Robert Streiffer's Ethical Blindness

I'm responding here to comments made by Robert Streiffer, a UW-Madison associate professor of bioethics and philosophy in an article that appeared on the Captital Times website on September 15, 2009, "Is monkey experimentation ethical?"

The relevant passages from the article:

"I think it's good to have an active, informed discussion about these things and I think Rick Marolt has helped to stimulate that debate," says Rob Streiffer, a UW-Madison associate professor of bioethics and philosophy. "But I think it's also important to note that this conversation was ongoing and that all of the researchers here that I've had contact with take their responsibilities very seriously."

and,

Conversely, Streiffer, the UW-Madison bioethicist and philosopher, argues that it's not necessarily a good thing for a university to bow to public pressure when it comes to what its professors and researchers study.

"Is animal research ethical?" Streiffer asks. "It depends. We have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. But the thought that we should restrict anybody's research just because the public is upset strikes me as not a good idea. Part of the reason universities exist is to have a place where a wide range of research can be conducted."

First, a caveat: I've been misquoted, quoted out of context, and have read things written about me that are inaccurate on a number of occasions. I don't know that what was written above and attributed to Streiffer is fair or not. In any case, it is these passages from the article that motivated my comments here, and for the sake of argument, I am responding as if they are accurate.

Streiffer: "I think it's also important to note that this conversation was ongoing."

Coincidentally, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin had a guest editorial printed just last week. She said:

A new initiative at UW-Madison is designed to make a larger point about what it means to engage in a process of integrated, rigorous and unfettered thinking.... We have developed additional events .... - all to provide opportunities for community participation... I believe promoting rigorous discussion of ideas, including those that are controversial, is one of a university's particular gifts to the larger society.... we hope our community will come away with a greater understanding of the complex issues.... Our long-term goal for Go Big Read is to continue to provoke questions and stimulate debate on issues of relevance. In this way, we hope to instill in our community a lifelong love of learning and a commitment to the continuous "sifting and winnowing" that defines the character of this great university.

Streiffer says that the issue of whether or not experimenting on monkeys (maybe he was speaking broadly, and about animal experimentation more generally?) has been the subject of ongoing conversation at the university. If so, it has been hidden from the public's observation, let alone participation. The faculty senate, as is noted in the Cap Times article, refused to discuss the matter. Where is this discussion taking place? Chancellor Martin's words reflect the role that a university should have when it comes to controversial issues affecting society. Unfortunately, and sadly, the university hasn't lived up to this ideal or even come close on the issue of primate experimentation. It has repeatedly refused, point-blank, to engage in any discussion of the matter. I suspect that they fear the results of genuine and fearless "sifting and winnowing." In light of the reality of the university hiding from the matter, Martin's editorial should be seen as a sad joke that dupes the state's citizens.

Further, who is having this discussion that Streiffer claims is ongoing? If the discussion doesn't include multiple points of view, then it amounts to something akin to Bible study where everyone involved is a devout believer.

Streiffer: "[I]t's not necessarily a good thing for a university to bow to public pressure when it comes to what its professors and researchers study."

But all Marolt is asking for is genuine discussion. And, researchers at universities should not be given the carte blanche implied by Streiffer's comment. There are absolute limits on what can be done in experiments involving humans. The roots of these limits are the direct result of public pressure brought to bear after learning what was being done. (See for instance, my essay, "Human Experimentation".) Public opinion should influence what is and isn't allowed to be done in a university lab.

Streiffer: "Is animal research ethical? It depends. We have to look at it on a case-by-case basis."

But the question of experimenting on monkeys is just that. In the case of monkeys, is it ethical to capture them, breed them, keep them in conditions that lead to self-mutilation, chronic diarrhea, mental illness, and to subject them to painful or frightening or otherwise distressing experiments?

Maybe Streiffer means that we should consider the individual experiments on a case-by-case basis. But this would sidestep the issue of whether we should use them in the first place. Consider following this "ethic" in the case of innocent humans, Jews for instance, locked into small cells. The notion of considering how they might be used on a "case-by-case basis" would be odious and clearly immoral. Streiffer's suggestion suggests that he has missed the larger issue altogether or else made up his mind (based on some fearless sifting and winnowing that took place in a prayer meeting?)

Streiffer: "[T]he thought that we should restrict anybody's research just because the public is upset strikes me as not a good idea."

This comment reflects profound confusion. Who pays for this research? Who is it that the researchers claim will benefit? Who is it that the university itself claims benefits from its mere existence? The answer in every case is "the public." From Streiffer's lofty ivory tower behind the wide moat it must be hard to see just who is footing the bill and who is supposed to be beholden. Dismissing the public's concerns strikes me as not a good or ethical idea.

Why is it that someone with training as an ethicist, purported to be an 'expert' can view this matter in such a shallow elitist way? I think the answer is that we aren't able to do a very good job of self-policing. Our self-interests are so overwhelming that they blind us to other perspectives and truths. Streiffer is paid by the university. This simple fact biases him. He has made friends with people on the animal oversight committees. (For an on-point look at the difficulty of self-policing see Plous, S., & Herzog, H. (2001). Reliability of protocol reviews for animal research. Science, 293, 608-609. [See also the press release]

As we know from a litany of past problems associated with self-policing, humans commonly find it difficult or impossible to fairly judge and control their own actions or the actions of their friends or close colleagues when self-interest conflicts with societal norms or plain facts. This is exactly why institutions and industries involved in potentially harmful or ethically problematic endeavors must have public oversight of their decisions and practices. This is exactly why broad public discussion and involvement is needed in decisions regarding the use of monkeys in research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere.

“[H]umans are the only sentient animal currently on Earth.”

Merriam-Webster:

sen·tient
1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
2 : aware
3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling

Now, a comment by University of California, Los Angeles Associate Professor of Psychology, Aaron Blaisdell — September 14th, 2009, on TimesUnion.com:

Pat wrote: “We view sentient animals as morally relevant beings who are not means to human ends.” So do the scientists who conduct animal research. The weight of evidence, however, is that humans are the only sentient animal currently on Earth (Area 51 and UFO sightings aside). For an excellent contemporary article that exhaustively deals with this issue see “Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2008, Vol. 31). And despite the evidence that non-human animals are not sentient, we scientists who conduct animal research do feel compassion for our research subjects and take every effort to minimize their discomfort and to ensure their health and well being (including psychological well being) in the laboratory environment. This is likely an easier task when a domesticated species like rats and pigeons–which are now adapted to human environments (as are dogs–is used, but nevertheless holds true with all species of animal used in research, from fruit fly to sea slugs to chimpanzee–to humans.

Wow. Maybe the post was from some other Aaron Blaisdell posing as a scientist or someone else posing as Blaisdell. Given UCLA Associate Professor Blaisdell's own work and his affiliation with the article's subject, I suspect it is him. His students should sue UCLA for failing to provide them with informed instructors.

Pro-Test

Adapted from a chapter in Monsters and Pygmies. Have you heard of the advocacy group NAMBLA? The North American Man/Boy Love Association advocates (or advocated, they seem to be more or less defunct) the lowering of the age of consent in sexual relationships. As their name makes clear, they want to change the law to make it legal for adult men to have sex with young boys. They claim to believe that an eight- or nine-year-old boy is old enough to give his informed consent to be buggered. And like the American Civil Liberties Union, I too believe that they have the right to advocate this change to the law. But I don’t think such a change should be enacted, and I suspect most of the ACLU attorneys who make arguments in favor of free speech, no matter how outrageous, don’t either.

NAMBLA reminds me of the relatively new group advocating for their right to torture animals. Pro-Test is the monsters’ response to the mob’s demand that they stop their dark and evil experiments. Like all mobs that have marched to monsters’ lairs, torches and pitchforks in hand, the mob yelling for them to leave the animals alone isn’t above setting fire to their cars and homes. This has been particularly true in Los Angeles where monsters at the University of California Los Angeles have been harried by their critics.

As a consequence, vivisectors at UCLA banded together and started a chapter of Pro-Test, a group that was founded in 2006, in Oxford, England, by a sixteen-year-old boy named Laurie Pycroft. Vivisectors at Oxford were ecstatic that (finally!) a teenager was supporting them and lifted him to their shoulders and marched through town shouting "Hurrah!" The boy was quickly sanctified by the monsters and anointed the industry’s moral compass.

UCLA’s new Pro-Test leader, David Jentsch (pronounced “yench” nearly rhymes with Grinch, and they have the same eyebrows), had been targeted in March 2009. His Volvo was parked next to his house when a firebomb destroyed it very early in the morning.

According to the LA Times, Jentsch claims that UCLA’s Pro-Test, was started to support research that uses animals “in what he calls a humane, carefully regulated way.”

At a UCLA lab, he administers methamphetamine to about two dozen monkeys and then withdraws them from it; about half a dozen are killed each year for postmortems. He contended that the animals suffer no pain from the work.

“The pain in addiction is when you lose your relationships, lose your children, lose your job, when your health goes down. Animals don't suffer those things,” [Jentsch] said. “They suffer none of the psychosocial pain that is what addiction is all about.” [Animals don’t suffer loss of children or decline of health?] Larry Gordon. “UCLA professor stands up to violent animal rights activists.” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2009.

Nowhere in the many articles covering Pro-Test’s first rally, held on April 22, 2009, is there much detail about what this grinch actually does to animals. The blurb about methamphetamine is odd given that he has apparently never published a paper on that particular drug. (A colleague of mine has pointed out that he has a current NIH grant (through 2010) titled NEUROCHEMICAL DETERMINANTS OF MA-INDUCED COGNITIVE DEFICITS, And that at least one report mentions Jentsch and methamphetamine.) He has published occasional papers describing his injections of nicotine, cocaine, THC (the active compound in marijuana), and a couple esoteric chemicals into rats and monkeys, but so far, not one scientific paper mentioning methamphetamine. Of his approximately 55 published papers, about one third describe his use of phencyclidine, or PCP, to induce schizophrenia-like mental duress in these animals.

He has been injecting PCP into monkeys and rats almost continuously since about 1997. In one 1997 paper, he cited others’ research from 1962, and wrote that: “PCP and the PCP analog ketamine induce schizophreniform symptoms in normal humans and cause profound worsening of symptoms in schizophrenics.” Jentsch JD, Elsworth JD, Redmond DE Jr, Roth RH. Phencyclidine increases forebrain monoamine metabolism in rats and monkeys: modulation by the isomers of HA966. Journal of Neuroscience. 1997.

In a paper from 2008, Jentsch explains:

Young adult male or female St Kitts green (vervet) monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops sabaeus) at the St Kitts Biomedical Research Foundation (St Kitts, West Indies) were used. As the subjects were feral monkeys, their exact age was not known. These studies were approved by the relevant institutional animal care and use committee. Monkeys, housed individually in squeeze-cages, were injected with PCP twice daily for 14 days, as described before (Jentsch et al, 1997).… John D Elsworth, J David Jentsch, Bret A Morrow, D Eugene Redmond Jr and Robert H Roth. Clozapine Normalizes Prefrontal Cortex Dopamine Transmission in Monkeys Subchronically Exposed to Phencyclidine Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008.

Let’s try to put Jentsch’s PCP injections into context and imagine the situation from the monkeys’ perspective.

First, PCP is almost never injected. It is almost always smoked – sprinkled on tobacco or marijuana, and only very occasionally, snorted like cocaine. But it is almost never injected.

Second, nearly everyone who uses PCP knows they’re using PCP.

Third, the commonly reported recreational dose of PCP is 0.01-0.02 mg/kg.

Jentsch is injecting 15 to 30 times (0.3 mg/kg) the normal recreational dose of PCP into animals, ripped from their families, trapped in cages and being manhandled, who then start having unending nightmarish hallucinations for reasons they can’t imagine. And this goes on for two weeks, prior to them being killed.

And this grinch does this, he claims, because the biochemical actions of a drug (clozapine) that has been used since the mid 1970s to treat schizophrenia aren’t well understood.

And then, he has the audacity to claim that people who see him for what he is — a monster of the worst sort — should stop trying to make him and his ilk stop their monstrous behavior.

Pro-Test is interesting because it is so very unusual for monsters to stand up in public and declare that the general public should countenance their monstrous behavior. This is what makes Vice President Dick Chaney’s public defense of torture such an oddity.

At UCLA, the Pro-Test “Founding Members” are:

* J. David Jentsch, UCLA Professor, Psychology
* Dario Ringach, UCLA Professor, Neurobiology and Psychology
* Tom Holder, Speaking of Research, Founder and Pro-Test (UK) Spokesman “There is round-the-clock treatment, there are people, veterinarians in research labs whose only job is to make sure that animals are treated well and are essentially happy in their lives.”
* Lynn Fairbanks, UCLA Professor, Psychiatry
* Kathy Wadsworth, UCLA Associate Director-Animal Subjects Research
* Megan Wyeth, UCLA Graduate Student, Neurobiology
* Donald Kalar, UCLA Graduate Student, Psychology

Dario Ringach may be one of only two vivisectors in the world to have even temporarily capitulated to anti-cruelty activists due to harassment. (The other was Michael Podell*) From the LA Times:

[Then acting Chancellor] Abrams said the Bel-Air incident, [in which an “incendiary device” that did not ignite was left at Lynn Fairbanks’ front door] along with the decision this month by neurobiology professor Dario Ringach to stop his primate research after several years of harassment and threats to his family, led to the announcement [of a $60,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of those who left the device.] Abrams said he was deeply saddened by Ringach's decision, describing him as a promising young professor, doing significant - and the chancellor emphasized, legal - research.

Ringach, whose work involved studies of the brain and the ways it receives information from the retina, sent an e-mail Aug. 4 [2006] to the Animal Liberation Press Office.

Posted on the website, the e-mail reads, in part: “You win. Effective immediately, I am no longer doing animal research.”

“Studies of the brain and the ways it receives information from the retina.” That’s not much detail. How can one form a thoughtful opinion without the details of what he’s doing? I guess you could simply say that no matter what he’s doing, since he’s doing it only to animals, that you support it, because you support anything scientific. I don’t think humans could hold such a position. That’s the position of a monster; a human would want to have at least some knowledge of the specifics before taking sides.

Ringatch uses monkeys and cats. Once they are prepared by him, they are used for at least a few days before they are killed or die. It isn’t clear from his papers whether they are always killed or just die. His experiments would look quite gruesome if we could watch them, but the monkeys and cats are reportedly anesthetized throughout the experiments. He puts electrodes in their brains, puts the animals in a metal frame, and then puts simple images (usually groups of dots or gratings) in front of their eyes, and then records the output from the electrodes in their brain. If the monkeys and cats are genuinely unconscious, then at least he isn’t causing them much discomfort aside from being raised in an environmentally and socially deprived laboratory setting. So, as far as Ringach’s current experiments are concerned, the moral question is whether he should be killing monkeys and cats in order to generate a mathematical approximation of the neuronal response to visual stimuli. He isn’t working on finding a cure for some widespread and hideous disease, his research is among the most arcane, much like the Little Angel of St. Louis.

Lynn Fairbanks, another of the Pro-test founders, says that:

[S]trong similarities to humans make [monkeys] particularly valuable for understanding complex behavioral traits and brain structure and function… Like humans, NHPs [nonhuman primates] experience a prolonged period of postnatal development, together with strong family ties and complex social relationships. Furthermore, most features of human behavior have recognizable counterparts in NHPs, enabling the examination of traits such as anxiety and impulsivity, which are central components of human behavioral disorders. Freimer NB, Service SK, Ophoff RA, Jasinska AJ, McKee K, Villeneuve A, Belisle A, Bailey JN, Breidenthal SE, Jorgensen MJ, Mann JJ, Cantor RM, Dewar K, Fairbanks LA. A quantitative trait locus for variation in dopamine metabolism mapped in a primate model using reference sequences from related species. Proceeding of the National Academy of Science USA. 2007.

And this makes hers and her cohorts’ experiments all the more monstrous. We can see ourselves in the monkeys. When people who are upset with this cruelty point this out, the vivisectors laugh and say their critics are being inappropriately anthropomorphic; but then they say to each other, ‘look, these animals are just like us, let’s hurt them in sundry ways’.

Here, she explains a few of the ways she does this:

For this study, METH [methamphetamine] was administered to adult male vervet monkeys living in social groups containing a full range of different age/sex animals. The social housing was considered a critical component of the study design because it allowed for behavioral assessments of drug-related changes in affiliative and agonistic behaviors. Such measurements are highly relevant for behavioral models of the human condition, but are not possible to obtain in individually housed animals….

Study 1: METH Pharmacokinetics Study
Subjects METH-naive male animals (age range: 5–7 years; n=4) that were not included in the long-term METH study were transferred to UCLA and housed in individual cages for the duration of the study. The animals were habituated to sitting in a customized primate chair for 2 weeks before the pharmacokinetics study.

METH administration and experimental design
On the study day, the animal was placed in the chair and a catheter was inserted in the tail vein 30 min before injection of methamphetamine …Blood samples were obtained at 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 2, and 4 h. The animal was returned to its cage and blood samples were obtained at 6, 8, 10, 12, and 24 h from either the tail or femoral vein while temporarily restrained…

Pharmacokinetic parameters for the human METH exposure were obtained from prior human METH studies (Cook et al, 1993.)

Study 2: Escalating Dose-METH Exposure
Subjects and housing The focal subjects in this study were 12 adult male vervet monkeys (age range 6.9–9.9 years, weight range 6.8–8.7 kg) that were housed in three outdoor social groups at the joint UCLA/VA Vervet Research Colony. …

The social groups were formed and allowed to habituate for approximately 3 months before study initiation. After focal subjects were randomly assigned to a group, they were randomly designated as either METH or Control subjects…[There were] two METH and two Control focal subjects in each of three social groups concurrently. Each group also consisted of 3–4 adult females, 2–7 juveniles, and 0–3 infants, with no other adult males present throughout the study. One METH subject died of an unknown illness during the study. There was no evidence that experimental manipulation caused this death. Subjects were always housed within their social groups except during experimental manipulations….

Experimental design
The study took place over a 1-year period. An initial 3-month habituation was followed by a 4-week pretest period, 8 Dose periods of 4–5 weeks each, and a 3-week abstinence period.

RESULTS

Abnormal Behavior Composite Score
Dose-dependent increases in species-typical stereotypic actions were observed in the METH subjects …Post hoc tests of simple main effects indicated significantly higher levels of abnormal behavior during ‘injection’ days compared to ‘no injection’ days for METH subjects at Dose 5, 6 and Dose 7, 8. METH subjects also showed significantly higher levels of abnormal behavior during Dose 7, 8 compared to the other three Dose periods... This increase was significant for both ‘injection’ days as well as for ‘no injection’ days. In addition, METH subjects showed significantly higher levels of abnormal behavior compared to Controls only during Dose 7, 8. This difference was also significant for both ‘injection’ days as well as for ‘no injection’ days.

Aggression Composite Score
Levels of aggression changed across Dose periods for both Control and METH subjects…

Anxiety Composite Score
Increases in the anxiety scores were observed in the METH subjects for most Dose-Analysis periods during ‘no injection’ days when AMPH but not METH was present in pharmacologically active concentrations… Tests of simple main effects indicated METH subjects showed significantly lower levels of anxiety-related behavior during ‘no injection’ days compared to ‘injection’ days for Dose 1, 2, but showed significantly higher levels of anxiety during ‘no injection’ days compared to ‘injection’ days for Dose 3, 4; Dose 5, 6; and Dose 7, 8. In addition, METH subjects during 'no injection' days showed significantly higher levels of anxiety-related behavior during Dose 5, 6 and Dose 7, 8 compared to Dose 1, 2. Control subjects also showed higher levels of anxiety-related behavior during Dose 7, 8 compared to Dose 1, 2 during ‘no injection’ days.

Social Behavior Composite Score
The METH subjects generally showed lower social behavior on ‘injection’ days, ie following METH administration…

And then she killed them and cut up their brains.

The aim of this study was to establish in socially housed vervet monkeys a profile of behavioral and brain alterations resulting from modeling an ED-METH exposure extending over 8 months. The principal observations were dose-dependent increases in abnormal and anxiety-related behaviors, activity levels, and decreases in aggression….

In conclusion, this METH administration protocol in the monkey modeled some aspects of a human daily multiple dose exposure and caused significant behavioral alterations in categories relevant to the human METH condition, eg anxiety, abnormal behavior, that were likely the result of alterations in both dopaminergic and nondopaminergic systems. Melega WP, Jorgensen MJ, Laćan G, Way BM, Pham J, Morton G, Cho AK, Fairbanks LA. Long-term methamphetamine administration in the vervet monkey models aspects of a human exposure: brain neurotoxicity and behavioral profiles. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008.

William Melega, one of Fairbanks’ coauthors has been injecting monkeys with methamphetamine since at least 1995. (Kuczenski R, Segal DS, Cho AK, Melega W. Hippocampus norepinephrine, caudate dopamine and serotonin, and behavioral responses to the stereoisomers of amphetamine and methamphetamine. Journal of Neuroscience. 1995.) Vivisectors have been injecting monkeys with methamphetamine since at least 1971 (Ellinwood EH Jr. Effect of chronic methamphetamine intoxication in Rhesus monkeys. Biological Psychiatry. 1971), but have been injecting other animals, namely, mice, rats, dogs, cats, and pigeons since the early 1950s. (Harrisson JW, Ambrus CM, Ambrus JL. Tolerance of rats toward amphetamine and methamphetamine. Journal of the American Pharmacists Association (Baltimore). 1952.)

Kathy Wadsworth, another Pro-Test founder and UCLA Associate Director-Animal Subjects Research, seems a bit like the ubiquitous Igor character in mad scientist movies — mewling, unhappy with their lot, but dedicated to keeping their master(s) supplied with victims.

Tom Holder (a friend of St. Pycroft) seems to be involved simply to call attention to himself. Although he occasionally speaks in public and presents slides, his information is nonsense taken from industry front groups’ websites and regurgitated without hesitation or critical evaluation.

The two graduate students named as founding members of Pro-Test seem to be children, naïve and enamored with tenured scientists taking notice of them. I wrote to Megan Wyeth and asked her about an article in the school newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that showcased her:

Hoisting a sign and marching with several hundred others, Megan Wyeth was not just protesting in favor of animal research. She was also trying to protect the safety of her friends.

Wyeth is one of seven founding members of Pro-Test at UCLA, a group formed to speak out against animal rights extremism…

Wyeth works with mice in her research on epilepsy…

Wyeth said the public generally doesn’t realize how much training researchers undergo before they are even allowed to touch an animal.

“It seems like they think we’re sadistic or get pleasure out of using animals for research,” she said. “We minimize the numbers we have to use. It’s not my favorite part, but we have to do it.”

In the three years of her main epilepsy research, Wyeth has been working with the same six mice….

“All of my animals are anesthetized when I work on them. I make sure they’re out – extra double sure.” ... Audrey Kuo. “Scientists seek to research in peace.” The Daily Bruin. April 23, 2009.

“Hum,” I wondered to myself, “if she’s been anesthetizing and ‘work[ing] on’ the same six mice for the past three years, are their small brains still functioning normally?” So I wrote to her and asked. I also asked whether she knew what Jentsch actually does.

It turns out that she killed these twelve, not six, mice three years ago and has been studying slides made from sections of their brains all this time. She also claimed to be using other mice in other experiments.

She also said that she didn’t know what Jentsch does to monkeys. She marched behind him, chanting for his right to, well, it turns out she didn’t have any idea what she was demanding that he ought to be allowed to do. Not knowing what one is marching and chanting for is not a good sign in a young aspiring scientist; critical well-informed decision-making would seem to be a key component in making any difficult discovery. She's a perfect fit for Pro-Test.

*Andrew Goldstein. A Win for the Kitties. Time Magazine, June 24, 2002.

Ohio State University Veterinarian Michael Podell has spent the past two years infecting cats with the feline version of HIV, shooting them with methamphetamines (commonly known as speed), cutting into their brain tissue to examine their responses and then killing and dissecting them. His goal: to explore what happens when HIV-positive humans abuse drugs. But animal-rights activists did everything they could to stop the research, and last week, when Podell announced he was quitting the project and leaving the university, they declared victory. The university says Podell had received more than a thousand protest letters and e-mails, including nearly a dozen death threats. Demonstrators sprayed graffiti on campus calling on him to STOP TORTURING CATS.

Liars, sadists, and English professors

As I was growing up my parents indulged my interest in animals. My shelves were filled with books on nature and science. I started my birding lifelist when I was in fifth grade. We subscribed to Time-Life’s Nature and Science Libraries, various nature magazines, and watched all the science specials on TV -- back in the days of three television channels. I grew up thinking of scientists as honorable people working in the most interesting careers imaginable. But I eventually quit thinking like a child.

And when I did, and finally turned my attention to the scientists using animals, I saw immediately that most of them – those working in the thousands of labs around the world – were torturing and killing animals for reasons that couldn’t be justified and that they tried to justify the suffering they caused with false appeals to past scientific advances, wild speculation about future cures, and a calculated effort to frighten people. What I saw, and see, is an industry filled with liars, sadists, and failed medical doctors.

It’s not just the vivisectors who are the villains; the industry supporting them is immense; its financial interests swamp any notion of concern for the animals; but that’s been noticed and written about many times.

A new thing I’ve come to understand is that the vivisectors’ support system isn’t limited only to politicians who use expanding “research” expenditures as evidence that they are concerned about their constituents’ health, or to the cage and equipment makers, the food suppliers, the scalpel makers, or even to the university schools and departments completely dependent on publishing ever more scientific reports on their vivisections, no, as responsible as all of those are, just as responsible are many of the rest of the universities’ staff members.

When a history professor, and English professor, a math teacher, a chemist, an engineer, a professor of education, and any one else who works at a university reads in the local paper about some heinous series of experiments, or some violation of the Animal Welfare Act, they have an obligation to find out the details of what is happening on their campus and not to swallow the institution-crafted pr pap that follows every unsavory revelation. They have an obligation to learn the facts, to get involved if they find a problem, to police their peers.

Academics working at an institution are, it seems to me, more responsible than are people outside the institution who read the same newspaper articles. Their silence helps provide a cover that outsiders likely view as evidence that there isn’t actually very much wrong. Except for only one or two exceptions, every staff member I’ve spoken to who also voices concern has had a reason that they can’t speak out and criticize their colleagues. Very convenient.

Those who remain silent, like the Germans who turned a blind eye, bear a responsibility for every atrocity occurring at their school.

Richard Davidson Big Bucks

Richard Davidson has said in public that he has received no money from the experiments on fear and anxiety in young monkeys in which he has participated. He has said this on multiple occasions.

5P50MH069315-05 AFFECTIVE STYLE: NEURAL AND BEHAVIORAL SUBSTRATES DAVIDSON, RICHARD J . UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON 2008 NIMH $1,976,077

Project Number: 5P50MH069315-05 Principal Investigator (PI): DAVIDSON, RICHARD J
Title: AFFECTIVE STYLE: NEURAL AND BEHAVIORAL SUBSTRATES Organization: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests five years of funding to establish an Interdisciplinary Behavioral Science Center for Mental Health (IBSC). Our Center builds upon our previous Center for Behavioral Sciences Research and is focused on affective style--consistent individual differences in particular parameters of emotional reactivity and affect regulation. Why some individuals respond especially intensely and persistently to negative events while others appear considerably more resilient, is a question of profound significance to understanding vulnerability to psychopathology. Each of the projects in this Center is focused on different, but related aspects of affective style. Each of the projects converge toward an understanding of the behavioral, neural and hormonal substrates of vulnerability toward mood and anxiety disorders, with a focus on understanding the interconnected roles of different territories of prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) in these processes. The Center is comprised of five projects and three cores. The projects are focused on different populations including normal adults, adults at putative risk for mood and anxiety disorders based upon biological indices that reflect emotion regulation, adolescents at risk for internalizing disorders, MZ and DZ twin children well-characterized with behavioral and other measures of temperament, and rhesus monkeys also selected to differ on temperamental features that are likely to confer risk for psychopathology. The twin and adolescent samples are tested across multiple projects in both behavioral and MR imaging protocols. There are many common behavioral (supported by a Behavioral Assessment/Clinical Diagnosis Core) and biological measures (supported by a Biological Measures Core that includes MR and microPET imaging, neuroendocrine measures and psychophysiological measures) across the projects. The science proposed will significantly advance our understanding of the neural and behavioral substrates of affective style and this new knowledge will aid in the prediction, prevention and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders.

Ethical Blindness

The top image is from "Farm matchmaking a way to preserve rural America," an article by SHARON COHEN, an Associated Press contributer. The article was on the front page of the Monday, August 31, Wisconsin State Journal.

There wasn't a word anywhere in the article about what was in store for the piglet in the picture. Newspapers seem to be run by zombies; the editors seem dead, to be unaware of the gross inconsistencies of the messages they send. On the one hand, they print stories about puppy mills and people running down deer and ducks on snowmobiles, presumably because they think the public should know about certain instances of animal abuse.

On the other hand, they ignore or even defend and champion the lifetime starvation of monkeys, remain mute on likely violations of state laws and federal regulations in local animal labs, and see nothing wrong with printing a photo of an infant pig getting ready to be tortured on the front page.

The problem with this is that this confused mushy-headedness is served up as high-level journalism. Far from it.

A friend wrote them a letter about the image and the very misleading glossing over of just what "confinement agriculture" actually is; I doubt that it will get printed, so I'm posting it here:

“Love-of –land , but of animals…?

I wonder how many of your readers have any idea of the mutilation the innocent piglet “Wannabe farmer” Phillips and his “old time mentor” are holding, will be subjected to? In factory farms, piglets are taken from their mothers when they are less than a month old, their tails cut off and their testicles ripped out of their scrotums without any pain relief. Pliers are used to break off the ends of their teeth and for ID purposes, farmers cut out chunks of the ears. These social animals will spend the rest of their short lives in overcrowded pens on tiny slabs of concrete. To find out more about this unnecessary suffering, watch Mary Tyler Moore on www.wyou.org, on-line, live stream, or on Ch 95or 991 [in Madison, WI] at 11 pm this Thursday Sept 3rd.

The reporter misleads us. Animals in these “confinement” farms live a horrible existence. They are only seen as commodities. Gestation crates, battery cages and veal crates have been banned in Europe. Such cruel methods only continue in the US because the public is intentionally kept unaware of the cruel reality these sentient, intelligent beings are subjected to daily.

Michele Basso

Rumor has it that UW-Madison's investigation of Michele Basso has concluded and that she has lost her "privilege" to use animals, and that she is threatening to file a lawsuit against the university. So far, all of this is from uncorroborated leaks from within the university. If true, it's no wonder they're keeping it a secret. Apparently, according to my sources, even other vivisectors have found her practices to be slipshod and an embarrassment. They have been trying to get rid of her for a number of years. If this turns out to be true, I'll revisit the many times that she and her work has been publicly defended by the UW's lackeys.

The pattern is easy to see

Primate center officials had denied using zoo monkeys in invasive research until The Capital Times obtained specific monkey identification numbers that showed monkeys being born at the zoo and dying at the hands of researchers.

The identification numbers were provided by a Madison animal rights group. "Zoo Monkeys Secretly Killed: Uw Researchers Broke Commitment." Capital Times August 9, 1997.

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Kemnitz,... interim director of the center ... maintained Sunday that the primate center has done nothing wrong. The monkeys taken from the zoo and used for invasive research are a tiny percentage of all the monkeys at the center and represent a legitimate exception to the non-use policy, he said. "Uw Scientists Deny Knowing Monkeys Had Lived At Zoo." Capital Times August 11, 1997.

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A month after the UW-Madison admitted to a "serious breach" of an agreement with the Henry Vilas Zoo, new incidents are still coming to light and questions are being raised about the candor of UW officials regarding research on zoo monkeys.

In a written statement released Tuesday, Joe Kemnitz, interim director of the university's Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, admitted that at least one animal has been used in invasive studies since he took over the helm of the primate center in August 1996. The monkey had a fetus removed from her womb 20 days after conception so scientists could study it.

"This assignment and procedure were made by error and not as an intentional exception to the agreement," Kemnitz wrote. "I am chagrined that this oversight occurred."

Kemnitz wrote to newspapers last weekend to say that no improper assignments had been made under his leadership.

He wrote: "I deeply regret this breach of trust between the primate center and the zoo's administration, as well as the public. Importantly, none of our current staff intentionally violated the agreement. Furthermore, no exceptions to the agreement have been made during my tenure as interim director, which began one year ago."

The Capital Times has learned that two other monkeys in addition to the one that Kemnitz refers to were used in biomedical research projects within the past year in ways that may have violated the zoo agreement. "Uw Official Backtracks On Monkeys' Fate (all Editions) Pact With Zoo Violated More Recently." Capital Times September 18, 1997.

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In 2007, three representatives from UW-Madison made a presentation to the Dane County Board of Supervisors. UW-Madison was one of 14 semifinalists bidding to host the planned NBAF, intended to replace the aging and contaminated Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. NBAF will feature BSL-4 laboratories intended to study the most dangerous diseases known and yet to be discovered or designed.

Irwin Goldman, associate dean for research in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences was the primary university spokesperson at the March 8, presentation. Goldman told the Dane County Supervisors that he was knowledgeable of the risk associated with biological research because he was familiar with the use of pesticides and herbicides. In his opinion, based on his own expertise in horticulture, he found nothing to be concerned with in having a BSL-4 lab in town. March 8, 2007 UW-Madison presentation to the Dane County Board of Supervisors.

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The Department of Homeland Security relied on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate a $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens. "Infectious Diseases Study Site Questioned: Tornado Alley May Not Be Safe, GAO Says." The Washington Post July 27, 2009.

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Biosafety Systems Strong, Uw Insists. "Biosafety Systems Strong, Uw Insists: Several Critics Worry University Researchers Could Inadvertently Expose The Public To Biohazards." Wisconsin State Journal Wednesday, January 30, 2008.

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With more than 100 research projects in limbo, dozens of labs behind on safety inspections, and the investigation into a "Major Action" violation unfinished, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin has vowed to hire more safety officers to review campus research.

Martin's response came after a campus committee sent her a letter last month stating that UW-Madison is not in compliance with National Institutes of Health guidelines because of "gross and chronic" understaffing.

"The risk is that the NIH would see that we're not carrying out our responsibilities, our end of the deal, and they could penalize the university," said Paul Lambert, who is head of the Institutional Biosafety Committee, which reviews research projects that involve biological materials. "They could deny us funding." "Martin Acts To Improve Safety: Understaffing Could Put Federal Funding At Risk." Wisconsin State Journal Friday, June 5, 2009.

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And then there are the decades of illegal sheep decompression experiments and the very secret new BSL-3 lab that the university wants to build at the primate center.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool the public over and over and over, and you ought to go to jail.

The decompression of the sheep

The decompression of the sheep
Alliance for Animals says UW researchers are violating the law
Bill Lueders on Thursday 08/27/2009

The animals are placed in a hyperbaric pressure chamber, then monitored for decompression sickness.

In early 2006, Leslie Hamilton spoke to a UW Veterinary School class about animals and the law. Afterward, one student approached her to say he had, as a part-time lab assistant, witnessed decompression experiments involving sheep.

"He was very bothered by it," recalls Hamilton, an attorney and member of the local Alliance for Animals.

Hamilton made an open records request seeking necropsy reports on sheep who had died. The UW refused on various grounds, including "trade secrets." The state Attorney General's Office declined to get involved. Sighs Hamilton, "We had to let it drop."

...

... The experiments, which the UW last fall classified as being in the highest category for animal pain and discomfort, are often fatal.

And that, Hamilton believes, makes them illegal.

State Statute 951.025 reads, in its entirety: "Decompression prohibited: No person may kill an animal by means of decompression."

The Alliance has written the federal authorities that oversee animal experiments and Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, saying the UW has been killing sheep through decompression at least since 1988. And more than 100 group members have sent postcards urging Blanchard to "investigate this matter and bring charges against those responsible for conducting and approving these cruel acts."

...

Eric Sandgren, director of the UW's Research Animal Resources Center, offers this response:

"We're still reviewing the complaint and preparing our response to Mr. Blanchard, so it wouldn't be appropriate for us to provide detailed comments right now. We do believe that the research studies at issue were fully compliant with the letter and spirit of all applicable state and federal laws governing the use of animals in research. The studies were humanely conducted according to generally accepted veterinary practices, and serve the important public purpose of helping people working in deep-sea environments, such as submariners, to survive a rapid ascent."

I don't think Eric Sandgren should go into law as a career. The question here is a simple one and the illegality of killing animals by means of decompression in the state of Wisconsin isn't arguable, though I won't be surprised if the UW attorneys try to argue the matter.

I don't think Eric Sandgren is familiar with generally accepted veterinary practices either.

He must never have read Appendix 4 of the AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia (Formerly Report of the AVMA Panel on Euthanasia) published in June 2007.

In Appendix 4, "Some unacceptable agents and methods of euthanasia," the American Veterinary Medical Association says:

Decompression is unacceptable for euthanasia because of numerous disadvantages. (1) Many chambers are designed to produce decompression at a rate 15 to 60 times faster than that recommended as optimum for animals, resulting in pain and distress attributable to expanding gases trapped in body cavities. (2) Immature animals are tolerant of hypoxia, and longer periods of decompression are required before respiration ceases. (3) Accidental recompression, with recovery of injured animals, can occur. (4) Bleeding, vomiting, convulsions, urination, and defecation, which are aesthetically unpleasant, may develop in unconscious animals.

Killing animals by means of decompression is illegal in Wisconsin and it's contrary to accepted veterinary practices.

This is doubly concerning because Sandgren is the director of the Research Animal Resource Center, which lists as one of its four main functions, to:

provide oversight and assistance in assuring compliance to all laws, regulations, and rules governing the care and use of laboratory animals.

So, the director, himself a veterinarian, is ignorant of the state's Crimes Against Animals statutes and is ignorant of the AVMA's guidelines on euthanasia. This lack of knowledge and delusional belief that the institution is obeying applicable laws goes to the heart of all the problems with the university's use of animals. They really don't know what they are doing, and are more than willing to say whatever they believe will pacify the public when a problem inadvertently slips into the public's field of view.

This problem can't be fixed. It's like trying to make the nuclear arsenal safe. The only sane and humane way to deal with it is to eliminate it.

UW-Madison: Bumbling Oafs or Big Fat Liars?

I'm sure that the University of Wisconsin-Madison has some fine teachers and bright researchers; the odds of having some outstanding minds are in the institution's favor given the large number of people who work there. But smart and ethical aren't the same thing. I'll talk more about that distinction a little later.

Maybe the animal-using component of the university attracts the oafs and the liars; maybe it's unfair to judge the overall quality of the institution and its staff by looking only at the animal users. Maybe, but that's the only part of the university with which I am familiar, and from that perspective, the university does indeed appear to be filled with oafs and liars.

At times it's hard to tell the difference between an oaf and a liar. For instance, when the university offered up property in the Town of Dunn as a construction site for the Department of Homeland Security's National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), did they simply not know that the Town of Dunn is nationally known as a leader in land use and open space preservation? Were they genuinely this uniformed, or did they think they could hornswaggle the townsfolk into dumping their three-decades-old land ethic for the possibility of new jobs? See what I mean? It's hard to tell whether the university "experts" were just dull or just liars.

I think they might be both, and that's a very dangerous mix when you stop to realize that they experiment with some of the most deadly and dangerous diseases known. NBAF is a case in point.

On March 8, 2007, three representatives from UW-Madison made a presentation to the Dane County Board of Supervisors. UW-Madison was one of 14 semifinalists bidding to host the planned NBAF, intended to replace the aging and contaminated Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. NBAF will feature BSL-4 laboratories intended to study the most dangerous diseases known and yet to be discovered or designed.

Irwin Goldman, associate dean for research in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences was the primary university spokesperson at the March 8, presentation. Goldman told the Dane County Supervisors that he was knowledgeable of the risk associated with biological research because he was familiar with the use of pesticides and herbicides. In his opinion, based on his own expertise in horticulture, he found nothing to be concerned with in having a BSL-4 lab in town. But on July 27, 2009, The Washington Post reported that:

The Department of Homeland Security relied on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate a $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens in a tornado-prone section of Kansas, according to a government report.

The department's analysis was not "scientifically defensible" in concluding that it could safely handle dangerous animal diseases in Kansas -- or any other location on the U.S. mainland, according to a Government Accountability Office draft report obtained by The Washington Post. The GAO said DHS greatly underestimated the chance of accidental release and major contamination from such research, which has been conducted only on a remote island off the United States.

Presumably, Ira Goldman and the rest of the university "experts'" claims that such a lab would be completely safe were based on the risk analysis conducted by DHS that the GAO now says was a "questionable methodology [that] could result in regrettable consequences." GAO says: "Given the significant limitations in DHS’s analyses that we found, the conclusion that FMD work can be done as safely on the mainland as on Plum Island is not supported." [My emphasis.]

This isn't reassuring. Either the university "experts" weren't expert enough to recognize that the risk assessments were based on out-dated incomplete scientific analyses or else didn't care enough about the public's safety to bother considering the DHS claims. This is particulary alarming given the fact that the university has been working to keep secret its plans for a new infectious disease lab right off Regent Street. Here's a letter published in the Aug. 22, 2009 Wisconsin State Journal regarding this stonewalling:

UW unresponsive on records request

Three years ago UW-Madison drew opposition from town of Dunn residents when it announced it was competing to build a lab for the study of diseases like anthrax and SARS. When the UW failed in its bid for the National Bio- and Agro Defense Facility, it admitted that community opposition was the biggest factor that sank the application.

UW-Madison recently announced it was in nationwide competition for federal stimulus funds to expand its infectious disease research facilities at its Charter Street lab, located just a block from the Vilas and Greenbush neighborhoods.

On June 3 I filed an open records request with UW to obtain information regarding the infectious disease research UW plans to conduct. I have yet to receive a response.

The Capital Times recently filed a lawsuit against Gov. Jim Doyle because he took more than 30 days to respond to their request for documents related to judicial appointments. The governor allegedly delayed his response to announce the appointments before he released the documents.

Following their failure three years ago, UW representatives said the process taught the university much about applying for federal projects. Was keeping the public in the dark one of the lessons?

The open records law requires a response "as soon as practical," and "harming the UW's chances for federal funds" is not listed among its exceptions.

-- Leslie Hamilton, Madison

If it weren't for a leak, we wouldn't know that the university has applied for a grant from the NIH to establish an BSL-3 infectious disease lab inside the primate center and that they propose to infect monkeys with SARS, avian flu, and tuberculosis. Given that the university's biosafety "experts" couldn't adequately evaluate the NBAF, or wouldn't, it makes sense to be worried about our health and safety now, to say nothing of the monkeys they will be watching die.
If their colossal circle-jerk regarding NBAF was their only screw up regarding possibly infecting everyone in Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin, or the world, maybe we could believe them when they (are sure to) say that we should trust their ability to keep us safe from their experiments. But it's not, not even close.

Right now, the university is under investigation by the NIH for a Major Action violation. Neither the university nor NIH will release details because the investigation is on-going. What we do know is that a researcher gentically modified disease-causing organisms to be resistant to the antibiotics used to control them (that's the definition of an NIH Major Action) and that s/he did this either without approval or without appropriate safeguards or both. We know this because Chancellor Martin announced it in the local paper. Apparently, the NIH began its investigation about two years ago and said that the entire biosafety program at the univerity was woefully lax. The Wisconsin State Journal reported that: "UW-Madison is not in compliance with National Institutes of Health [biosafety] guidelines because of 'gross and chronic' understaffing."

The university has a history of putting the public at grave risk and of not following basic federal regulations for working with deadly diseases. In 2007, MSNBC reported that:

University of Wisconsin-Madison research on the deadly Ebola virus was conducted for a year in a less-secure laboratory than required, until the National Institutes of Health alerted the school to the problem....

The university approved [Yoshihiro] Kawaoka's study initially for a Biosafety Level 3.... Several of UW-Madison's laboratories are Level 3 labs, but none are Level 4, where the most stringent guidelines to contain the most dangerous pathogens are applied.

Klein said Kawaoka was pressing to conduct the research in a less restrictive Level 2 lab. When the university asked the NIH for guidance, it learned the material was restricted to a Level 4 lab.

So, didn't the university know that federal regulations require Ebola research to be conducted in a BSL-4 lab or didn't they care, in essence lying to NIH and CDC? Were they oafs or liars?

Kawaoka has a history of putting the public's health at risk, and all of his experiments have been approved by the same "experts" who said NBAF was safe and that Ebola could be studied in a BSL-2 lab. Consider this:

Experts fear escape of 1918 flu from lab
October 2004
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Debora MacKenzie

The 1918 flu virus spread across the world in three months and killed at least 40 million people. If it escaped from a lab today, the death toll could be far higher. “The potential implications of an infected lab worker – and spread beyond the lab – are terrifying,” says D. A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading biosecurity expert.

Yet despite the danger, researchers in the US are working with reconstructed versions of the virus at less than the maximum level of containment. ....

The latest work was done by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His team showed that adding the 1918 gene for the surface protein haemagglutinin to modern viruses made them far deadlier to mice. The researchers also found that people born after 1918 have little or no immunity.

The team started the work at the highest level of containment, BSL-4, at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Then they decided the viruses were safe enough to handle at the next level down, and did the rest of the work across the border in a BSL-3Ag lab in Madison. The main difference between BSL-4 and BSL-3Ag is that precautions to ensure staff do not get infected are less stringent: while BSL-4 involves wearing fully enclosed body suits, those working at BSL-3Ag labs typically have half-suits.

Kawaoka told New Scientist that the decision to move down to BSL-3Ag was taken only after experiments at BSL-4 showed that giving mice the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in advance prevented them getting sick. This means, he says, that if all lab workers take oseltamivir “they cannot become infected”. ...

Yet this assumes that the mouse results apply to humans. And the findings have not been published. In similar experiments, Terrence Tumpey’s team at the US Department of Agriculture’s poultry research lab in Athens, Georgia, got quite different results: they found that mice given oseltamivir still got sick and 1 in 10 died. It is not clear why Kawaoka’s mice fared better.

What is more, all the safety precautions are aimed at preventing escape, not dealing with it should it occur. If any of Kawaoka’s lab workers are exposed to the virus despite all the precautions, and become infected despite taking oseltamivir, the consequences could be disastrous.

“I experienced disbelief ... regarding the decision to relocate the reconstructed 1918 influenza strain from a BSL-4 facility to a BSL-3 facility, based on its susceptibility to antiviral medication,” Ronald Voorhees, chief medical officer at the New Mexico Department of Health, wrote on ProMED-mail, an infectious diseases mailing list....

Still not worried?

January 9, 2009 U. of Wis. quietly scraps risky lab equipment

By RYAN J. FOLEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

MADISON, Wis. -- The University of Wisconsin-Madison has quietly decided to stop manufacturing its signature aerosol chambers used for researching infectious disease, which were involved in a few dangerous lab accidents nationwide, including one in Seattle in 2004.

The College of Engineering is shutting down the business after an internal audit found it was poorly managed and carried the potential for huge liability costs in the event the chambers failed, exposing researchers to toxic agents.

And this:

12 April 2007 - A [Madison] aerosol chamber mishap at Texas A&M University in February 2006 caused a researcher to be infected with the bioweapons agent brucella. Texas A&M University then violated federal law by not reporting the brucellosis case to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and now faces severe penalties. This information has only come to light as a result of persistent Texas Public Information Act requests by the Sunshine Project.

And this:

The Sunshine Project News Release 18 April 2005:

The Chamber: The Madison aerosol chamber is a specialized type of lab equipment. The chamber is used to infect animals with disease through their lungs. Cultures of organisms causing tuberculosis or the bioweapons agents anthrax, Q fever, or brucella and others are placed in a part of the device called a nebulizer, which mixes the agents with air. The resulting aerosol is directed into a metal chamber in which animals have been placed on racks. The animals then breathe in the agent. The integrity of the complicated device's "O rings", seals, and other fittings is critical to preventing the aerosols from escaping the chamber and causing accidental infections. But the Madison chamber in Seattle, Washington leaks badly, and in 2004 it caused three laboratory-acquired tuberculosis infections at a BSL-3 lab shared by Corixa Corporation and the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IRDI).

“Foolproof”: In late 2003, the Seattle lab began using a Madison aerosol chamber to infect guinea pigs with tuberculosis. Several batches were exposed over a period of months. By March 2004, a serious problem was detected when three employees, who previously tested negative for tuberculosis, came back with positive tests, or "conversions", indicating that they had been exposed to the agent.

The Madison aerosol chamber was designed by biosafety "experts" at UW-Madison, the same peole who are going to tell us that the public's safety will not be at risk from the lab they want to establish just a block off Regent Street. But listen to this.

In the leaked documents we received, university officials have claimed that they will secure their SARS, avian influenza and tuberculosis-infected monkeys in BioBubbles. BioBubbles are claimed by the manufacturer to be the "most cost effective" way to establish BSL-3 and BSF-4 environments, and they may be, but that doesn't make me feel very safe. Looking that the patent for BioBubbles [US Patent 7335243 - Modular biosafety containment apparatus and system], it seems to be a system designed primarily for emergency use:

[C]urrently available biological containment chambers are often expensive and difficult to retro fit into existing structures especially when one considers the short time periods available for attempting to control potential outbreaks of infectious agents. What are needed are more cost effective and readily adaptable biological containment chambers.... It is contemplated that modular construction provided in some embodiments, allows the user to more rapidly deploy the invention in preexisting spaces.

Keep in mind that Plum Island, the lab in New York that NBAF is intended to replace, essentially fell apart due to lack of adequate maintenance. Madison aerosol cabinets, the foolproof safety system designed by the university were taken off the market because they fall apart. The university has failed to follow federal rules and quidelines regarding Ebola research, genetic engineering of antibiotic resistance, biosafety oversight, and has allowed researchers to experiment with the most deadly diseases ever encountered. And, they have been confused about federal safety rules and the science behind safety analyses. And now they want to import SARS, avian influenza, and tuberculosis into downtown Madison.

Oafs or big fat liars, it's impossible to tell with certainty; what is much easier to say though is that we shouldn't trust either one.

Smart doesn't mean ethical

A fellow here in town named Rick Marolt teaches business at the university. He had the reasonable idea to ask who at the university is responsible for ethical decision-making. Who is it that looks at the influx of data on the mentality of monkeys and determines whether infecting them with terminal diseases, or experimenting on their brains, or what have you, is ethical. He asked the faculty senate, but they said it wasn't their job. He asked Chancellor Martin, and she said it was the animal care and use committee's job, but the animal care and use committee said that their job was to make sure that the experiments comply with the law (which in the case of the sheep decompression and past piglet starvation experiments, they failed to do). Apparently no one at the university wants the responsibility or will accept the responsibility of looking at the issue from a moral or ethical perspective.

The fact that not even the English, history, or math professors can muster the gumption to look critically at their colleagues' work doesn't speak highly of the principles guiding the institution; the culture there is an apparent studied overlooking of other's unethical behavior -- they probably call this academic freedom, but that's the same mindset that allowed Nazi scientists to experiment on Jews. Academia seems to be filled with people whose spines are missing.

I wonder if there are even five people at the university with a spine?