Situational Power

This is the seventh time on this blog that I've referred to The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Here, I call attention to Chapter 12, "Investigating Social Dynamics."

Throughout the chapter, author Philip Zimbardo presents the results of a a number of psychological investigations into the propensity of people to go along with the crowd, to comply with authority, and to dismiss their own feelings and even concrete evidence that is directly in front of them.

You should think about the results of this body of work when trying to make sense of what is otherwise rather ridiculous claims made by those who argue that the oversight of experiments on animals is subject to careful ethical considerations.

Before giving an example from Zimbardo that illustrates how malleable our perceptions and beliefs actually are when certain situational influences are at work, I think it worthwhile to mention that even people studying this psychosocial phenomena are themselves at risk of being drawn in.

The first half of The Lucifer Effect is about the experiment conducted by Zimbardo that has come to be known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's not important to this short essay, but very briefly, Zimbardo turned an empty floor of a university building into a mock prison, randomly assigned volunteer male undergrads to role-play either prison guards or prisoners, and then let them "play" prison.

Things very quickly got out of hand, but Zimbardo himself was unable to see it until he invited a colleague to observe his experiment. She was horrified. Zimbardo realized he had fallen victim to the very phenomena he was studying. He writes,

In retrospect, my role transformation from usually compassionate teacher to data-focused researcher to callous prison superintendent was most distressing. I did improper or bizarre things in that new strange role.... I so fully adopted that role it made the prison "work" as well as it did. However, by adopting that role, with its focus on the security and maintenance of "my prison," I failed to appreciate the need to terminate the experiment as soon as the the second prisoner went over the edge. (p 218.)

If someone studying this phenomena is so at risk of falling victim to it, imagine how much more likely it is that it routinely ensnares others without their realizing it. One of the dangers of these social dynamics is that we generally assume that we are immune, its the weak willed other guy who is likely to just go along with the crowd. Zimbardo writes:

I must warn you of a bias you likely possess that might shield you from drawing the right conclusion from all you are about to read. Most of us construct self-enhancing, self-serving, egocentric biases that make us feel special--never ordinary, and certainly "above average." ...

Yet these biases can be maladaptive as well by blinding us to our similarity to others and distancing us from the reality that people just like us behave badly in certain toxic situations. Such biases mean that we don't take basic precautions to avoid the undesired consequences of our behavior, assuming it won't happen to us... In the extreme version of these biases, most people believe that they are less vulnerable to these self-serving biases than other people, even after being taught about them.

The biases Zimbardo is talking about cover a wide spectrum of circumstances, from Nationalism to local team spirit. The situational influences that govern and control what is done to an animal on a college or university campus is an extreme case. One example directly on point discussed by Zimbardo is the research reported in the paper Obedience to authority with an authentic victim. Sheridan, Charles L.; King, Richard G. Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. 1972. Here's the abstract:

Instructed 13 male and 13 female undergraduates to deliver 30 graded shocks to a puppy. The extreme shocks, thought not actually so, were purportedly dangerous and labeled up to 450 v. Ss'[subjects'] levels of obedience were assessed by noting the shock level at which they refused to comply with instructions. Despite the reactions of the puppy to the shock, 54% of the male Ss and 100% of the female Ss threw all switches. The sex difference was statistically reliable. Thus, Ss obeyed authoritatively given commands even when the victim was authentic.

The puppy, standing on an electrified grid, was really being shocked, though at a lower level than shown on the voltage labels the students saw. The shocks were sufficient to make the puppy cry out and jump around. Some of the female students cried as they shocked the puppy with higher and higher voltages. The lesson here is that situational influences can easily make us do things we would otherwise believe we never would or even could.

The reason I got to thinking about all of this again is because of a long comment by UW-Madison associate professor Robert Streiffer during a public "forum" on animal research. I've written about these "forums" before on a number of occasions. Streiffer is a member of the Letters and Sciences Animal Care and Use Committee. He says on his website that his "research includes bioethics (both medical and agricultural), ethical theory, metaethics, and political philosophy, with a focus on ethical and policy issues arising from modern biotechnology."

You can watch the forum here. Streiffer begins speaking at about 45:00.

Here, I'm primarily interested in the remarks he makes beginning at about 50:35. He argues that a "thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process" occurs with regard to experiments on animals. He says that the researchers themselves are likely familiar with only a small part of the process which explains why they give "truncated" justifications for the things they do to animals when asked by a reporter. He argues that this thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process begins with Congress, then is continued by the NIH, then is continued by the university, then by university departments, the lab animal veterinarians and animal care staff, then the animal care and use committees, and then ("of course") the vivisector him or herself is responsible for parts of this thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process. And, because of all these steps along the way, yes indeed, a thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process is in place.

This seems a too convenient way to sidestep responsibility for what is done to an animal in one of the university labs. I questioned his claim at about 1:11:45. Streiffer finishes up his answer at about 1:16:00.

He argued in his prepared remarks that a thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process takes place, and then says in his answer to me that it's biased, but that there isn't too much we can do about it. He also says that in past forums that there has been some limited discussion about the systems in place to try and mitigate those biases -- which he agrees can be financial and caused by group membership. But I don't know of any such system or effort in place. In the end, he seems to just shake it all off and says oh well, what can we do?

Streiffer's claims about there being a thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process isn't very accurate with regard to the topic of and reasons for the forums, the ethics of animal research. In the thoroughgoing process he thinks he sees, the ethics of experiments on animals are not part of the discussion. The process sits squarely and unquestioned on the assumption by everyone in the system that using animals isn't a big deal or worthy of consideration.

When I say that Streiffer thinks he sees something that isn't actually there, I'm not being trite. In fact, research discussed by Zimbardo makes if very clear that situational pressures will make people see things that aren't as they claim them to be if others around them claim to seem them that way. This has been demonstrated in a number of studies. The opinions of those around genuinely change what we beleie we see, even when the change we think we see isn't real.

When challenged, and generally only when challenged, those who experiment on animals pontificate about their goals and high ideals and rail on at length about how much their critics must hate sick babies. But they've been conditioned by their membership in their group to respond like this. The proof that there isn't likely to be any discussion about the costs to animals themselves during Streiffer's imagined thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process is simple to see: essentially everyone along the way eats animals.

The taste of an animal's fried flesh is a significant enough reason to raise and kill them. This is believed by essentially all the decision makers in Streiffer's imagined thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process. The idea that some more meaningful justification is needed prior to approving someone's getting a massive amount of money to poison a bunch of rats, to drill holes in cats' heads, or to raise monkeys without mothers is too silly to believe.

The connection with this and Zimbardo is the apparent consumption of Streiffer's better judgement due to his now extended membership in a group situation that includes most and perhaps all the elements identified by sociologists as reinforcements to the subjugation of independent thought.

Zimbardo summarizes these elements in what he calls "Ten Lessons from the Milgram Studies: Creating Evil Traps for Good People." (See his on-line version here: http://www.prisonexp.org/pdf/powerevil.pdf)

1. Offering an Ideology so that a big lie provides justification for any means to be used to achieve the seemingly desirable, essential goal. Presenting an acceptable justification, or rationale, for engaging in the undesirable action ...

-- Everything we do to animals, no matter how much pain and misery it causes is fully justified because it is for the good of Humanity. Human Exceptionalism.

2. Arranging some form of contractual obligation, verbal or written, to enact the behavior.

3. Giving participants meaningful roles to play [ACUC membership] that carry with them previously learned positive values and response scripts.

4. Presenting basic rules to be followed, that seem to make sense prior to their actual use, but then can be arbitrarily used to justify mindless compliance.

-- All protocols will be approved when every box is appropriately checked and questions are answered in an approved manner.

5. Altering the semantics of the act, the actor, and the action, [from hurting victims to helping children] -- replace reality with desirable rhetoric.

6.Creating opportunities for diffusion of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be responsible...

-- this seems to describe Strieffer's imagined thoroughgoing utilitarian decision-making process.

7. Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, insignificant first step.

-- Just sit in on a few of our meetings.

8. Having successively increasing steps on the pathway be gradual, so that they are hardly noticed as being different from one’s most recent prior action.

9. Changing the nature of the influence authority from initially “Just” and reasonable to “Unjust” and demanding, even irrational, elicits initial compliance and later confusion, but continued obedience.

10. Making the "exit costs" high, and making the process of exiting difficult by allowing usual forms of verbal dissent (that make people feel good about themselves), while insisting on behavioral compliance (“I know you are not that kind of person, just keep doing as I tell you.”)

-- Whistleblowers are frightened and want to remain anonymous; people speak to colleagues or outsiders on the sly and are afraid to be seen by the group as a critic.

I hope people like Robert Streiffer who themselves don't experiment on animals, and thus might not be quite as under the Situation's influence, will take the time to reread, or read for the first time, at least part of the very large body of research that explains to a large degree why otherwise good people so often end up doing really despicable things if ordered or encouraged to do so.

The good news is that some people's actions in the face of toxic situations have shown us that these strong negative influences are not universally able to corrupt everyone all the time.

Dehumanization

I’m just finishing up Phillip Zimbardo’s 2008, New York Times bestseller, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Zimbardo, a boyhood friend and schoolmate of Stanley Milgrim, author of Obedience to Authority, was fairly well-known prior to The Lucifer Effect for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in which normal mentally healthy male college students randomly separated into either “prisoners” or “guards,” almost immediately internalized their roles: “guards” became increasingly abusive and “prisoners” often became obedient to the point of participating in cruel and demeaning tasks designed off-the-cuff by the “guards.”

The SPE, I learned from the book, is but one data point in the body of social psychology research that has looked at the behavior of otherwise normal people who find themselves in situations or working in systems that condone, encourage, or fail to stop behavior that would ordinarily be deemed cruel or monstrous.

The early part of the book is dedicated to a reenactment of the SPE, replete with much transcribed dialog and comment. It is a bit tedious. The middle section of the book is engrossing and provides insight into the characteristics of situations that can and have led to many instances of abuse and widespread atrocity. The latter part of the book is a look at the system and situation that led to the abuses that occurred during the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism.

For anyone with an interest in the factors that lead to the expression of the dark side of human behavior, The Lucifer Effect will be worth your time.

One commonality in many of the instances of abusive behavior, both in the controlled scientific studies and the historic episodes surveyed by Zimbardo is the dehumanization of the enemy, prisoners, or intended victims. Seeing someone as less-than-human apparently invites ill-treatment and even extermination. Zimbardo says repeatedly throughout the book that dehumanization goes far in explaining how and why someone feels motivated and empowered to harm someone else.

I was struck by this observation and Zimbardo’s consistent reliance on it to explain so many people’s abusive and even murderous behavior. Zimbardo does not need to explain to his readers why dehumanization is synonymous with the permission to inflict harm because it is an a priori assumption that hurting and killing non-humans isn’t a very serious matter and that it is even to be expected.

This deep and largely unexamined assumption is the bedrock upon which rest institutional guidelines governing animal care and use.

This goes a long way in explaining why, in an institution like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, animals are treated so poorly, situations that contribute to their detriment and suffering are allowed to continue for so long, why the internal inspections are so cursory and ineffectual, and why job performance related to the quality and efficacy of oversight of animal care and use is of little concern to the administration.

The system itself is intended to exploit to the fullest those who don’t need to be dehumanized because they aren’t human. Given the key role that dehumanization has played in atrocities like the Holocaust, the Rwandan massacres, the Rape of Nanking, the Melai massacre, the hundreds of instances of abuse and murder of prisoners during the War on Terrorism, and so very many others cases, it should come as no surprise that animals are abused so often in situations designed specifically for their systematic exploitation.

What Zimbaro’s and others’ work demonstrates is that those who are generally kind and compassionate easily transform into monsters in the right situation. The people involved in the atrocities named above were not exceptionally bad people; they were and are you and me. The evidence seems clear that our behavior is controlled to an overwhelming degree by the circumstances we find ourselves in. This explains why no one did anything about the boar who was unable to walk without falling down because of the inappropriate and slippery surface in the pen he was being kept in by researchers at UW-Madison. It is the "normal" behavior of those who work around the animals -- created and condoned by the system and situation they find themselves in -- to ignore the animals’ plight.

A recurring argument defending the use of animals is that they were made to be used by us; first, it is sometimes argued, by God, but now through our breeding programs. So not only are they less than human, and thus OK to harm, but additionally, they were made by us to be harmed, plastering on a further layer of justification for the suffering we heap upon them.

In the vernacular of the labs (and in most other industrial settings using animals), animals raised to be used as experimental subjects (or as food or fiber) are termed: purpose-bred. Using purpose-bred animals, it is argued, is less odious than using wild-caught ones. [See for instance: This Monkey Died for You. OHSU animal researchers fire back at their critics. Willamette Week, March 31st, 2010.] Set on a human stage, the weakness and ugliness of this argument becomes clear: would it be less immoral to raise children for the sex trade than to kidnap them off the street?

If dehumanization explains in large part our inhumanity to one another, it isn't difficult to see why people who hurt animals are confused by the arguments and outrage of their critics.

"UW a focus in avian flu controversy"

UW a focus in avian flu controversy
Lauren A. Michael Science Editor. The Daily Cardinal
Sunday, January 22, 2012

SCIENCE

You may or may not have noticed dramatic headlines over the last few weeks regarding research on the deadly avian flu virus. A variety of news sources have led with titles noting a "mutant killer virus" and "science gone wrong."

It can be really hard to distinguish the truth from the drama, especially when a controversy places your university under the media microscope.

You can read the entire piece here.

I'm not sure what to make of this article. It appears to be simple PR spin rather than actual reporting. But the author is a new grad student who is listed as a research assistant trainee at the INSTITUTE FOR MOLECULAR VIROLOGY which leads me to think that she might actually believe what she wrote. If she were in one of the journalism programs, I'd think she was just completing an assignment on fooling the public.

What makes this article sort of interesting is that she is probably just voicing the chatter she's hears where she works. Lab personnel are particularly susceptible to the negative effects of conforming to group norms, obedience to authority, and the other well researched and documented risks of group identification, particularly when there is a perceived in-group and out-group. This phenomena is on full display whenever one takes the time to observe the group behavior of the university's vivisectors and the administrators, staff and faculty associated with their work. (My favorite work on this dark and interesting part of human behavior is Phillip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. 2007. The second half of the book amounts to a survey of many studies and situations that demonstrate the risks of "situational influences.")

As a result of being a part of a group that probably feels somewhat under attack at the moment, and listening to the likely uncritical self-supporting and self-justifying conversations, its little wonder that she is so confused and feels a need to tell her fellow students the "truth." No matter how limited the local news coverage has been, it is a near certainty that the staff and students associated with the virology labs at UW-Madison are keenly aware of what's being reported elsewhere. The author understandably has projected her personal interest onto the rest of the student body. (I doubt that more than a handful of non-biology students even know that there is a storm raging over the work at their university.)

Anyway, I thought I'd take a moment here to look at her statements because they very likely reflect the opinions of those in the labs she believes to be the "true" authorities on the questions surrounding the invention of what may be, so far as humans and perhaps some other mammals and some birds are concerned, the most dangerous virus on the planet.

She says that the world-wide concern is media-induced. She calls it "media-induced fear." But the risk isn't a media contrivance. I would say that the fear is scientist-informed. The earliest alarms seem to have been raised by people like Ian Ramshaw of Canberra's National Centre for Biosecurity (NCB) and Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ebright apparently said early on that the research should never have been conducted in the first place because of the grave public health risks.

The outspoken concern by authoritative scientists -- urging the censoring of the details of this work -- is very unusual. Very unusual too, maybe even unique, is the request from the National Institutes of Health (under the direction of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity) to the world's two premier science journals, Science and Nature, not publish papers detailing how this new version of the bird flu was created. (See Fears grow over lab-bred flu: Scientists call for stricter biosafety measures for dangerous avian-influenza variants. Declan Butler. Nature. 20 December 2011.)

Unlike most local Madison news outlets, reporters in other markets, particularly science reporters, took notice and explained to the public why there is such largely unprecedented concern among scientists about this research.

The author then mentions the potential risks, but dismisses them with a claim about the potential benefits of the research.

Throw in the fact that the H5N1 flu has killed nearly 60% of humans who have contracted it (though only 570 people have been infected worldwide) and you can understand the current media-induced fears-that scientists are providing bioterrorists with instructions to create a virus that would kill more than half of the human population.

Again, that's pretty dramatic. Not only does such a statement ignore the practical limitations of flu infection and laboratory science, but also the more important reasons for performing such research and the role of regulatory measures in preventing such a situation.

But her justification is the mantra of all basic biomedical research -- speculative benefits that rarely come to pass. In this case, it's like saying we ought to invent a doomsday time-bomb so that we can learn how to defuse it. That's nuts, but nutty beliefs are one of the common results of the sort of situational influences examined by Zimbardo.

The author seems unable to see what is in front of her, even when she writes it down. She says: "In an introductory article from Science Insider (of the journal Science), Fouchier is quoted saying that his lab created what is 'probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.'" That seems like a pretty clear statement about the danger given the sometimes high mortality associated with other viruses that are here naturally.

The author has apparently no knowledge of the history of the biosecurity failures in the U.S., abroad, or at her own institution. She says:

Regarding any fears that harmful viral agents could escape from such laboratory spaces, the measures taken by the IIVR represent "the most stringent set of federal guidelines I've ever seen," according to James Tracy, former associate dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, in the On Wisconsin article. Previously, federal research funding agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, would have had to approve Kawaoka's research.

This is an odd statement. A very odd statement. Surely she knows that Kawaoka's lab's most secure space is classified as Bio-Safety Level-3-Agriculture, or just BSL-3-Ag.

A BSL-3-Ag lab is a safer place to handle dangerous pathogens than a a BSL-1 or BSL-2 certified lab. A BSL-3-Ag lb has special requirements because large "loosely" housed animals are used. You can read some of the technical details here.

But as safe and secure as the Kawaoka BSL-3-Ag area is, it's no BSL-4 lab. These two photos from the CDC give some sense of the difference:

Notice that the fellow on the left has the back of his head exposed and is wearing a lab coat over his clothes. The people on the right are more or less in space suits.

James Tracy's comment about a lab at the UW-Madison having "the most stringent set of federal guidelines" that he'd ever seen is silly and either intentionally misleading or based on an absence of knowledge. (Frankly though, I don't think Tracy's comments should be given much weight, regardless of what he says. In my opinion he intentionally mislead the public about what has taken place at the university. Thankfully he's no longer at the university. See my response to a letter to the editor from him here: Millions dead within weeks.

The author provides her readers with a reassuring balm: "With respect to the publication of results, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has been called in, as it has been for similar situations in the past."

Unfortunately, there has only been one other case that could in any way been seen as somewhat similar, and that was the crazy resurrection of the previously extinct 1918 Spanish flu. Read my essay linked to above for more on Kawaoka's involvement in that affair.

But even that insanity is dwarfed by the craziness of creating even deadlier diseases.

If in fact, the author's opinions reflect those of her superiors and virus lab co-workers, then we ought to be concerned about their faith in the system and their failure to take note of the many problems on their own campus regarding biosafety. I suspect, as I said at the start, that her opinions on this matter give us a very good indication of what's being said in the virus labs on campus. That's not cause for comfort.

I'll give Ms. Michael the last word here. She sums up with her expression of faith and pride. She is one of the insiders, proud to be part of the elite club that sees all the current controversy as just so much media-induced nonsense. You can't argue with faith:

While the NSABB has yet to make a decision, there are many factors for audiences to consider in judging for themselves. Either way, UW-Madison's place in such a debate is an example of its prominence in such worldwide research efforts.

Apt Comparisons

People react in various ways when the parallels are pointed out between the horrible things we have done to humans and the horrible things we continue to do to other animals. Some of us shake our heads and lament the sad results of our flat learning curve, others of us bristle at the audacity or insensitivity of comparing an animal’s pain and fear, particularly their death, to the pain, fear, or death of a human.

Sometimes, not infrequently in fact, even people with a real concern for animals sometime express unease with such comparisons and argue that such comparisons shouldn’t be made.

Similar arguments were undoubtedly made in the past when people voiced a concern about the way enslaved blacks were being treated in the South...

It follows, from what has been stated, that it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike; -- a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving; -- not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is, and ought to be the case. John C. Calhoun. Disquisition on Government. 1854. In Slavery Defended: the Views of The Old South. McKitrick, Ed. 1963.

It seems to me that the language of equality has always been an assertion that the un-enfranchised person is morally equivalent to the people in power and deserving the same rights precisely because of their equality.

It is worth some notice too that members of exploited groups are frequently dehumanized and branded as mere animals. (Much space has been devoted to this device by Phillip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. (2007.) For instance, on dehumanization and seeing others as less than humans he writes:

... dehumanization automatically facilitates inhumane actions. When we dehumanize people we transform them into objects and can ignore their demands and pleas...

... The Nazi genocide of the Jews began first by creating ... a national perception of these fellow human beings as inferior forms of animal life...

It seems reasonable to think that humanizing an animal, by pointing out how much he suffers when he is hurt in the same way humans were when they were animalized, might help people to see them in a different, more positive light.

It’s impossible to think much about the matter of comparing the horrible things we have done to humans and the horrible things we continue to do to other animals without calling to mind Marjory Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. (1988.) In her preface to the book, Alice Walker makes it clear that she found the comparisons apt and disturbing. The small volume is filled with parallel images – precisely the sort of images critics of any comparison find particularly worrisome and inappropriate.

The criticisms of making such comparisons seem to have another flaw. As I understand one particular argument, one ought not use any particularly heinous situation as a means of calling attention to the hideousness of another because in doing so one inadvertently diminishes the evil that was visited upon the group that suffered the original harm.

But to me, the opposite is true. One calls attention to the horrors of the Middle Passage when trying to characterize the suffering in a battery cage facility because the now acknowledged and widely-decried impossibly cramped conditions and the stifling atmosphere and resultant suffering of the Africans ought to help us understand why it is wrong to keep chickens in tight, cramped, conditions and having to endure a stifling atmosphere.

It is salt into a wound for some to then hear the kicker – the Middle Passage took six weeks; chickens spend their entire too short lives in such circumstances and suffer crude mutilations as well.

The most common reaction to such comparisons comes from people who see nothing wrong with hurting and killing animals. How dare you compare a chimpanzee to a black, or a Jew to a rat!

But that’s just the point. I am like a rat, and so is every other human, when it comes to suffering and probably to the capacity for joy. I’m not entirely sure about joy in rats though; the rats I’ve known have definitely been excited about favorite foods and items. But I’m very sure about joy and excitement in chimpanzees and dogs. In fact, as I’ve written before, I think dogs have a higher capacity for joy than humans do, but I don’t think it would demean dogs or the experience of the dog tribe to say that some human seemed as happy as one.

The Ethics Underpinning Oversight

It is common to hear from those within the vivisection industry that research with humans is considerably less constrained by regulations than research involving other kinds of animals.

FACT: GOVERNMENT AGENCIES WORLDWIDE MONITOR THE TREATMENT OF RESEARCH ANIMALS.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has set rigorous standards for the use of animals in research that are more stringent than those used for human studies." Our Commitment to Ethical Animal Care and Use. (p 7)
Johnson and Johnson

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Even though the policies for protecting human participants have been strengthened, the requirements for human subjects investigators and IRB members remain less stringent than those of many other regulatory compliance boards, such as those overseeing radiation safety, biosafety, and animal research.

Regulatory Changes Affecting IRBs and Researchers
BY CHRISTINE HANSEN
APS Observer. The American Psychological Society. Sept. 2001.

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Is animal research regulated in any way?

Yes. All animal research is subject to strict federal regulations. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has set forth federal regulations governing the care and use of animals in biomedical research that are considered more extensive than those covering human research subjects. The Animal Welfare Act sets these high standards of care for research animals.

ResearchSaves.org

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If these claims were accurate they might suggest that American society cares less about humans than about other animals; or, if they were accurate, maybe these claims might mean that people experimenting on animals need the law explained to them in much greater detail than do those studying humans.

These claims do not reflect reality. These claims suggest that those within the industry worry about the potential results of the public’s concern and as a result either manufacture misleading claims or else, and probably more likely, have been duped by their industry’s propaganda. Such duping and willful ignorance – “faith” in the eyes of the believer -- or is a common phenomena throughout society and is discussed at length in Phillip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect.

Previous posts and discussions here and elsewhere have addressed the question of whether or not ethics enters into the decision-making process regarding experiments using animals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This discussion has been narrowly focused for the most part on the university’s use of monkeys.

One of the many possible stumbling blocks in this discussion is the meaning of ethics. For some, apparently, ethics means compliance with rules and regulations. For others, like me, ethics in this context is synonymous with morality. When arguing that compliance with rules and regulations assures ethical behavior, it is claimed that ethics is built into the rules. This is sort of true, but it misses the point of the bigger question of whether or not we should use monkeys or other animals in the first place.

If we compare the regulation of the use of humans in biomedical and behavioral research with the regulation of the use of other animals we should be able to draw reasonable fact-based conclusions concerning the way these two enterprises are thought about and controlled.

We can look at the language used in the regulations and in the documents underlying the regulations. We can look at the paperwork required for each, and we can look at what is allowed.

The use of humans and other animals in research in the United States and its territories is regulated by the federal government. The use of humans and the use of other animals are each regulated by different laws and regulations, the differing regulations have different purposes, and the regulations each have different histories.

Human research subjects

Regulations controlling the use of humans grew out of the long history of scientists using humans in ways that they expected could or would harm or kill them. The most well-known and often cited example is the medical research conducted on humans in Nazi Germany. The result was "The Nuremberg Code", a set of ten guidelines written in 1949 by the judges presiding over the “Doctors Trial.”

The Nuremberg Code is a landmark document. It has been called the most important document in the history of the ethics of medical research. It is germane to note that the Nuremberg Code requires experiments on animals prior to experiments on humans but requires no initial consideration concerning the use of animals.

In 1964, the World Medical Association issued its Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, which begins with the clear statement of purpose and intent:

The World Medical Association has developed the as a statement of ethical principles to provide guidance to physicians and other participants in medical research involving human subjects. Medical research involving human subjects includes research on identifiable human material or identifiable data.

The clear unambiguous intent of the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki is the protection of people used in scientific research. The Declaration of Helsinki includes the directive that if appropriate, experiments on animals should proceed human experimentations and that “the welfare of animals used for research must be respected.”

In the United States, the National Research Act of 1974 was passed as a result of the political embarrassment over the disclosure that men had been left untreated and had died as a result in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was halted in 1973.

SUMMARY: On July 12, 1974, the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law, there-by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. One of the charges to the Commission was to identify the basic ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects and to develop guidelines which should be followed to assure that such research is conducted in accordance with those principles.

The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research the produced the Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. “The Belmont Report attempts to summarize the basic ethical principles identified by the Commission in the course of its deliberations.”

In 1981, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration issued regulations based on the Belmont Report. DHHS issued the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 45 (public welfare), Part 46 (protection of human subjects).

In 1991, 45 CFR 46 Protection Of Human Subjects, Subpart A, known as “The Common Rule” was officially adopted by most federal agencies using human research subjects.

“The Common Rule” requires among many other things that an Institutional Review Board (IRB) review, approve, and oversee all research involving humans at each institution:

§46.107 IRB membership.

(a) Each IRB shall have at least five members, with varying backgrounds to promote complete and adequate review of research activities commonly conducted by the institution. The IRB shall be sufficiently qualified through the experience and expertise of its members, and the diversity of the members, including consideration of race, gender, and cultural backgrounds and sensitivity to such issues as community attitudes, to promote respect for its advice and counsel in safeguarding the rights and welfare of human subjects. In addition to possessing the professional competence necessary to review specific research activities, the IRB shall be able to ascertain the acceptability of proposed research in terms of institutional commitments and regulations, applicable law, and standards of professional conduct and practice. The IRB shall therefore include persons knowledgeable in these areas. If an IRB regularly reviews research that involves a vulnerable category of subjects, such as children, prisoners, pregnant women, or handicapped or mentally disabled persons, consideration shall be given to the inclusion of one or more individuals who are knowledgeable about and experienced in working with these subjects.

Repeated throughout the regulatory literature mentioned above is the underlying frequently repeated intent to treat human subjects with respect and to keep their individual safety and dignity paramount in any research design. “The IRB shall be sufficiently qualified through the experience and expertise of its members, ..., to promote respect for its advice and counsel in safeguarding the rights and welfare of human subjects.”

For more on the regulation of human-based research see:

NIH Regulations and Ethical Guidelines

University of Nevada Las Vegas History of Research Ethics


Non-human research subjects

In the United States, laws governing the use of animals emerged directly from the theft of dogs and their sale to research laboratories. The first regulations were intended to protect the rights of pet owners rather than the animals themselves.

A “Legislative History of the Animal Welfare Act” is available on the National Agricultural Library website. It provides a useful bibliography and history.

Compare this summary of the meaning and intent of the laws and regulations governing the use of animals with the passages above regarding the use of humans:

All of these codes are the philosophical foundation for the development of laws that protect animals as property. They limit liability for the owner or for the animal. They set forth rules regarding the theft of animals, the use of animals in the punishment and execution of criminals or traitors, religious sacrifice, and provide for the legal standing of animals. The predominate rationale in these codes is based on the protection of property, the protection of the owner’s investment, and sanctions imposed by society for violating its notions of justice. These factors are not surprising if one considers the importance of animals to the early agricultural societies.

It is difficult to find among the large body of documents included in the “Legislative History of the Animal Welfare Act” any assertions similar to those found throughout the regulatory history of human experimentation.

There is no Belmont Report addressing the use of animals.

United States Code, Title 7, Chapter 54 § 2143 “Standards and certification process for humane handling, care, treatment, and transportation of animals,” creates the regulatory framework that controls the use of animals in laboratories. It also establishes the requirement of an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at each institution, a committee parallel in form to that of the IRB mentioned above:

(b) Research facility Committee; establishment, membership, functions, etc.
(1) The Secretary shall require that each research facility establish at least one Committee. Each Committee shall be appointed by the chief executive officer of each such research facility and shall be composed of not fewer than three members. Such members shall possess sufficient ability to assess animal care, treatment, and practices in experimental research as determined by the needs of the research facility and shall represent society’s concerns regarding the welfare of animal subjects used at such facility.

Notice that “The IRB shall be sufficiently qualified through the experience and expertise of its members, ..., to promote respect for its advice and counsel in safeguarding the rights and welfare of human subjects” while the IACUC “shall represent society’s concerns regarding the welfare of animal subjects.” One committee is charged with protecting the research subjects while the other is charged with representing society’s “concerns.” In practice, the results are grossly disparate.

This is because the Act has an escape clause unlke anything found in the regulations governing human-based research:

(6) (A) Nothing in this chapter—
(i) except as provided in paragraphs [1] (7) of this subsection, shall be construed as authorizing the Secretary to promulgate rules, regulations, or orders with regard to the design, outlines, or guidelines of actual research or experimentation by a research facility as determined by such research facility;
(ii) except as provided [2] subparagraphs (A) and (C)(ii) through (v) of paragraph (3) and paragraph (7) of this subsection, shall be construed as authorizing the Secretary to promulgate rules, regulations, or orders with regard to the performance of actual research or experimentation by a research facility as determined by such research facility; and
(iii) shall authorize the Secretary, during inspection, to interrupt the conduct of actual research or experimentation.

In other words, and in actual practice, anything is allowed to be done to animal subjects so long as it is approved by the IACUC and documented.

National Institutes of Health regulations governing the use of animals in research rely heavily on the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. The Introduction to the Guide makes its purpose clear:

The Guide is applicable only after the decision is made to use animals in research, teaching, or testing. Decisions associated with the need to use animals are not within the purview of the Guide,...

The NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare is charged with ensuring that funded institutions and researchers are in compliance with the Guide. Additionally, NIH has promulgated a number of documents addressing the use of animals in the research it funds. One of these is the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.

The "U.S. Government Principles for the Utilization and Care of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research, and Training" looks superficially like the Nuremberg Code. And, the "Principles" have been offered as evidence by researchers at the UW-Madison that ethical principles are built into the oversight committees’ deliberations. But a glance at each makes clear that one is intended to protect one group of subjects while the other is intended to govern how another group may be imprisoned, harmed, and killed.

If the "Principles" were cited as a guide to the use of humans no one would argue that meaningful ethical deliberation had occurred.

But everything above is academic. The scalpel meets the flesh at the paperwork required by federal law and regulation prior to using either humans or other animals and it is this regulatory burden and the resulting limitations and requisites therein that animal researchers seem to refer to when that they claim to be more regulated than scientists using human subjects.

The form researchers submit to their IRB is the “Application for Initial Review of Research Projects Involving Human Subjects.” The form researchers submit to their IACUC is the “University of Wisconsin - Madison Animal Care and Use Protocol Review Form.”

The Human Subjects form is twenty-one pages long. (The Human Subjects form was recently removed and replaced with a web-based form that is not accessible to the public.)
The Animal Care and Use form is nine pages long.

The Human Subjects form requires a “Submission Cover Sheet for Initial Review and Ongoing Studies,” which is five pages long.
It also requires a one page “Potential Financial Conflict of Interest Assessment Form.”
See too: University of Wisconsin-Madison Health Sciences Institutional Review Boards

Looking at the two forms, it seems clear that one expects the subjects to be seriously harmed and the other expects the subjects to be well protected from harm. The Human Subjects form asks about the length of stay required by subjects; the Animal Care and Use form leaves unsaid that the subjects are incarcerated for their entire lives.

Regulation of human use rests on the idea that the research is voluntary, that the subject can terminate their participation at any time, and that a subject’s best interests must prevail.

In actual practice, regulation of nonhuman use rests on the idea that animals are consumable commodities, that their use is justified by even the most remote and most unlikely possibility that some knowledge will be gained through using them.

All in all, it is difficult to find any evidence that regulations governing research using animals have more than a superficial similarity to the regulations governing research using humans.

It is difficult to find evidence that researchers using animals engage in formal discussions of the ethical issues associated with animal use or that there has ever been discussion and deliberation similar to that underpinning the regulation of human use.

The Plasticity of Our Ethics

Situational influences are so compelling that many of us, most of us perhaps, are unable to resist them. This explains why otherwise reasonably decent people do really horrible things, even things that are widely acknowledged to be atrocities.

Contrary to what you might wish were true, if you take the time to think about it, the people who make the best torturers and death squad leaders aren't deviants. Research has demonstrated that they aren't sadists, and they don't have a predilection for hurting others. If only they had some sort of identifiable mental aberration, we might be able to shield ourselves from the fact that you and I, in the right situation, could feel good about peeling the skin off someone as they screamed and begged for mercy.

To me, the most unsettling thing about our universal weakness is the demonstrated fact that people who are familiar with the phenomena are themselves just as likely to do horrible things when the situation demands it of them and to miss seeing that they have been inadvertently manipulated by the situational influences to condone and/or commit evil acts. Philip Zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment" is a case in point.

The situations that compel participation, compliance, and complicity have some common elements. These elements have been enumerated by a number of social scientists over the past years, particularly since, and as a result of, the behavior of so many people associated with the Nazis.

One of the well known early works was Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, from 1963. In certain situations, doing otherwise horrible things becomes so common place that no one even notices it any longer. It becomes normal behavior. The evil is normalized.

This normalization of evil is a common factor in situations that condone and reward behaviors that would otherwise be immediately recognized as cruel or even criminal.

Another common factor in such situations is that otherwise aberrant behaviors are promoted and condoned by authorities. This is particularly true when the authority is the State. This seems to be related to our propensity to arrange our values in a way that puts the opinions of authority figures ahead of what we believe is right behavior if asked about our ethical beliefs in a neutral setting. This particular common psychological phenomena seems also related to our natural moral development. These characteristics have been looked at carefully by a number of social scientists. See for instance Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority and Lawrence Kohlberg's "Stages of Moral Development."

A third factor is the use of the term war or the designation of a common enemy. The War on Terrorism, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, or common enemies: Communists, socialists, or enemies of the State; these are examples of the sort of branding that can contribute to otherwise decent people doing things that they would never do if not confronted by an apparent emergency or immanent threat.

The influence of the State, its power to declare war and identify the common enemy, to determine what is and isn't legal and moral, has a profound influence over us. In The Nazi Doctors, Robert J. Lifton writes at some length about the doctors who made the selections at Auschwitz. These too were otherwise reasonably decent people. They needed emotional support and reassurance early on to get over their discomfort with being the ones who decided who would die right away and who would live a little while longer. But, evil was the norm, they were at war, they were working for the State, and they were "treating" the nation against a common enemy.

As I was writing this, I heard a news story about New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman receiving a 2013 George Polk Award, a prestigious annual award for journalism, for her article, "The Throwaways." She reported on law enforcement’s unregulated use of young confidential informants in drug cases. The War on Drugs and the situational influences that surround it explain why otherwise reasonably decent people, police officers in this case, are willing to exploit children and force them into dire situations that end up occasionally being fatal encounters with hardened criminals.

I suspect that the law enforcement officials involved are sorry for the children and others they coerce into becoming undercover informants, particularly when they are physically harmed or killed, but hey, sacrifices must be made, we are at war.

When these three elements come together, the likelihood of people doing horrible things increases dramatically. It becomes a near certainty that any ugliness will increase unabated until something revolutionary stops it: a political coup, being defeated in war, or some more powerful outside influence forcing a change.

This last possibility seems to be possible only when the situation is unique to some subunit of some structured hierarchy like a rogue police precinct or a military unit that has lost track of basic norms.

These three elements: the normalization of evil; encouragement, support and reward for the evil acts by the authorities or State; and the designation of a common enemy, in this case disease or imperfect knowledge of biology, have combined synergistically to produce the bureaucratic system -- the situational influence -- that supports, works to expand, and defends any and all uses of animals in publicly-funded scientific research.

Those within the system behave exactly as social scientists would predict most people operating within such a system will behave. Otherwise decent people are compelled to be cruel. Otherwise decent people are compelled to approve the cruelty. Otherwise decent people are compelled to defend the cruelty. And otherwise decent people are compelled to lie, mislead, dissemble, censor, and obfuscate to protect the system and their comrades within the system.

How far removed from the actual act does someone have to be before they can claim some immunity from responsibility?

It seems to me that someone who was a member of the Nazi Party wasn't necessarily complicit in the Holocaust. An employee of the U.S. government is not necessarily responsible for blowing up an Afghani wedding party with a drone attack. But somewhere up the line or off to the side, people not directly involved do bear some responsibility, and the ethical weight of that responsibility seems to increase along with the knowledge of what their employer is doing.

It seems to me also that the more one relies on the spoils of an employer's evil deeds while knowing where the money comes from, the more responsible one becomes. In many, maybe most cases, this responsibility may not carry with it the ability to do anything about the acts, but it does seem to require an overt distancing of oneself from the deeds, either with public comments (comments, not a single comment) or finding other employment. The more one knows, the more one's silence becomes an act of complicity.

So what about university employees and students? Which of them bear some responsibility for the evil things done to animals that has become normalized in the laboratories, the evil things that are done to animals in the name of Science, the War on Disease, the evil things that are sanctioned, condoned, and paid for by their institution and the State?

My observations regarding personal responsibility notwithstanding, the actual case is much different, as so much social science points out. The reality is that the closer one gets to the atrocities, the more one is controlled by the situation; the more one is distanced, the more one will deny a responsibility. The status quo is maintained. And thus, Germans rounded up and killed millions of people they saw as unlike themselves; Stalin massacred millions more; Americans tortured and killed prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and people who claim to be aware of the very serious risks of situational influences get swallowed by the system and don't even know they are being digested. They probably don't even understand this reference to them.

Calories, bias, and ethics

If you are one of the few people in the world who pay attention to both the industry’s claims and the actual results from experiments on animals, then you’ve likely already read something about a recent report from the NIH.

The story was covered in the New York Times and starts this way:

Severe Diet Doesn’t Prolong Life, at Least in Monkeys
By GINA KOLATA
Published: August 29, 2012

For 25 years, the rhesus monkeys were kept semi-starved, lean and hungry. The males’ weights were so low they were the equivalent of a 6-foot-tall man who tipped the scales at just 120 to 133 pounds. The hope was that if the monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe people, their evolutionary cousins, would, too. Some scientists, anticipating such benefits, began severely restricting their own diets.

A 23-year study comparing calorie restricted rhesus monkeys, left, to normally-fed monkeys, has shown that calorie restriction may not increase one's lifespan.

The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.

The article goes on to point out the UW, Madison’s involvement in this research:

Like many other researchers on aging, he had expected an outcome similar to that of a 2009 study from the University of Wisconsin that concluded that caloric restriction did extend monkeys’ life spans.

But even that study had a question mark hanging over it. Its authors had disregarded about half of the deaths among the monkeys they studied, saying they were not related to aging. If they had included all of the deaths, there was no extension of life span in the Wisconsin study, either.

What you might not be aware of if you don’t read the Wisconsin State Journal is just how frequently the university has called attention to its research in this area. Media often swallows whole the reports that are so straightforwardly propaganda – written by spin-doctors whose only reason for writing about the university’s use of animals appears to be, well, propaganda – cultivating the public's misunderstanding and delusion that they themselves planted originally in misleading press releases.

Below, I’ve pasted in a few of the university’s releases over the years regarding its caloric restriction tax-payer-funded gravy train. The university’s spin seems at odds with the third party report in the NYT.

This is a good example of the problem of bias in science. Assuming that the UW, Madison scientists involved actually believed the things they said, their fiddling with the data they used to draw conclusions is the reason for blinding and double blinding in research design. Even knowing the risks of bias, it seems that many, maybe most scientists are unable to keep from seeing success when it simply isn’t there.

This seems to be a situation-based version of a universal human foible. We aren’t good, or even moderately fair judges of anything when the thing that we are trying to judge is something we are involved in more or less directly. We can’t accurately judge even our own morality when we are part of a system that condones and encourages our behavior.

This explains why people will commit atrocities when ordered to so. The work of people like Milgram, Zimbardo, Bandura, and many others has made it exquisitely clear that human endeavors that include opportunities for willfully hurting others will almost always do so unless their is vigorous third-party oversight. The harm done often has the energetic support and cooperation of nearly everyone in the system.

So researchers are unable to fairly draw conclusions from their own data and must blind themselves to many details behind the data if they are to have any hope of fairly judging their own results.

And people who experiment on animals and approve the experiments are also hopelessly biased and can see only pie when they look up at the sky.

The part of all this that is doubly depressing is the plain fact that most of the people who approve experiments on animals are supposed to know the inherent unavoidable bias they bring to their work. But when deciding whether to approve an experiment, they do nothing to avoid their blinding biases. They decide to approve someone’s invasive brain experiments on dogs or cats or monkeys not because there is any evidence that similar experiments have provided some benefit to human patients, but solely because the experiments come with a bucket of money for the institution or else the vivisectors whose experiment they are “considering” for approval, is well-known to them.

The failure to make any effort to avoid bias is unethical and dirties everyone involved.

Anyway, below are snippets from the university’s press releases touting the work that the NIH study now seems to refute.

University Communications
News releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

6/13/06

PHOTO EDITORS: High-resolution images are available at http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/monkeyRC.html

CONTACT: Richard H. Weindruch (608) 263-3503, rhweindr@wisc.edu; Sterling Johnson (608) 256-1901, Ext. 11946, scj@medicine.wisc.edu

WISCONSIN DIET AND AGING STUDY GAINS $7.9 MILLION GRANT

MADISON - A pioneering long-term study of the links between diet and aging in monkeys will continue through 2011 with the help of a new $7.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

First initiated at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989, the study examines the effects of a reduced-calorie diet on the aging process and health of 76 rhesus monkeys. It is one of only two long-term studies of its kind, and during the course of 16 years has shown that a nutritious but reduced-calorie diet has multiple benefits for health and aging.

The project, according to Richard Weindruch, the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health professor who has led the research since 1994, is in a critical phase as the monkeys in the study are entering late middle age, which for rhesus macaques is their early to mid-20s. In captivity, rhesus monkeys can live up to 40 years.

Late middle age, Weindruch notes, is the time of life when a host of age-related conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, cognitive deficits and arthritis, among other things, begin to manifest themselves. This is true, he says, for both monkeys and humans.

"This is a very interesting time in the study," says Weindruch, who also is an investigator at the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital. Because the animals have reached this stage of life, "it's show time for dietary restriction."

At this point in the study, the disparities between the monkeys on a diet reduced in calories by 30 percent and those allowed to eat as much as they wish are clearly evident. "Most importantly, we're starting to see the separation of the survival curves," Weindruch says, noting that 90 percent of the animals who began the study on a reduced diet are still alive, while only 70 percent of the animals allowed to eat freely have survived to this stage.

Of those animals who have died, most have succumbed to the same age-related conditions that kill many humans with colon cancer claiming the most, and diabetes and heart disease also taking a high toll. Says Weindruch: "Whether these trends will continue, time will tell."

The idea that fewer calories can extend lifespan and improve health has a long experimental history. The notion has been tested in animal models ranging from spiders and mice to, more recently, fledgling studies in humans. But the rhesus macaques in the Wisconsin study, according to Weindruch, offer perhaps the best window into a phenomenon that is the only proven dietary way to extend lifespan. Rhesus macaques have much in common with humans, including a similar genetic makeup and susceptibility to many of the diseases and conditions that affect human health.

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University Communications
News releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20, 1999
CONTACT: Richard Weindruch, (608) 256-1901, Ext. 1642, rhweindr@facstaff.wisc.edu

((Editor's note: We've put together a news media resource web page at http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/aging.html for organizations wishing to download high-resolution images to accompany this story.))

$6.75 MILLION TO EXTEND PRIMATE STUDIES OF DIET AND AGING

MADISON - A decade-long study of how diet affects the process of growing old, will continue and be expanded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the help of $6.75 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Begun in 1989 at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center (WRPRC),
the study of rhesus macaques on controlled diets is one of only two such studies in the world. The research, according to Richard Weindruch, a UW-Madison Medical School professor and the lead scientist for the project, is intended to answer a central question of biology: Can aging be held at bay by cutting down on calories?

"Dietary restriction offers a powerful experimental strategy to explore mechanisms of aging because it is the only intervention which has repeatedly and strongly increased maximum life span and retarded the rate of aging in laboratory rodents," said Weindruch. "But the study of calorie restriction and aging in non-human primates is in its infancy, as compared to the body of work done in rodents."

The new grant will enable scientists to continue studies in rhesus macaques, a much-studied and long-lived animal whose genetic and physiological characteristics parallel those of humans. The work is being conducted in several groups of primates whose calorie intake for the past five to 10 years has been reduced by about 30 percent, as well as monkeys whose diets permit them to eat as much as they wish.

The study of rhesus monkeys builds on extensive research in rodents, spiders and other animals that shows life span can be significantly extended and the rate of aging slowed by maintaining a nutritious but restricted diet, according to Weindruch.

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UW-Madison Home
News from UW-Madison

UW-Madison News Releases
University Communications
News releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
7/9/09

PHOTO EDITORS: Images are available for download at http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/monkeyDiet09.html

CONTACT: Richard Weindruch, 608-256-1901, ext. 11642, rhweindr@wisc.edu; Ricki Colman, 608-263-3544, rcolman@primate.wisc.edu; Sterling Johnson, 608-256-1901 ext. 11946, scj@medicine.wisc.edu

REDUCED DIET THWARTS AGING, DISEASE IN MONKEYS

MADISON - The bottom-line message from a decades-long study of monkeys on a restricted diet is simple: Consuming fewer calories leads to a longer, healthier life.

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University Communications
News releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
6/4/08

CONTACT: Tomas Prolla, (608) 265-5204, (608) 556-0175 (cell), taprolla@wisc.edu; Richard Weindruch (608) 256-1901 ext. 11642, (608) 556-0176 (cell), rhweindr@wisc.edu

AGENT IN RED WINE FOUND TO KEEP HEARTS YOUNG

MADISON - How, scientists wonder, do the French get away with a clean bill of heart health despite a diet loaded with saturated fats?

The answer to the so-called "French paradox" may be found in red wine. More specifically, it may reside in small doses of resveratrol, a natural constituent of grapes, pomegranates, red wine and other foods, according to a new study by an international team of researchers.

Writing this week (June 3) in the online, open-access journal Public Library of Science One, the researchers report that low doses of resveratrol in the diet of middle-aged mice has a widespread influence on the genetic levers of aging and may confer special protection on the heart.

Specifically, the researchers found that low doses of resveratrol mimic the effects of what is known as caloric restriction - diets with 20-30 percent fewer calories than a typical diet - that in numerous studies has been shown to extend lifespan and blunt the effects of aging.

"This brings down the dose of resveratrol toward the consumption reality mode," says senior author Richard Weindruch, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of medicine and a researcher at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital. "At the same time, it plugs into the biology of caloric restriction."

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UW-Madison Home
News from UW-Madison

UW-Madison News Releases
University Communications
News releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11/18/10

CONTACT: Tomas A. Prolla, 608-556-0175, taprolla@wisc.edu; John M. Denu, 608-265-1859, jmdenu@wisc.edu

SCIENTISTS FERRET OUT A KEY PATHWAY FOR AGING

MADISON - For decades, scientists have been searching for the fundamental biological secrets of how eating less extends lifespan.

It has been well documented in species ranging from spiders to monkeys that a diet with consistently fewer calories can dramatically slow the process of aging and improve health in old age. But how a reduced diet acts at the most basic level to influence metabolism and physiology to blunt the age-related decline of tissues and cells has remained, for the most part, a mystery.

Now, writing in the current online issue (Nov. 18) of the journal Cell, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues describe a molecular pathway that is a key determinant of the aging process. The finding not only helps explain the cascade of events that contributes to aging, but also provides a rational basis for devising interventions, drugs that may retard aging and contribute to better health in old age.

"We're getting closer and closer to a good understanding of how caloric restriction works," says Tomas A. Prolla, a UW-Madison professor of genetics and a senior author of the new Cell study. "This study is the first direct proof for a mechanism underlying the anti-aging effects we observe under caloric restriction."

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University Communications
News releases

HOLD FOR 5 P.M. EASTERN TIME RELEASE OCTOBER 28, 2002

CONTACT: Tomas Prolla, (608) 265-5204, taprolla@facstaff.wisc.edu; Richard Weindruch, (608) 256-1901, Ext. 11642, rhweindr@.wisc.edu

NOTE TO PHOTO EDITORS: To download high-resolution photos that accompany this story, visit: http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/age.html

EVEN IN MIDDLE AGE, CUTTING CALORIES SLOWS AGING OF THE HEART

MADISON - To remain young at heart, eat less.

That, in short, is the message drawn from research published today, Oct. 28, by a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research group led by UW-Madison genetics Professor Tomas A. Prolla, and Medical School Professor Richard Weindruch, reports the results of a study in which middle-aged mice, put on a calorie-restricted diet, exhibit signs of a remarkable uptick in heart health in old age.

"It looks like caloric restriction just retarded the whole aging process in the heart," said Prolla whose group employed powerful molecular techniques to study nearly 10,000 genes at work in the heart. The work represents the first global analysis of gene expression in the aging heart.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 26, 1999
CONTACT: Tomas A. Prolla (608) 265-5204, taprolla@facstaff.wisc.edu; Richard Weindruch (608) 256-1901, Ext. 1642, rhweindr@facstaff.wisc.edu

(NOTE TO PHOTO EDITORS: High-resolution images of Prolla and Weindruch are available for downloading at: http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/age.html )

STUDY DETAILS GENETIC BASIS OF AGING-- AND HOW IT MIGHT BE DELAYED

MADISON - Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have, for the first time, profiled specific genetic changes during the aging of experimental animals, a discovery that could aid work to extend life span and preserve health.

The work conducted with mice combines a powerful new genetic technique with dietary restriction, the only known way to delay the aging process. The research will be published Friday, Aug. 27, in the journal Science.

The study is a milestone in aging research, providing scientists with an intimate look at the ebb and flow of genetic activity with age, and the roles individual genes play in the process of growing old.

Moreover, it reveals how a low-calorie diet, the only known method of slowing aging in several animal species, works at the most basic level to extend life span and preserve health. Such knowledge, used in concert with new technologies capable of rapidly surveying the activity of thousands of genes at once, promises to accelerate the development of drugs that mimic the age-retarding effects of a low-calorie diet, according to the Wisconsin scientists.

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Vivisectors, a Living Sociological Laboratory

Most government-funded vivisectors are probably fairly smart and have been to college. Those and other characteristics of that group further inform modern thinkers about potential and observable effects of various situational influences on behavior.

History and past research provide an immense body of evidence demonstrating that otherwise normal people otherwise destined to live more or less benign lives, can be easily induced to do bad things to other people. Stanley Milgram showed us that a random person off the street will almost always hurt, sometimes kill, a total stranger simply because someone who they perceived as an authority told them to. Our moral rudders are apparently very flimsy.

If a random person off the street can be so easily made to do the worse things to someone they don't know, we don't need to wonder why or how someone trained to do bad things can do them. But the behavior of vivisectors provides us with something that is not as easily discerned in past research into the causes of cruelty.

Past studies have had to rely on reports from people who committed atrocities after they were widely condemned and stopped. Those people have tended to speak somewhat guardedly. See for instance the interviews of people who were interrogators or members of state-sanctioned death squads in Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities by M. Huggins, M. Haritos-Fatouros, and  P. Zimbardo. (2002).

There are a handful of reports that have sought some understanding of vivisectors' self perceptions and feelings about the things they do. See for instance  The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People by LIA Birke, A. Arluke, and M. Michael. (2007). There are also some books and articles written for the public by vivisectors trying to justify their work, see for instance, Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research, a collection of essays edited by EF Paul and J Paul (2001). And there is a collection of books written by vivisectors vilifying their critics. See for instance The Animal Research War by PM Conn and JV Parker. (2008).

Today, there are on-line sources that provide some of insight into the twists and turns of the vivisection industry's self-justifications. Some of these are produced by lobbying groups and trade organizations trying to promote the use of animals. These are groups like the National Association for Biomedical Research and the Society for Neuroscience. Many universities put up web pages to defend and promote their use of animals as well.

A relatively new source of insight into the beliefs of vivisectors is the on-line presence of some collections of writing by them. One recent example is a defense of experiments on baby monkeys written by University of Wisconsin, Madison vivisector Allyson J. Bennett: "Child health benefits from studies of infant monkeys – Part 1". Bennett's apology is her rebuttal to recent criticism of the use of infant monkeys at UW-Madison and at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a part of the NIH.

Bennett's own work is focused in part on the long-term consequences to monkeys from having been raised in deprived conditions. See for example: Long-term effects of differential early rearing in rhesus macaques: behavioral reactivity in adulthood. Corcoran CA, Pierre PJ, Haddad T, Bice C, Suomi SJ, Grant KA, Friedman DP, Bennett AJ. Dev Psychobiol. 2012. 

It isn't a coincidence that Bennett defends the use of baby monkeys. Bennett and Steven Suomi are frequent collaborators. Stephen Suomi was Harry Harlow's star pupil and deeply involved in imprinting an infamously dark stain on the university's legacy. Suomi is the director of the NIH in-house lab being criticized as a result of records being brought to light by PETA, particularly video recordings of baby monkeys being used in macabre, psychological pulling-the-wings-off-butterflies sorts of experiments, and the vivisectors' shocking (to some!) laughing response to young monkeys' distress.

Bennett's  defense of the use of baby monkeys may be motivated as well by the national criticism that has erupted over the resurrection of maternal deprivation at UW-Madison where Bennett is now currently employed and being paid by taxpayers to study the long term effects on monkeys raised in social isolation.

Bennett defends the use of baby monkeys generally by pointing to their use: because vivisectors use baby monkeys, it must be proper to use them. She provides a list of examples that she believes  justify frightening, physically and psychologically harming, and killing young monkeys; or in her words, "demonstrate how the work contributes to public health," as if, even if true, that could justify the infants' terror, pain, and deaths.

She provides 29 bulleted examples. She was a busy badger.

The majority of them don't amount to anything at all. At all. She simply points to projects that involve hurting and killing young monkeys, more or less saying, wouldn't it be great if this project helps someone someday? Her assertion is illustrative. Her point is exactly the one used to justify every taxpayer-funded project using animals in the U.S. today. Maybe she can be excused for succumbing to her industry's rhetoric.

Bennett points to only five examples that she believes are evidence that experiments using young monkeys have benefited human patients, and therefore are justified and justify all future use of infant monkeys.

1. "Work conducted by Martha Neuringer at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) on visual development established the importance for infant nutrition of two nutrients, taurine and omega-3 fatty acids, and led to the addition of these substances to infant formulas worldwide. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8915371, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19369246)."

Martha Neuringer. I heard a description of her work at a law conference in 1996; it contributed to who I am today. Really briefly, she took infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and raised them on a formula without taurine, did serial brain biopsies on them, and reported that the absence of taurine affected brain development in infant rhesus monkeys. And then she repeated the experiment. And then she did it again -- she had to do something to justify her draws on her taxpayer-funded grant.

Taurine is the most abundant free amino acid in breast milk. Think infants might need it? Neurenger's work is not much different than a demonstration that oxygen is a necessary component of the air children breathe.  Neurenger's work was and continues to be cruel garbage. Even now, she is reporting that monkeys fed nutrient deficient diets suffer long term health consequences. Dietary omega-3 fatty acids modulate large-scale systems organization in the rhesus macaque brain. Grayson DS, Kroenke CD, Neuringer M, Fair DA. J Neurosci. 2014.

2. "Scientists at the CNPRC developed the SIV/rhesus macaque pediatric model of disease, to better understand the pathogenesis of SIV/HIV in neonates and test strategies for immunoprophylaxis and antiviral therapy to prevent infection or slow disease progression. Drug therapies used to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to infant were developed in nonhuman primate models at the CNPRC, and are now being successfully used in many human populations to protect millions of infants from contracting HIV. (http://www.cnprc.ucdavis.edu/koen-van-rompay/)"

Koen van Rompay's university webpage says that: "Dr. Van Rompay was on the forefront of developing HIV treatments at the CNPRC in the 1990s. He helped to develop and test the anti-viral drug tenofovir."

But not so much. SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus was not identified until after HIV the human immunodeficiency virus was described. When scientists studying HIV in vitro discovered an agent that might have value in treating AIDS, monkeys researchers were quick to try it out on monkeys intentionally infected with some version of SIV, a different disease in a different species. Research using monkeys has never resulted in advancements in treating HIV. At best, primate vivisectors have demonstrated that some methods of preventing HIV in humans can sometimes be effective in preventing SIV in monkeys. Big whoop.

3. "Eliot Spindel at the ONPRC has shown that large doses of Vitamin C can protect developing lungs from the damage caused when mothers smoke. This work has been duplicated in clinical trials. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15709053)"

It is true that Spindel is involved in a clinical trial of using vitamin C in pregnant women who smoke to see whether it might ameliorate some of the known deleterious effects of nicotine to developing fetuses. And, it is true that Spindel has given pregnant monkeys nicotine, or as he explains, "Nicotine was delivered by continuous infusion using subcutaneously implanted osmotic minipumps," (what mother smokes 24/7?) Oddly though, and I wonder if the women in the clinical trial know this, he reported that in the pregnant monkeys being infused with nicotine, "Vitamin C substantially increased the nicotine concentration in the amniotic fluid." See: Effects of prenatal nicotine exposure on primate brain development and attempted amelioration with supplemental choline or vitamin C: neurotransmitter receptors, cell signaling and cell development biomarkers in fetal brain regions of rhesus monkeys. Slotkin TA, Seidler FJ, Qiao D, Aldridge JE, Tate CA, Cousins MM, Proskocil BJ, Sekhon HS, Clark JA, Lupo SL, Spindel ER. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2005.

I'm no pediatrician, but I'll wager that increased nicotine concentration in the amniotic fluid isn't good for a developing baby of any species.

4. "WNPRC scientists and surgeons at UW Hospital successfully tested a new compound, mycophenolate mofetil, in combination with other drugs in monkeys and other animals, and then in human patients in the 1990s. Their work has saved the lives of patients needing kidney or other organ transplants. These new therapies have also kept patients with chronic kidney diseases, including lupus nephritis, which strikes many children and teens, from needing transplants. (Hans Sollinger, Folkert Belzer, Stuart Knechtle, others.) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8680054, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9706169, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8821838"

Maybe it was getting late when Bennett was writing this and she simply forgot her theme: the benefits to children from experimenting on baby monkeys, because she didn't provide any evidence to support her assertion; there probably isn't any

It is an easily demonstrated fact that mycophenolate mofetil was tested on animals, I don't know of any drugs that haven't been. Mycophenolate mofetil was tested in rats, mice, and dogs before it was tried on humans, and I don't think they were pups or puppies.

Here's a passage from a paper reporting on the first clinical trial:

RS-61443 synthesized by Dr. Peter Nelson(Syntex Corporation, Palo Alto, CA)was found to have improved bioavailability as compared with mycophenolic acid. In vivo, the drug blocks proliferative responses of T and B lymphocytes' and inhibits antibody formation and the generation of cytotoxic T-cells. In vivo, monotherapy with RS-61443 was shown to prolong the survival of heart allografts in rats and islet allograft survival in mice. When combined with low doses of cyclosporine A (5mg/kg)and prednisone (0.1 mg/kg), RS-61443 significantly prolonged the survival of renal allografts in mongrel dogs. The first clinical trials with RS-61443 were conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Alabama-Birmingham. The purpose of this study was to test the safety and tolerance in patients receiving primary cadaver kidneys. RS-61443 (mycophenolate mofetil). A multicenter study for refractory kidney transplant rejection. Sollinger HW, Belzer FO, Deierhoi MH, Diethelm AG, Gonwa TA, Kauffman RS, Klintmalm GB, McDiarmid SV, Roberts J, Rosenthal JT, et al. Ann Surg. 1992.

(An aside) "Recent findings from nonhuman primates studied by Ned Kalin at the WNPRC suggest that an overactive core circuit in the brain, and its interaction with other specialized circuits, accounts for the variability in symptoms shown by patients with severe anxiety. The ability to identify brain mechanisms underlying the risk during childhood for developing anxiety and depression is critical for establishing novel early-life interventions aimed at preventing the chronic and debilitating outcomes associated with these common illnesses. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23538303, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23071305)"

I just had to include this here. Notice that she cites nothing from Kalin's decades of experiments on young monkeys  that have benefited children. Nothing. It's just the same old song and dance; his work has suggested this or that, but has led to nothing. Nothing. Literally millions of taxpayer dollars and immense suffering. He's hurting and killing baby monkeys, so it must be good, it must be important. This is a stellar example of the mindset of someone doing and trying to defend evil behavior. The simple facts are ignored; excuses are made; nothing but hubris. And it's easy to understand why someone becomes such a cork head, the research into this sort of blind evil behavior has been consistent. Most of us would succumb; people are weak and almost always go along when an authority figure -- a king, general, God, NIH, a man in a white coat -- tells them to do something, no matter how odious. And, the propensity to act so badly is reinforced when the authority figure awards you for your work and holds you up as an example of the good. Most of us will do anything and believe anything we are told to believe. The research on this is unequivocal. Unequivocal.

And since I have for a moment stepped aside from looking at Bennett's claims actual benefit, I deviate a bit further and call your attention to an implication of her apparent inability to locate an example of actual benefit to children or adults from Kalin's experiments.

A few years ago, Kalin's regular collaborator and co-author Richard Davidson was speaking at a local book store. Most of the audience was there to adore him and moon over his close association with the Dalai Lama (there's an example of screwing with a child's early development). But I and a few friends had other questions in mind.

Put on the spot to point to one single benefit to human patients that have resulted from his and Kalin's decades of cruelty, the only thing he could come up with was to say that there was a Phase I clinical trial underway to test something -- he wouldn't say what -- that had come out of the experiments. If he wasn't lying, and there is absolutely no reason to think he wasn't -- then whatever it was must have been an abject failure.

5. "The first pluripotent stem cell derived clinical trials to treat childhood blindness are now underway, using stem cell technologies discovered using monkeys first, then humans, by WNPRC scientist James Thomson in the 1990s-2000s. (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=juvenile+macular+degeneration+stem+cell&Search=Search, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18029452, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9804556, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7544005

If clinical trials are underway to treat macular degeneration using stem cells, why is Martha Neuringer, blasted in number 1 above, conducting stem cell experiments on the eyes of rats and monkeys and claiming that her work will lead to some new treatment for macular degeneration?

As far as Thompson's work on the isolation and culture of pluripotent stem cells is concerned, he certainly didn't need monkeys, he could have used any muticellular organism at its very early stages of development. He used monkey blastocysts because they were readily available. He reported his isolation of an embryonic cell line in monkeys in 1995 and then moved to the use of human cells almost immediately. The notion that the first pluripotent stem cell derived clinical trials to treat childhood blindness are now underway because of Thomson's very few monkey cell experiments is farfetched and simply ignores his publication history. And, unless you want to call a blastocyst a baby, this too is far off the mark Bennett claims to be addressing.

And that's it. That's part and parcel of the "benefits" Bennett has been able to identify as a result of experiments on infant monkeys. 

So, looking at Bennett's efforts to defend the use of baby monkeys in harmful experimentation we gain further evidence and insight into the effects of situational influences on behavior. It may have been Peter Singer who pointed out the conditioned ethical blindness of vivisectors. It can work like this: A student is confronted with a science lesson in school that involves hurting and killing and animal or even dissecting an already dead animals. When they voice their concern, the teacher, the authority figure, consoles and encourages them, saying something along the lines of, "No one likes to hurt animals, but sometimes in science there is no other choice."  

Most of us in that situation, as research readily demonstrates, will be swayed by the weight of the authority's opinion. Students who find biology interesting and choose to follow a course that leads to a life science education in college will have many reinforcing experiences, and at every turn, if they voice some reticence, they will be consoled or challenged by the current authority with the admonition that science sometimes requires scientists to make tough decisions.  

By the time they get to graduate school and land a job in some scientist's lab, they have been thoroughly indoctrinated and are surrounded by others who have been through similar conditioning. They see around them scientists being honored by their institutions, media, authoritative profession organizations, and receiving lavish monetary rewards for their experiments on animals. It becomes ever more unlikely that they will be able to think independently. Additional factors come into play as well. Because medical research is often cast as a war against this or that malady, ethical constraints are further weakened because we think war can necessitate actions that would be unthinkable in times of peace. Additionally, vivisectors rightly feel that they are under attack from people like me. Having a common enemy lends itself to being less than critical about the things their fellow-victimized colleagues are doing, and so little to no self-criticism or questioning of the ethical premise is tolerated. I have an acquaintance who was drummed out of a primate lab because she stopped and spoke with people protesting outside the lab and then asked her laboratory colleagues what they thought about the protestors' concerns. A current example of the matter-of-fact acceptance of their peers' opinions on the ethics and value of animal experimentation is UW-Madison's promotion of Bennett's essay (near the bottom of the right hand column.)

Because of the conditioning and the situational influences on their behavior, vivisectors' ethical positions and confused arguments to support their positions and beliefs are understandable and largely predictable. I believe that they, as a group, offer those who have an interest in the roots of evil behavior, a living laboratory which could further our understanding of a phenomena that has most often had to be examined retrospectively.