UW-Madison wants exemption from state open records law

First, they slipped in an exemption from the state's anticruelty laws for themselves; now they want to keep their cruelty even more secretive. Evil is as evil does.

UW-Madison wants to protect research by limiting open records law
By Jason Stein and Karen Herzog of the Journal Sentinel
May 23, 2013 1:44 p.m.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is seeking to limit the state's open records law — potentially through language slipped into the state budget — to keep from the public information about research until it is published or patented.

No specific incidents of harmful disclosures were cited in language for a possible motion that is being passed among Republican lawmakers and was obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

University officials have been seeking to convince GOP lawmakers to advance the legislation either as a separate bill or by inserting it into the state budget when the UW System's part of the bill comes before the Legislature's budget committee Thursday.

In an interview Thursday, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) made clear he was at least open to the idea, though he didn't know all the details on it. He didn't say if the provision would be included in a larger and still unreleased motion on the UW System that is expected to be voted on by Joint Finance Committee members later in the day as it considers funding for public universities and colleges in the 2013-'15 state budget.

Vos said he saw a need to make changes to the open records law to ensure a researcher's work wouldn't have to be released publicly before the researcher was ready to publish it.

"In general, if it's a public institution things should be public, but I don't want to hurt (research)," Vos said.

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And here’s UW’s memo: http://media.jsonline.com/documents/Open+Records+Research+Exemption+Language.pdf

The Discovery Institute gets one right

I don't think I've ever agreed with anything I've read from Wesley J. Smith a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute who is a regular critic of protecting animals. The organization is very pro-status-quo when it comes to exploiting animals. Animals don't have souls, so piss on them, they seem to be saying. I guess they think that's what God wants. Whatever. Our apparent shared close observation of modern experimental biology has though resulted in a rare convergence of opinion on at least this point: Self Regulation of Science Doesn't Work.

Vivisectors ask you to ignore the obvious.

Opinion: Ethics Training in Science: The NIH has required researchers to receive instruction about responsible conduct for more than 20 years, but misconduct is still on the rise. James Hicks. May 14, 2013. The Scientist.

.... Today, 1 in 3 scientists responding anonymously to surveys admits to “questionable” research practices; research misconduct cases handled by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) are at an all-time high; and retractions of scientific papers have increased exponentially since 2005. It should be noted that not all retracted papers involve foul play, but a recent study reported in PNAS surveying 2,047 biomedical and life-science papers revealed that 67 percent of retractions were directly attributable to misconduct.

It strains credibility to imagine that an industry based on harming animals and filled with those who admit to unethical behavior treat their research subjects with compassion or respect.

Animal Testing Thrown into Doubt, Again: Idiocy Confirmed

I don't know how many times I've seen someone post the dismal statistic regarding the very low success rate of new pharmaceuticals in an on-line discussion about the use of animals. Invariably, some numbskull will write back that the crazy vegan animal rights nuts who point out this little problem simply don't understand science and the drug development process. The assertion frequently comes with a puffed-up chest and the anonymous assertion that of course scientists, like them, know more than the nut.

Well..., as many of us nuts have known for some time, financial and other factors tend to turn those with vested interests into total idiots. The research finding discussed below will be vigorously argued against and disparaged, and given the gigantic financial benefits of producing animals and experimenting on them, in spite of the absence of significant benefit, things probably won't change any time soon.

Nevertheless, I simply can't wait to hear the idiots yelling that the many authors of this paper simply don't understand science and the drug development process.

The Experiment Is on Us: Science of Animal Testing Thrown into Doubt
May 6, 2013 Environment, Health, News

by Pat Dutt and Jonathan Latham, PhD

New scientific research has cast grave doubt on the safety testing of hundreds of thousands of consumer products, food additives and industrial chemicals.

Everyday products, from soft drinks and baby foods, to paints, gardening products, cosmetics and shampoos, contain numerous synthetic chemicals as preservatives, dyes, active ingredients, or as contaminants. Official assurances of the safety of these chemicals are based largely on animal experiments that use rabbits, mice, rats and dogs. But new results from a consortium of researchers and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest such assurances may be worthless (Seok et al. 2013).

The results of these experiments challenge the longstanding scientific presumption holding that animal experiments are of direct relevance to humans. For that reason they potentially invalidate the entire body of safety information that has been built up to distinguish safe chemicals from unsafe ones. The new results arise from basic medical research, which itself rests heavily on the idea that treatments can be developed in animals and transferred to humans.

The research originated when investigators noted that in their medical specialism of inflammatory disease (which includes diabetes, asthma and arthritis), drugs developed using mice have to date had a 100% failure rate in almost 150 clinical trials on humans.

According to Kristie Sullivan, Director of Regulatory Testing Issues at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), this is not unusual “about 90% of all pharmaceuticals tested for safety in animals fail to reach the market, or are quickly pulled from the market”. Wanting to understand why this might be so, the consortium decided to test the effects of various treatments that lead to inflammation, and systematically compare results between mice and humans. This postulated correlation across different animal species is sometimes known as the concordance assumption.

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“appalling irresponsibility”

Just like UW-Madison...

New strain of killer flu created in a lab

May 6 2013
By STEVE CONNOR

London - Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic, killing millions of people.

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics. “They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,” Lord May told The Independent.

“The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It's appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

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"Very dangerous work disguised as big science."

Study: Lab-made H5N1-H1N1 viruses spread in guinea pigs

Robert Roos - News Editor May 2, 2013

(CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists report that lab-generated hybrid viruses combining genes from avian H5N1 and pandemic 2009 H1N1 (pH1N1) influenza viruses can achieve airborne spread between guinea pigs, a finding that seems likely to renew the debate about the risks of creating novel viruses that might be able to spark a human pandemic.

Writing in Science, the researchers say that 5 of 127 hybrids they generated by shuffling genes from the two subtypes showed "highly efficient" transmission in guinea pigs. None of the guinea pigs died, but some mice that were infected with the reassortant strains did succumb.

Guinea pigs are not regarded as the best experimental model for human flu, a distinction that belongs to ferrets. The Chinese team did not test any of the hybrid viruses in ferrets, because a voluntary moratorium on "gain of function" research on H5N1 viruses—studies involving the creation of potentially dangerous new strains—intervened in January 2012 and lasted a year.

The moratorium was prompted by the controversy that erupted in late 2011 over two earlier studies in which researchers generated novel H5N1 strains that spread among ferrets via respiratory droplets. One of the studies involved an H5N1-H1N1 reassortant; while the other involved an H5N1 virus in which specific mutations were induced. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) sought to prevent publication of full details of the two studies, but eventually reversed itself, and the studies were published in May and June of 2012.

continues....

SIV isn't HIV

SIV, the so-called simian immunodeficiency virus isn't the same virus as HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, and rhesus macaques aren't human beings.

These two confounding facts were again responsible for yet another HIV vaccine clinical trial being shut down.

Federal researchers have faced a major setback in the pursuit of an HIV vaccine, shutting down a clinical trial on Thursday after determining that volunteers who received the vaccination shot were more likely to contract the virus than those who were given a placebo. The vaccine also failed to reduce virus levels in the blood of volunteers who contracted HIV, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). ...

The study began in 2009, and researchers had immunized half of the 2,504 volunteers with a DNA-based vaccine called HVTN 505 that was intended to “prime the immune system to attack the AIDS virus. Then a different vaccine, encasing the same material inside a shell made of a disabled cold virus, acts as a booster shot to strengthen that response. Neither vaccine could cause HIV,” according to the Associated Press.

....

Results from a series of nonhuman primate studies influenced the decision to expand the HVTN 505 trial, says Dieffenbach. Animal data showed that about half of rhesus macaques given a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) vaccine regimen similar to the HIV vaccine regimen used in the HVTN 505 trial were protected against SIV following SIVsmE660 challenge, and that a low level of neutralizing antibodies to Env, and an Env-specific CD4+ T-cell response correlated with this protective effect.

Dieffenbach says the large number of animals (129 macaques) used in the study, and the fact that the protection occurred in the presence of robust cellular responses and low levels of SIV-neutralizing antibodies, suggested that the HVTN 505 regimen could have the capacity to prevent HIV acquisition in people. “You are only as good as the data you have in front of you,” says Dieffenbach, reflecting on the expansion of the HVTN 505 trial. “We [haven’t had] many efficacy trials and if we have the opportunity and there is plausibility, we need as a field to take a chance.”

....

The study, led by Louis Picker, a professor of pathology at the Oregon Health & Science University [Oregon National Primate Research Center], showed that 12 of 24 Indian rhesus macaques vaccinated with a replication-competent rhesus cytomegalovirus (rhCMV) viral vector vaccine candidate encoding the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)mac239 proteins Env, Pol, Gag, and Vpr/Vpx demonstrated early and complete control of viral replication for more than a year after repeat, homologous, low dose SIVmac239 challenge....

No surprises here.

Davidson and his guru back in the news

Read this: http://www.madisonmagazine.com/Madison-Magazine/May-2013/The-World-Wide-Web/

Now read this by the same author: http://www.madisonmagazine.com/Madison-Magazine/June-2008/Its-a-Jungle-in-Here/#.UXH_KJ2ZGmg.facebook

This is the video linked in the above article.

Fabricating Importance

University of Wisconsin-Madison vivisectors Ned Kalin and his colleagues have come under criticism, both from people who abhor cruelty, and even from some with somewhat similar sensitivities who work within the university's guarded walls.

How might a public relations department go about diffusing the criticism or work to set the stage to defend itself from future criticism?

One way to confuse the public, to mislead any nosy independent journalist, or to just build the walls of illusion a little bit higher would be to claim importance where little to none exists.

This is a very common vehicle for spin doctors. Dramatic medical breakthroughs are announced by university PR departments almost every day; and yet, articles written by less biased observers, by people not being paid to hype their institution's work, convey a much different picture. See for example:

The Medical Revolution: Where are the cures promised by stem cells, gene therapy, and the human genome? Emily Yoffe. Slate. Aug. 24, 2010.
Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong. Sharon Begley.

In my last post, Conflicts of Interest, I pointed out some of the glaring conflicts of interest that limit legitimate reporting of controversies involving the University of Wisconsin-Madison's use of animals.

I failed to notice another staff member of the Department of Life Sciences Communication (LSC) who is yet another previous staff writer for the Wisconsin State Journal. Coincidentally, the university recently issued a release about a newly published paper by Ned Kalin, et al. The release was written by LSC Senior Lecturer, Susan Lampert Smith.

Here's the release: UW researchers discover the brain origins of variation in pathological anxiety.

And here's the published abstract: Neural mechanisms underlying heterogeneity in the presentation of anxious temperament. Shackman AJ, Fox AS, Oler JA, Shelton SE, Davidson RJ, Kalin NH. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013.

The university's news release hyping this new paper must read like something from America's Finest News Source to clinical psychiatrists and others with even a passing familiarity with neurosurgery. The fundamental claim, in much of Kalin et al's work is that by identifying areas of the brain associated with some disabling mental affect like severe anxiety that it will be an easy next step to drill a hole through someone's skull and fix them or to come up with a new miracle drug.

But right now, brain surgery is relatively crude. Surgeons remove tumors, ablate small regions, and perform some vascular repairs. The idea that we are anywhere close to having the understanding and ability to fix a part of the brain associated with something as complex as a disabling emotion is like saying a surgeon could fiddle with your neural pathways and give you an extra hundred IQ points if only we knew where in the brain geniuses differ from the average Joe. An analogy from history is William Harvey' small book on the heart and circulation published in 1628. The first cardiac surgery wasn't conducted for another two-and-a-half centuries, until 1895, and the heart-lung machine wasn't in use until the 1950s. Arguably, Harvey's observations were so far ahead of the technology needed to put them to use that that they were of no material value at all.

But you can just imagine the hype that the UW spin doctors would have made of it.

And a new miracle drug that will be more effective than the drug therapies currently available, as a result of some brain scans on frightened young monkeys? Any celebration is premature. Kalin is a psychiatrist, not a pharmacologist or even a chemist.

The release about Kalin's new publication, written by LSC Senior Lecturer, Susan Lampert Smith, says that "this line of research sets the stage for improved strategies for preventing extreme childhood anxiety from blossoming into full-blown anxiety disorders." Unfortunately, that's far-fetched nonsense. It is an example of invented importance. It is a fabrication widely divergent from the plain facts. But that's the nature of propaganda.

Nothing in a brain scan or a dissected slice of a young frightened monkey's brain is going to help anyone prevent extreme childhood anxiety from blossoming into a full-blown anxiety disorder. The prevailing opinion is that childhood anxiety disorders often go undetected or untreated and that early identification and intervention is of great importance. To put Kalin's announcement of having identified brain regions associated with fearfulness in young monkeys into practice, it would appear that every preschooler will need a brain scan. A wholesome breakfast for all kids might be a better goal.

Kalin et al have been "setting the stage" for better care of anxious children for decades by frightening baby monkeys, burning away various regions of their brains, killing, and dissecting them. The stage has become very dusty and bloody. No one has yet been able to write a script that incorporates the frightened monkey "discoveries" into a story line that concludes with better care or treatments for anxious children.

Clinical pediatric psychiatrists are unlikely to glean much from this latest hyped announcement that will help them help their patients. Where are the cures and preventions? They're certainly not hiding in Kalin's experiments on fearful young monkeys. In spite of the spin doctoring by LSC staffers.

In the process of writing this I stumbled across an interesting article written by a Wisconsin State Journal reporter on the Association of Health Care Journalists website: Reporter offers advice on avoiding embarrassing incident. The reporter blames himself for an unfortunate incident, but it seems to me that the university might have been so focused on some good PR that they just couldn't think of anything else. Notice too, the name of the UW Hospital "PR person" near the end.

You may find this article worth reading if the general topic of research into anxiety is of interest: Understanding the Anxious Mind. NYT Magazine. September 29, 2009.

Conflicts of Interest

The University of Wisconsin-Madison promised four years ago to provide public forums to help the public understand its use of animals in it various research programs. You can read about those promises here.

But even the organizers have admitted that the promised forums have not met the goals spelled out by Martin T. Cadwallader, Professor of Geography, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Dean of the Graduate School. Lots of titles, but Mr. Cadwallader should have asked a real teacher or two to help organize the forums because the university staff involved either don't know how to design a meaningful and effective educational activity or else don't really want to talk about the university animal labs, or both.

I've written enough about the "forums" elsewhere. I'm writing here because I have recently gained a little bit more insight into ways that the university tries to control their image. The forums are an example of the university saying one thing and then doing another. The thing they say gets some news exposure, and then the thing they actually do, doesn't. A recent example is the things they said to media about the cats in Tom Yin's lab and PeTA's complaint, and the things they actually did about the problems and about the USDA citations. Their claims were dutifully dispersed by media, but when caught in a series of lies, nothing got reported.

It all comes down to their active propaganda effort. It turns out that you can actually earn an undergraduate degree, a Masters, and a PhD in how to manipulate public perceptions at the university.

Degrees and certificates in "science writing" are offered by a handful of colleges and universities around the country. UW-Madison offers a handful of degree programs in UW-Madison's Department of Life Sciences Communications (LSC).

The LSC webpage explains: "As a department, we further fulfill The Wisconsin Idea through our relationships with UW-Extension, WSUM Madison Student Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television."

To begin to see why local media won't report on the problems, lies, cover-ups, and suffering associated with the use of animals at the university, consider the staff at LSC.

It is far too idealistic or naive to imagine that Wisconsin Public Radio or Wisconsin Public Television would ever cover the problems at the university. According to a conversation I had with the NPR Ombudsperson, self-censorship by NPR affiliates associated with universities is a recognized problem that no one has taken the time to address.

In the case of UW-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio, the reason for the self-censorship could be related to the fact that the Madison station is physically on the UW campus, in a UW building, and that some of the senior staff are university employees. The most obvious example is Larry Meiller, host of the Larry Meiller Show. Mieller is also a Professor, and the Director of Undergraduate Advising and Career Placement, and the Department Chair of UW-Madison's Department of Life Sciences Communications (LSC). You won't ever hear Meiller say something critical of the university's use of animals.

One of his common guests, and his co-host of Calling All Pets, is Patricia B. McConnell, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Zoology at the university. I remember once hearing them on the show laughing together about what was being done to rats in an experiment they were talking about. You can't expect to hear any criticism of the university's use of animals on that show either.

And things aren't any better at the Wisconsin State Journal. Ron Seely is the science and environment reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal and a Senior Lecturer at LSC. Seely ought to be talking about the treatment of animals at the university but steers clear of the issue. It's easy to see why.

And then there is Tom Still, former associate editor of the Wisconsin State Journal and a currently a regular columnist in the business section. Still is a Lecturer at LSC.

Still is also president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, which has strong ties to the university. Additionally, he serves on the Board of Directors of the very creepy Wisconsin Security Research Consortium (WSRC), a UW sock puppet. Over the years, Still has been a defender of all things harmful to animals that might be economically profitable.

This incestuous intertwining of the university's interests with the programming and reporting in the Wisconsin State Journal and on Wisconsin Public Radio goes a long way to explaining why there isn't much local coverage or discussion of the problems at the university.

But the problem isn't just these obvious conflicts of interest.

UW-Madison's Department of Life Sciences Communications is worth digging into a bit. For instance, the statewide effort to recruit children and turn them into adults who like to kill animals, was apparently designed by staff at LSC:

A new initiative called the Hunters Network of Wisconsin, led by LSC Assistant Professor Bret Shaw, aims to understand how social networking technology may be used to promote hunter recruitment and retention in Wisconsin.....

"The Hunters Network of Wisconsin is targeting people who are interested in hunting but have not been raised in families that hunt,” said Bret Shaw, environmental communication specialist for the University of Wisconsin-Extension and assistant professor of life sciences communication at UW-Madison. “Many people, particularly young people, are heavy users of social networking technologies, and this may be an important way to inform them about hunter education opportunities in their local communities and connect with others who are interested in hunting,” said Shaw. "

It is interesting to read through some of the info at the LSC scimep lab (Science, Media and the Public.)

They explain that the lab is involved in "experimental studies of message processing and public understanding of controversial science, and long-term tracking of media coverage." But as far as I can tell, out of the approximately fifty papers from the lab over the course of its seven years of existence, there hasn't been even one paper concerning the public's perceptions of, or the media's framing, or anything whatsoever, regarding the use of animals in science. This is distinctly odd. The Department of Life Sciences Communications, the department's lab looking at public understanding of controversial science, the matter-of-fact reality that the use of animals is the epitome of controversial science, and yet nary a word. Maybe someone has alerted them to the institutional strategy of keeping the subject hushed up.

It is notable that investigators in a lab that is supposed to be involved in experimental studies and analysis of message processing and public understanding of controversial science aren't looking at the most controversial topics. They aren't looking into the messaging about and the public perception of abortion (When does an embryo begin to feel pain?) or medical testing on animals, or cloning animals, or the use of stem cells from human embryos, or even cloning humans. No, their big investigations and research are focused on the public's perception of nanotechnology. This might seem odd until one realizes that they aren't interested in the topic. They are interested only in how public opinions about controversial areas in science are formed, with the goal, apparently, of being able to manipulate them.

It seems to me that when taken together the unavoidable conflict of interests in media employing UW staff and quasi-staff to report on the university, the university's active encouragement of harming animals, their undeniable financial dependency on harming animals, and their managed propaganda campaign, it all adds up to a likely explanation for why all critical reporting has been dependent on one or two reporters independent enough to report the facts. Now that they have left the field, there is no one left who doesn't have their hand in the university's pocket in one way or another.