study. These obligations apply whether the subjects are humans or animals and whether the entire organism is being studied or specimens are being taken. When research involves human subjects or their specimens, failure to adhere to the principles in the Declaration of Helsinki and to seek approval from and adhere to the ethical standards of the appropriate institutional or national committee on human experimentation is a serious form of scientific misconduct. For researchers who study animals, failure to follow institutional or national recommendations for the care and use of laboratory animals is also a type of research misconduct. [emphasis added]

The following are examples of actions that constitute mistreatment of research subjects:

• Failure to obtain approval from an ethical review board before starting the study.


• Absent or inadequate informed consent of human subjects.


• Maltreatment of laboratory animals.


• Exposure of subjects to physical or psychological harm without informing them of the potential for harm.


• Exposure of subjects (or the environment) to harm because research practices/protocols do not meet accepted and/or specified standards.


• Failure to maintain confidentiality of human data without specific consent from the subject.

[emphasis not in original]

For the full text, please see The Council of Science Editors (CSE) - Editorial Policies: Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journals:

Viet Nam News

Viet Nam News

Revenge of the cloned monkeys

globeandmail.com: Moment with orangutan inspired ethicist

globeandmail.com: Moment with orangutan inspired ethicist

There might be no better way to gauge connection than to look straight into the eyes of another.

If Kerry Bowman didn't know this before, he learned it soon enough when he peered through the Sumatran rain forest to find an orangutan, right there at ground level.

"He looked up, and when we had eye contact, it was a very powerful experience," Mr. Bowman says, recalling a 1980s work stint, in the midst of his post-university travels, when he helped document the great apes' movements.

"When my eyes caught his eyes, I just felt nothing different than as if I was coming across a human."