Blogging About Critters Since 2007

Thursday, October 8, 2009

What if the Public Truly Probed Animal Research Funding?

This is a great short column by Martha Rosenberg. It's in response to the arrest of Yale animal technician Raymond Clark for the murder of Annie Le, but makes some important points about animal research.
There's a reason for the security that keeps Beagle burn videos from surfacing like egg farm videos. Animal research is too lucrative for the university/government/pharma complex to risk macaques on YouTube and the public judging the asinine and repetitive experiments many researchers know they live on.

Do you think Northwestern University--or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--want to acknowledge that every year from l978 through l985 Associate Professor Dr. Charles Larson fused monkeys' necks to their skulls and deprived them food five days per week to make them cry out in a specific manner according to Concerned Citizens for Ethical Research? At a tax payer cost of $472,370? To "gain insights into some of the neurological disorders affecting vocalization?" Even as his colleagues scoffed?

...No, for animal researchers the bigger fear from Le's murder than technicians like Clark is the public seeing the heaps of unsupervised government pork behind their Plexiglas curtain. No wonder the research community wraps a "saves lives" cloak around its work whether falsified journal articles or Larson's "speech" studies.

It keeps the public from saying YOU'RE FUNDING WHAT? For how many years? With what results? about its tax dollars.

1 comment:

Andrew said...

Ana,

I would not be surprised if there was indeed quite a bit going on behind the scenes with regard to various projects which would shock the general public if they were publicly exposed - it's hard to know what's really going on sometimes.

But I must say that this type of research sounds pretty damn appalling. I do appreciate the need to learn more about neurological disorders and that it is an important area of research, but surely there are better ways than this.

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