UW-Madison Aligns with Radical Anything-Goes Vivisection Cult.

UW-Madison Announces (then doesn't) Alignment with Radical Anything-Goes Vivisector Cult.

 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:25fb2MTLJokJ:https://research.wisc.edu/blog/announcements/interim-director-named-for-research-animal-resource-center/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Alas, the big announcement was taken off the university's webpage. But not until it was cached by various webcrawlers.

The university unveiled a new position: "Dr. Allyson Bennett, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, was named faculty director of the Animal Program and will serve as its lead spokesperson." Whatever the "Animal Program" is. Maybe its televised...

Bennett's apparent first stab at being the official university spokes-vivisector was in the Sheep death at UW-Madison fuels new attack from animal rights group. PAT SCHNEIDER | The Capital Times | pschneider@madison.com Oct 19, 2015.

Bennett is one of the leaders of the group Speaking of Research. Here they are in action, speaking for research:

I think it oddly nearsighted, that the Capital Times article quoted Michael Budkie and Bennett, and then apparently for some "balance" provided comments from UW associate professor Robert Streiffer, who is very much a part of the system. Streiffer did make waves over the Kalin maternal deprivation project, but that deviation from the party line was an anomaly. As a longtime member and chair of animal care and use oversight committees at the university he probably approved hundreds if not thousands of equally and even more hideous experiments on animals. It seems to me that the situational influences on him drastically reduce his ability and likelihood to act or think independently regarding this matter. But this is an aside.

The interesting thing to me is that the administration at UW-Madison has made it clear that they admire the folks seen in the video above.

The Capacity to Suffer

Steven Wise, of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has just had an important piece published in the April 28, 2015 on-line edition of Foreign Affairs magazine, "Animal Rights, Animal Wrongs: The Case for Nonhuman Personhood." I believe his specific argument will eventually prevail; I pray the day soon comes when other animals are finally granted some basic legal rights; when they are, the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project will prove to have been a highly significant contributor to the advancement.

I think Wise's claims about the animals commonly pointed to as deserving basic legal rights are on solid ground. I think though that he errs when he talks about all animals being located along a continuum of mental capacity and awareness along which "a primitive level of consciousness and sentience kicks in."

There is no continuum of mental capacity or the capacity to suffer. Moreover, the capacity to suffer and intelligence are independent. It is unlikely that consciousness or sentience can be qualitatively categorized.

There is no continuum of mental capacity.

Mental capacity varies between species and individuals. One can clumsily rank order individuals' mental capacity, but the results tell us little. Generally speaking, humans are smarter than other species, but this is a coincidence, not evidence of a continuum. Claims to the contrary are just new iterations of divine order or the Great Chain of Being.

The notion of a continuum of mental capacity is contrary to evolution and the resulting speciezation. There is no "advancement" or "progress," there is only change over time. In pre-Darwinian science, scientists thought they could see a step-wise progression and advancement in animal species; they were wrong. Instead of a linear ever-upward progression, there has been continual branching; every extant species has a evolutionary history that stretches back through time to the original progenitor microorganism. An amoeba is just as "advanced" as you and me; we just have different characteristics and capacities.

The capacity to suffer is not dependent on mental capacity.

The capacity to suffer is dependent on the existence of a mind, but not on intelligence. This is the largely unrecognized foundation of all concern for others. Most of those who care about others know this, but I've not met many people who know that they know it.

If it were otherwise, we would relate to others much differently than we do. If I believed that capacity to suffer was dependent on intelligence, I would be less concerned, I would be less bothered, less worried about someone who isn't as smart as someone else. I'm not; and I don't know others who are either. If the capacity to suffer was in some step-wise-like way dependent on intelligence, then a genius with toothache would suffer more than someone of average intelligence with a toothache.



I spent part of my teaching career working with cognitively handicapped students. Their smiles and tears seemed as deeply felt as the smiles and tears of my other students. Mickey, a designer puppy-mill produced dog seems to have a much greater capacity for joy than I have; he is much more prone to worry or be anxious. I see no evidence whatsoever of intelligence having a significant impact on a being's capacity to suffer or experience other emotions. I suspect that the emotions experienced by members of different species vary. It is unlikely that the entire gamut of emotions is experienced by humans.

Consciousness is probably like water.

The claim that some animals have some (only) "primitive" consciousness is simple speculation. One of my favorite quotes concerning consciousness comes from Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2005): "The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand, the fact that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character, is an absolute mystery."

It is possible that the behavior of the animals commonly claimed to have no consciousness is some mindless, yet-to-be teased apart chemical chain-reaction, but it is more parsimonious to imagine that an earthworm, for instance, recoils when touched because she/he experiences being touched.

There is no such thing as primitive water or primitive gravitational attraction. Water is an emergent phenomena that occurs when free hydrogen and oxygen are mixed in the presence of sufficient heat. When conditions are right, consciousness occurs. But we don't know what those conditions are or what consciousness is. It is wild speculation to posit its absence in organisms that behave as if they may be conscious.

Wise's argument regarding an organism's lack of capacity for suffering is an appeal to authority rather than a citation of repeatable observation. He says, "At one end of this spectrum of mental capacity and awareness are animals such as sponges, jellyfish, and sea anemones that scientists believe are unlikely to be conscious or have an ability to feel pain or suffer."

But scientists have a miserable track record when it comes to characterizing the subjective experiences and capacities of others. Only recently has it been acknowledged as a reasonable possibility by biologists that other animals have minds, emotions, and can suffer. They are just emerging from the dogma of behaviorism.

I've written previously about the tendency to readily discount the likelihood that those so unlike us can be similar to us in ways that have ethical weight. See: "Slime molds and mind," 9/8/2008; and "Invertebrates," 3/13/2011.

I pray the day soon comes that some animals are finally granted some basic legal rights; when they are, the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project will prove to have been a highly significant contributor to the advancement. I wish though that they would not build walls around the harms we do to others; those walls will eventually be used to defend our harm to other sentient beings.

Stealthy Advertising

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself could become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address. January 17, 1961.

Unfortunately, Eisenhower's prescient warning failed to protect us. Today, federal policy and funding of research is controlled largely by those affected by the policies and who receive the funding. This easily explains why taxpayers are forced to pay for so much crap and cruelty. The university-based basic bioscience slice of the industry has become more concerned with public relations than with public health, because it depends almost entirely on the public's dollars. With little to show for the continuing massive public investment, and worried by those who keep pointing out the cruelty and suffering in the animal labs, public relations efforts commonly make much ado about nothing and sidestep mention of anything that might serve to lessen their carefully groomed public image.

Consumers, at least some, recognize that for-profit businesses will overstate the value of their products or services. Every fast-food chain simply can't be making the best burger in the world. The public has a right to expect that publicly funded institutions are more forthcoming, more honest.

Commercial businesses' and even politicians' communication with the public is readily recognized as self-interested advertising because it is usually presented as such in signage, television and radio commercials, print ads, direct mail, and on line.

Some government agencies and public universities' on the other hand can and do promote their public images and hoped for continuing public support with advertising that is made to look like important public announcements. Doing so violates the publics' trust. When those within government agencies and public universities use their position and power in a misleading or dishonest way to benefit themselves, even indirectly, they abuse their authority. Announcements about research using animals are often stealthy promotions of the use of animals; those who use this tactic believe that their industry is dependent on public perception. These are particularly noxious examples of advertising masquerading as news because it isn't just the taxpayers who are being harmed.

There is a near constant rain of this sort of advertising from the vivisection industry. A recent example was the University of Wisconsin's announcement that vivisector Louis Populin had received a grant from a private charity for $100,000 a year for three years to develop a game for children with ADHA that might help doctors better predict the optimal dosage of methylphenidate, more commonly known by the trade name Ritalin, but also Concerta, Methylin, Medikinet, Equasym XL, Quillivant XR, and Metadate.

His hypothesis seems to be that a child's impulsivity predicts the rate at which they metabolize methylphenidate. The current method used by doctors is to start children on a very low dose and slowly increase the dose over time until a therapeutic effect is achieved. That seems like a prudent method to treat children with this powerful drug. Populin's conceived method would apparently allow doctors to prescribe a higher initial dose. You can read the university's April 7, 2015 hype here: Two receive awards for research to benefit children.

Whether or not his plan makes sense, the university says that he learned that different individuals react differently to methylphenidate through his experiments on monkeys. They imply that it will be his use of monkeys that is responsible for any success he might have with his envisioned diagnostic game. If it is unsuccessful, we'll never hear about it again.

.... The work grows from Populin's studies of monkeys, which measured the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin, a common ADHD drug), on working memory and other aspects of executive functioning.

"We found that the effect varied depending on the dose and the individual, which could explain why these dosing decisions often come down to educated trial and error," he says.

Executive functioning refers to one's conscious decisions and willful behavior. Habitually acting impulsively is sometimes thought to result from an impairment of one's executive functioning. Cognitive control is sometimes used synonymously.

Some close observers of the university's use of animals may recall that Populin collaborated regularly with cat vivisector Tom Yin whose retirement was hastened by the negative publicity generated by the photographs of the mutilated cats he was using in his sound localization experiments. Populin's publication list provides the gist of his career:

1: Dopamine transporter gene susceptibility to methylation is associated with impulsivity in nonhuman primates. J Neurophysiol. 2014.

2: The inferior colliculus encodes the Franssen auditory spatial illusion. Eur J Neurosci. 2013.

3: Dissociative effects of methylphenidate in nonhuman primates: trade-offs between cognitive and behavioral performance. J Cogn Neurosci. 2012.

4: Target modality determines eye-head coordination in nonhuman primates: implications for gaze control. J Neurophysiol. 2011.

5: Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) do recognize themselves in the mirror: implications for the evolution of self-recognition. PLoS One. 2010. [This is Populin's only positive contribution to posterity. Unfortunately, the import was lost on him and his like-minded colleagues.]

6: Time course of allocation of spatial attention by acoustic cues in non-human primates. Eur J Neurosci. 2010.

7: Human sound localization: measurements in untrained, head-unrestrained subjects using gaze as a pointer. Exp Brain Res. 2008.

8: Monkey sound localization: head-restrained versus head-unrestrained orienting. J Neurosci. 2006.

9: Anesthetics change the excitation/inhibition balance that governs sensory processing in the cat superior colliculus. J Neurosci. 2005.

10: (With Yin.) Sound-localizationperformance in the cat: the effect of restraining the head. J Neurophysiol. 2005.

11: (With Yin.) Neural correlates of the precedence effect in the inferior colliculus of behaving cats. J Neurophysiol. 2004.

12: (With Yin.) Effect of eye position on saccades and neuronal responses to acoustic stimuli in the superior colliculus of the behaving cat. J Neurophysiol. 2004.

13: Human gaze shifts to acoustic and visual targets. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2002.

14: (With Yin.) Bimodal interactions in the superior colliculus of the behaving cat. J Neurosci. 2002.

15: Fundamental differences between the thalamocortical recipient layers of the cat auditory and visual cortices. J Comp Neurol. 2001.

16: (With Yin.) Kinematics of eye movements of cats to broadband acoustic targets. J Neurophysiol. 1999.

17: (With Yin.) Pinna movements of the cat during sound localization. J Neurosci. 1998.

18: (With Yin.) Behavioral studies of sound localization in the cat. J Neurosci. 1998.

19: (With Yin.) Topographical organization of the motoneuron pools that innervate the muscles of the pinna of the cat. J Comp Neurol. 1995.

Populin's publications don't show much evidence of him ever having worked with humans. There was the one paper from 2008 that reported on a small project. He explained that he used, "Three female and six male humans ranging from 21 to 43 years of age that were free of neurological disease and reported having normal hearing served as subjects." And there was the even smaller study with four men and a woman in 2002. It isn't clear that he has any research experience with children or in designing games for them.

He has published two papers, nos. 1 (2014) and 3 (2012) in the list above, that sound as if they might be related in some meaningful way to his envisioned diagnostic game, but neither are.*

The university says that: "Luis' study showed that methylphenidate made the impulsive monkeys more willing to wait. We will use the game to look for a similar effect in children with ADHD...".

But methylphenidate's effect on impulsivity in hyperactive children has been known for almost half a century. (Cognitive styles in hyperactive children and the effect of methylphenidate. Campbell SB, Douglas VI, Morgenstern G. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 1971.) In children with hyperactivity disorder for over 30 years (Effects of methylphenidate on reading in children with attention deficit disorder (Ballinger CT, Varley CK, Nolen PA. Am J Psychiatry. 1984.) And in children with ADHD since 1993. (Effects of methylphenidate on impulsive responding in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Malone MA, Swanson JM. J Child Neurol. 1993.)

The university says that Populin's knowledge came from his experiments showing "that methylphenidate made the impulsive monkeys more willing to wait...". This is what tipped him to the fact that the drug reduces impulsivity? And why was he surprised or uniformed about the fact that there is variation in response to the medication. This has been a topic of study in human children for at least a decade. (Pharmacogenetics of methylphenidate response in preschoolers with ADHD. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2006.)

So, Populin's work merely replicated again in monkeys what had already been recognized and studied in children for many years; he has no evident experience with studying children or designing games that might engage them, and his hypothesis that impulsivity measured through game playing predicts a child's response to methylphenidate seems wildly speculative. But, a charity was convinced to give him some money, so hey, the PR folks must have thought, let's use this to make people think that experiments on monkeys are going to help children.

This sort of baseless hype about the results of animal experimentation is par for the course. It is essentially never challenged or questioned; the public trusts that spokespersons for public universities will be accurate and honest with them. But when a large portion of an institution's income depends on the public's perception, an institution like the University of Wisconsin-Madison is less concerned about the facts than it is about what people believe. Propaganda is accepted and reported as fact. Decision makers at all levels are financially vested in the system so want to grow the industry. They promote and fund research modalities -- like the use of animals -- that validate their own grant requests. Most of the senior decision-makers are themselves vivisectors.

Ike must be turning over in his grave.

---

* The earlier of the two papers is freely available. Dissociative effects of methylphenidate in nonhuman primates: trade-offs between cognitive and behavioral performance. J Cogn Neurosci. 2012.

In that paper he reported that he drugged three monkeys with varying doses and recorded the effects on their performance of visual and memory tasks. He says the monkeys participated, but that's a euphemism used to soften the raw and jagged reality of the situation these three animals found themselves in. They weren't participants, they were victims. This is how he prepared them:

Three adult male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) ranging from 8 to 13 kg participated in this study. These animals were purchased from the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center. The three animals were prepared for eye movement recordings by implanting scleral search coils [Sewing them to the monkeys' eyes] (Judge, Richmond, & Chu, 1980), constructed from teflon-coated stainless steel wire (SA632; Cooner Wire, Chatsworth, CA) and a lightweight titanium head post [screwed to their skull], which was used to restrain the head for experimental sessions and for cleaning the implant area. All surgical procedures were approved by the University of Wisconsin Animal Care and Use Committee and were in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. [Which underscores the fact that anything goes in these labs.]

The more recent paper explains that he used four male rhesus monkeys, three had been used in the project mentioned above. The surgical preparation was the same for the fourth monkey. Populin says in the more recent paper that:

The animals were housed individually in two rooms with other monkeys of the laboratory colony in the same hallway of the same facility, permitting rich visual, olfactory, and auditory interactions.

Surgical procedures were carried out under aseptic conditions while the animals were under general anesthesia. All efforts were made to minimize suffering of the subjects.

Double-talk gibberish. Individually housed male rhesus monkeys have high rates of stereotypic behavior and self injury. And all efforts to minimize their suffering certainly weren't taken because he didn't have to hurt them in the first place.

The Ebola Bandwagon

Rust never sleeps. Neither it seems does the University of Wisconsin-Madison animal experimentation propaganda machine. This essay is a response to the April 23, 2015 ersatz news article "In Sierra Leone, a chance to learn from Ebola," written by Kelly April Tyrrell.

Ms. Tyrrell's article will leave most readers misinformed. I've come to view such pieces as violations of authority. The university has a clear obligation to the public to be as accurate and complete in its reporting to the public as space reasonably allows. Sometimes the full story cannot be told in a page or two, but the university has a responsibility to avoid publishing information for the public that is likely to lead to false conclusions. Knowingly doing so is trickery. It is unethical for the university to trick the public into believing falsehoods, doubly so when the bamboozle benefits the university's financial or public relations interests.

Consider this passage:

His studies had always involved common laboratory models, like mice and special cell cultures, and took place in high security laboratories like the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, where researchers gown up in airtight, spacelike suits and look at how these models respond to infection.

Now [his December 2014 trip to Sierra Leone], he had a chance to study a disease in the very people who were living and dying with it.

But Kawaoka was publishing details of his Ebola experiments on monkeys as early as March 2007. [Proteolytic processing of the Ebola virus glycoprotein is not critical for Ebola virus replication in nonhuman primates. Neumann G, Geisbert TW, Ebihara H, Geisbert JB, Daddario-DiCaprio KM, Feldmann H, Kawaoka Y. J Virol.]

And, it isn't true that his studies had always involved common laboratory models, like mice and special cell cultures, and took place in high security laboratories...". ["Wisconsin lab broke Ebola rules, watchdog group says." Lisa Schnirring. Sep 25, 2007.]

“The Ebola virus is identified almost every year now, but it has been contained because it has happened in countries where Ebola virus appears consistently,” says Kawaoka. “This outbreak is different. This outbreak occurred in an area where we never had Ebola outbreak, so the local people did not know how to contain it."

Nonsense. No one knows what stops an Ebola outbreak. Consider the history of all known prior outbreaks against the backdrop of the most recent event which began in 2013 and so far has resulted in 26,109 cases and 10,835 deaths.

1976 Sudan. 284 cases, 151 deaths. That is considered the first known outbreak. Did Sudan have measures in place to contain this previously unknown disease? Or Zaire in 1976, when 318 cases led to 280 deaths? Why doesn't Kawaoka know the history of the disease; why didn't the university do a little fact checking? In fact, in the seventeen known outbreaks that preceded the 2013 event, only one involved more than 400 people and nine involved less than 100. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks See too: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/history/chronology.html] It is astounding that anyone seriously believes that the poor African nations where the previous outbreaks occurred, Sudan, Zaire, Gabon, Uganda, and the two Congos could have mechanisms in place to contain an outbreak, or that given the relatively small short-lived, apparently self-limiting nature of these outbreaks, that they would even try. People who imagine that they did and do must not have spent much time in Africa.

... in March 2015, he published a study in the journal Science describing a vaccine shown to be both safe and effective in mice, guinea pigs, and nonhuman primates. That vaccine could be produced for clinical trials in the next couple of years, Kawaoka said at a public hearing at the Wisconsin State Capitol on April 21.

This is the second time I've seen the university refer to Kawaoka's vaccine as something that could or might make it into clinical trials someday. (Here's the other.) But just in today's news I read that other Ebola vaccines are already in clinical trials. In spite of his many years studying the virus, he is apparently years behind those who apparently started their Ebola vaccine development just recently.

In a related story published on April 22, 2015 in the Badger Herald, "UW researcher outlines effectiveness of new Ebola vaccine Vaccine may enter human clinical trails in two years," by Shawn Bhatti, obviously stimulated by the university's recent ballyhoo about Kawaoka, the public, this time mostly students perhaps, are further hoodwinked:

To prove the vaccine’s efficacy, Kawaoka said he and his team tested it on various animals. After experiments showed the effectiveness of the vaccine in rats and guinea pigs, Kawaoka’s team advanced testing the vaccine on non-human primates.

“Primates are the golden standard for Ebola work, but for ethical reasons we have to show the efficacy of the vaccine in rodents first,” Kawaoka said.

The control group Kawaoka’s team immunized with a deactivated version of the Ebola virus was not protected and subsequently died, he said.

But rats and guinea pigs don't get Ebola. I shouldn't be so critical of student writers, but their reporting on the university's animal research sometimes appears to me to be an exercise in propaganda rather than basic reporting, and the university has degree program in propaganda. if their paid spin-doctors bend the truth, why wouldn't they feed misleading facts to a student writer?

Anyway, any claim that Kawaoka's work is ethical is suspicious. Here's a chart from one of his many papers that shows the possible suffering of monkeys used in his Ebola experiments.
It looks like a monkey balled up on the floor of his cage, his hands and feet cliched in pain, and bleeding from his skin would need to develop additional symptoms before Kawaoka thought that the humane thing to do would be to kill him. That's not a band wagon most decent people would knowingly get on board -- which probably explains the side-stepping and omissions in the university's "news."

Maternal Deprivation Cancelled

"The study design has been changed." Blink.

Without much ado the University of Wisconsin, Madison has cancelled its planned revival of Harry Harlow's infamous experimental use of maternal deprivation.

(They have apparently cancelled them. They say they have, but I'm skeptical of anything they say about their use of animals.)

It was May 11, 2012, that I first wrote about the university's plans, though I initially misunderstood who the vivisector was. I thought at first it was the evil Alyson Joy Bennett, when it was actually the evil Ned Kalin. Over the past three years, many other people have taken note of the cruelty and have added their voices (here, here, here, here, google Ned Kalin to see many more) to demand that the maternal deprivation experiments be stopped. Kalin used the euphemism early adversity in lieu of maternal deprivation, but no one was ever confused by his double talk.

In the university's defense of the defenseless, they mobilized a number of senior researchers and administrators who all made ridiculous and misleading claims about the project. They received support from pro-vivisection industry groups and a cult.

University Communications quietly announced on March 12, 2015, that: "... the study design has been changed. Researchers will now examine the wide range of individual differences in the development of anxiety in monkeys raised by their mothers. While this study will not examine the effects of early adversity, it will characterize [clinically meaningless other stuff.]"

I suspect that I am more surprised by this capitulation than anyone else in the world. The cruelty is going to be somewhat less it now appears. I'm very glad.

Kalin had based his request to NIH for millions of taxpayer dollars on his argument that he was going to come up with information that would lead to a cure or vaccination against the rare lifelong consequences that afflict a small percentage of people who experience early adverse experiences like child abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of poor parenting, and that he needed to maternally deprive 20 newborn rhesus infants to do so. He had explained in his grant request:

It is important to emphasize that currently there are no evidence based treatments available for young children exposed to early adversity who face the risk of developing debilitating psychiatric disorders. While numerous studies have been performed examining the effects of surrogate/peer rearing in nonhuman primates, no studies have been reported examining the effects of this rearing modification on brain development using state of the art imaging and molecular methods. These efforts will allow us to identify the exact brain regions affected, the changes in gene function in these regions, and the specific genes that are involved in increasing the early risk to develop a anxiety and depression. Such information has the potential to identify new targets in specific brain regions that can lead to new ideas about treatment and even prevention of the long-term suffering associated with early adversity.

That's apparently gone out the window. Dollars to vegan doughnuts, one or more of the university's high donors caught wind of the maternal deprivation project and exerted the only sort of pressure the university understands.

For much more on this saga, just search this blog using any germane term, like snake oil.