OSU President Cans Anthrax Vaccine Research On Primates 230
Wrath0fb0b writes "Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis has abruptly canceled an NIH-funded study on an anthrax vaccine in primates. (The primates would have to be euthanized afterward.) There is suspicion that the decision was meant to appease large donor Madeleine Pickens, the wife of noted huntsman T. Boone Pickens, who had previously pressured the school over animal-rights issues. Scientists counter that the study was approved by the NIH peer-review process, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and subject to the Federal Animal Welfare Act (by virtue of using NIH money) and that the decision by the President has short-circuited months of planning and deliberation on the matter. Hargis has denied being influenced by Pickens and cited 'confidential factors' that he couldn't discuss, telling the faculty council that 'to go through every lurid detail is simply not prudent.' A post on Pickens' blog, on the other hand, obliquely takes credit for the 'great decision,' noting a faculty member's hunch that the 'generous benefactor to OSU and her ties to the Humane Society of the United States may have played a role in the termination of the project.' Meanwhile, the NIH expressed displeasure at the decision, stating, 'NIH fully expects institutions to honor these assurances and commitment to complete NIH supported projects as requested, approved and funded.' Some OSU scientists speculated that the fiasco would make it harder for them to receive NIH funding in the future."
hope he switches to PETA members (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vaccine funding useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah of course, all of those PhDs and researchers at Oklahoma State University have been wasting their time. They should have just asked robinstar1574 on slashdot if it was possible.
Silly them.
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:0, Insightful)
To be fair, they exist because those pesky human rights people stymie medical research even more. Oh, if only we could go back to the good ol' days with things like Unit 731. Why, we would've practically cured cancer by now!
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
NIH should put OSU on a blacklist and not fund anything involving them until OSU provides a valid (as judged by NIH) explanation for why they wasted the time (and money) of NIH.
OSU is of course free to not do so and rely on non-NIH funding. Or there might be a perfectly valid reason that they don't want to disclose publicly that they can provide to NIH.
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:2, Insightful)
Because the human child has a reasonable chance to outgrow this condition.
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:3, Insightful)
Some would argue that discriminating based on arbitrary metrics like "being alive" is wrong, and that a rock is as equally deserving of rights and freedom as any human.
These people are quite reasonably regarded as being batshit insane.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Please see this [slashdot.org].
Then get the fuck off of /. and go to a website where Logic and Reason aren't part of rational debate. Maybe 4chan.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
I've watched a lot of animals die. A lot. In misery. I've held them in my arms. I've found them half-dead, with their intestines hanging out on the sides of roads. I've seen them left at the front door of a Humane Society in boxes on nights when it gets below freezing. I don't like watching animals suffer.
I hate watching people suffer even more.
The problem with the world is that people seem to care more about cute little animals than they do about living, breathing, thinking human beings.
Animal Cruelty is doing horrible things to animals because you enjoy it or you just don't care. Animal Cruelty is shooting a kitten with a twelve gauge. Animal Cruelty is keeping a dog in your back yard tied up to a tree, rarely feeding it, keeping it on such short line it has to sleep in its own filth. Animal Cruelty is torturing small animals for your own amusement.
Animal Testing is conducting experiments on animals that, while they may, and probably will, kill the animal, will save human lives, in part due to the fact that you don't have to do the same test on a human being.
Re:Big problem on various levels (Score:2, Insightful)
the fault in your statement is that you assume that people in OK want science in their state to begin with...
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2009/03/oklahoma_hates_richard_dawkins.php [scienceblogs.com]
Re:IT's really not. (Score:5, Insightful)
From a perfectly rational perspective, allowing, for instance, ten violent criminals to go free probably does more overall harm to society than imprisoning one innocent man. That doesn't mean that it's OK, but it's better than the alternative. You can argue what the threshold should be. Maybe you really think that it would be better to release every imprisoned person in the world, because there are bound to be innocent people among them, but I don't think you'd get much support for that idea.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Animal testing is certainly cruel to the animals involved. Whether that cruelty to animals is justified by the savings in cruelty to humans is a matter of debate.
The argument can also be made, though, that some human beings' lives are more valuable than others. Certainly every society practices this, no matter what beliefs they profess, as some members of every society (e.g., chieftans, priesthood, nobility, aristocrats, "party members") receive a disproportionate allocation of that society's resources. So, we could just go down that route. Already done that [wikipedia.org], of course.
A better argument against animal testing would be that a society that practices cruelty to animals is one step closer to practicing cruelty to its fellow humans. A society that respects animal life, on the other hand, is more likely to respect human life.
Finally, your oft-stated argument that "better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer" is specious. The ten guilty men will almost certainly victimize other innocents, which is why we incarcerate them in the first place. An argument of "better that a guilty man go free than an innocent man suffer" would carry more water.
Re:IT's really not. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a probability that it will make mistakes and punish the innocent, and there is a social cost for that, and there is a cost to setting guilty men free.
The cost of letting a guilty man go free is always less than the cost of punishing the innocent, since unless the crime was completely fabricated, a guilty man went free so that the innocent man could be punished.
Re:Not OSU (Score:2, Insightful)
That's right, the "The" that the OSU people are so fond of was born of political grandstanding and obnoxious pretentiousness. Which is exactly how it's still looked at to this very day...
An animal-rights activist who hunts? (Score:1, Insightful)
...noted huntsman T. Boone Pickens, who had previously pressured the school over animal-rights issues.
Don't huntsmen shoot and kill animals?
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with the world is that people seem to care more about cute little animals than they do about living, breathing, thinking human beings.
Animals are living, breathing, and thinking too. Certainly there are arguments for animal testing, but supposing some sort of human sanctity hardly wins the debate, nor is it a contradiction for humans to be on the side of non-humans. And while being cute and little does not imply that animals should be protected, it also does not imply that they should be stomped on.
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:3, Insightful)
Having been part of animal experiments in the past, this isn't easy subject. I think sometimes the scientific community does get a little impatient with animal rights organizations because they're like Republicans in that anytime you try to find middle ground, they move the center line. It's hard to negotiate with ignorant, closed-mined, intractable people.
Absent on the other side is recognition that the alternative is experimenting on humans. Cell culture experiments will only tell you about toxicity, not other systemic side effects. If a few monkeys lose their lives in the quest to save humans infected with anthrax, I'm okay with that. It's sad and shouldn't be done lightly, but there isn't really any alternative. It would be great if we lived in a world where we didn't have to use animals for food or experimentation, but it's just not the reality.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with the world is that people seem to care more about cute little animals than they do about living, breathing, thinking human beings.
I don't think that many people really prioritize (cute little) animals over human beings. The people you refer to probably want to counterbalance the lack of respect for animal life in our society (i agree that some people are overly zealous in that).
Animal Testing is conducting experiments on animals that, while they may, and probably will, kill the animal, will save human lives, in part due to the fact that you don't have to do the same test on a human being.
I'm not so sure that animal testing invariably saves human lives. Have there been any studies on that?
a rat != a pig != a dog != A boy (Score:5, Insightful)
For one thing, only the boy has any chance of understanding such a philosophically complex concept as "Morality". It is an entirely human construct required for civilization to work. That is it entirely subjective and does not possess a single fixed universal rule appears to escape most people becuase so many of the more popular definitions of what is "Moral" are similar. That is becuase, as a result of cultural evolution, selective pressure on societies favor those that define morality to include concepts such as Don't murder, Don't steal, Don't lie, etc.
The moral value of non-human animals is currently being redefined. I'm of the opinion that raising the moral value of animals is based on misplaced belief that without such value, their suffering is guaranteed and a tendancy for humans to anthropomorphise their pets and extend that compassion to other animals. I work with research and production animals. I frequently think of the behaviors I see in terms of human behavior and human emotional responses even though I know that they are wrong. The motivation and perception of a pig is incredibly different from that of a human, even a child at a similar level of intellectual development. The perfect person to readup on to learn about how fundamentally damaging the "anthropomorphic" view is to our understanding of animals is Temple Grandin.
As to your original snarky remark:
why not experiment on the mentally ill, or children born with severe learning disabilities
A. We do if we are trying to learn about the specific conditions that those individuals represent. You learn about Autism by working with autistic children.
B. More in line with what you probably intended to get a response to, Humans of any kind make horrible research subjects. The diversity within human groups, even within specific ethnic groups, is orders of magnitude greater than that between 2 strains of rats. That is why much of our biomedical and nutritional research is piloted in animals and only replicated in humans if it seems like the research is going somewhere.
I realize that you were probably hoping to get into a flame war with someone over your emotional decision to consider the quality of life for a child and a rat to be equivalent, but you won't get one from me. You can make that argument, I just don't buy it.
That you've used such an obvious and flawed comparison leads me to believe that you probably haven't had an original thought on the topic in your life. You're probably just parroting arguments you've seen others use. Saying so may make me look like a Troll, but it needs to be said. This is an issue that most people argue based on an emotional decision to accept a given viewpoint regardless of what any science may have to say on the matter. The vast majority of those posting have probably never spent more than a half an hour actually reasoning out their position.
I don't pretend to have an answer that will address the concerns of all. However, I can state with a high degree of certainty that those monkey's that were going to be used for the Anthrax study were subjected to far less fear and pain in their life than most humans. I've worked with primates (in a behavior lab) and the regulations for working with and caring for them put the laws governing the rearing of human children to shame.
Much of the modern Animal Rights movement is based on a book by Peter Singer. IIRC, there is a line in there in which he indicates that the use of animals for agricultural or research purposes is acceptable as long as their use for that purpose ends up being a net positive for the individuals involved. However, that point seems to be ignored by many who claim to desire animal rights, but have not bothered to do t
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:4, Insightful)
They're against people having animals as pets but locking up thousands of animals in cages just to be euthanized is ok? PETA is an organization that depends on crazy PR stunts to raise funding; as long as killing thousands of animals is cheaper for them than the alternative they will continue to do so.
Re:Big problem on various levels (Score:1, Insightful)
OK State doesn't really do much NIH-funded research. They're eligible for "Academic Research Enhancement Awards" the grants NIH gives out to encourage research at health-related schools that don't actually do research.
That's fine. Not all universities want to compete in that area. There's plenty of good science that isn't biology, and there's even plenty of good biology that doesn't fall under the interests of NIH. OK State is not at the top of research-centric faculty's list as it is, and welshing on an NIH project isn't likely to change opinions much. And I'm sure Pickens can replace the lost income (if not the lost credibility
It is interesting that in Oklahoma, the #5 beef producer and #8 hog producer, there's a fuss over testing anthrax vaccines on non-human primates. The treatment of food animals and the scale of food animal use is on such a different level than research use that it boggles the mind. To worry over 20 chimps who will be well housed & fed, entertained, and exposed to anthrax, while ignoring 1.8 million cattle branded, castrated, and de-horned without anesthesia, crammed into feedlots and railcars, and finally killed with a bolt through the brain is completely without perspective. It's like worrying over a splinter in the arm that wasn't severed.
Re:hope he switches to PETA members (Score:2, Insightful)
You were doing so well until you made that off-topic trollish comment.
It's a typical liberal rant, calling anything right of Rachel Maddow "radical right", and then pretending that demanding that things be done their way is "bipartisanship". No, getting weak Republicans to vote liberal is not "bipartisanship".
It's hard to negotiate with ignorant, closed-mined, intractable people.
So you admit that liberals refuse to negotiate? Or just that it's hard to do it?
Re:IT's really not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Picking "not guilty" for the guy who committed the crime in no way implies that there'll be a second trial involving some other poor schmuck.
Picking "guilty" for some other poor schmuck directly indicates that there will be no second trial involving the guy who committed the crime.
The alternative must have been worse (Score:3, Insightful)
As one observer noted, most university presidents are not idiots. Any that were in there were Darwinned out during the 1960s and not replaced (my own was replaced at that time by a labor negotiator). Hence, we can assume the alternative was worse.
There's a likely scenario: Clarabelle Pickens drops her support. It's a huge chunk of change. The legislature, strapped, does not replace it. The NIH grants can't come close to covering it, not to mention the fact they're not growing anyway. Result: everything gets cut, including the athletic budget. At this point, for the first time, the alumni get PO'ed and cut their contributions, and all life on earth as we know it comes to an end.
At that point, losing NIH looks like the best of a bad lot, so the tap-dancing begins.