Monkey Maven: exposing primate exploitation

Aug 31, 2007

The AWA: Fostering mediocrity and suffering

Many moons ago when I worked at an unnamed insurance company, they actually did time motion studies of the workers to figure out how long it “should” take to adjust a hospital claim, for example. They’d send a special engineer down to watch you with a stopwatch and check sheet. “Now tell me what you do when you get a durable medical equipment claim? How many do you see each week? Why did you route that claim for utilization review?”

The more I was treated like a cog, and the less my thinking was valued, the more I performed like the “average” employee - something I was not. I stopped wearing suits and volunteering to be on committees, taking extra classes, etc. I started wearing stretch pants and sweaters and paced myself so that I did exactly the number of things that I needed to do to be “within range.” I volunteered for lay offs when they announced a merger. And when I didn’t get that lay off, I staged even more of “slow down.” Average is easy, but it's boring and soul-killing. Eventually I was released from Bare Minimum Corp. I embarked on 10 years of education - where life can be about more than "average."

I’m really not interested in working in an environment like that ever again. Any system based on achieving minimum performance will consistently produce minimum performance. Take the Animal Welfare Act for example. The Act more or less states that if facilities make cages this big, keep this paper work, file these reports, etc., they are fine. There’s no “excellent,” there’s just “no deficiencies.” When performance targets are lame to begin with, as they are with the Act, we end up a long way from excellence.

We might get consistent results, but it's not assured. What is assured is that we will never get newer, bigger, better results. Consistent crap is crap all the same. The top ten percent of shit is shit. Why set your organization up for a whole lotta "average?" Hoping that it will lead to success or excellence is just foolish.

Dec 14, 2006

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Dozens of dead monkeys found in Thai smuggling bust

Dec 11, 2006

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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?)

Dec 10, 2006

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More on ALDF victory for chimpanzees

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Call to ban primate experiments in the EU

Animal Defenders International announced that legislators from the EU are proposing a change to the regulations that govern animal testing in the EU - Directive 86/609 - that would end all primate experimentation.

Dr Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South-East England and Vice-President of the European Parliament’s Animal Welfare Intergroup, said: “Medical and commercial experiments on primates are cruel, unnecessary and, according to increasing numbers of doctors themselves, unhelpful and often misleading. This Written Declaration seeks to ban them in line with the European Commission’s aspiration to make the EU a world leader in animal welfare standards, and I urge my fellow MEPs to sign up and demand legislative proposals to make outdated and outmoded tests on living primates a thing of the past.” Dr Caroline Lucas has recently drafted a set of proposals to end the requirement for industrial toxicity tests on animals.

A new report, called ‘Primate Nations’ has highlighted the suffering of Europe’s 10,000 laboratory primates and describes how these tests can be replaced with advanced techniques based upon human data. Dr Michael Coleman, Senior Lecturer in Toxicology of Department of Pharmacy, Aston University, commented: “As well as the ethical considerations, scientifically primates are simply not close enough to us to act as good experimental models and we should be promoting replacement of animal work with human cellular systems. We must leave behind the intellectual laziness of relying on animal models and invest in human-cellular based alternatives for the future.”

There is a complementary campaign in the US where ADI, an animal advocacy group, is lobbying members of the House of Representatives. Last Friday, HSUS ran a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the retirement of the chimpanzees now used in experiments (there are about 1300). There is no exact count for all primates in the US, but estimates are between 50 and 80 thousand for labs and breeding centers combined.

See: MEPs lead call to end experiments on primates in the EU