By Brandon Keim In 1970, a graduate philosophy student named Peter Singer happened to meet a fellow student who didn’t eat meat. Even today this is uncommon, but at the time it was radical, and it made Singer pause. “Here I’d been eating meat for 24 years. I was studying ethics. Yet I’d never thought that eating meat might be an ethical problem,” he recalls. “I thought, what does entitle us to treat animals like this? Why is the boundary of our species so important?” Out of the intellectual journey that followed came Animal Liberation, published in 1975 and considered one of the most influential books in modern history. Encyclopedia Britannica called Singer “one of the world’s most widely recognized public intellectuals,” and he and his seminal work are credited with shaping the modern animal rights movement. Now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, Singer is quick to clarify that his arguments are not fundamentally about rights. Rather, they’re about equality: The interests of similar beings deserve similar moral consideration, regardless of the species they belong to, and avoiding pain is a transcendent interest. “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration,” he writes. “Beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life; and mere membership in our own species is not a morally relevant distinction.” © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

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Link ID: 28813 - Posted: 06.07.2023

By Brandon Keim When Lauren Strohacker received her second Covid-19 vaccine dose in the spring of 2021, she rejoiced. It meant she could see her friends again, go to concerts and live with far less fear that an infection might leave her physically or financially devastated. But it became a bittersweet memory. Not long after Ms. Strohacker, an artist based in Knox County, Tenn., returned home from the vaccination site, she read an article about monkeys used in testing Covid vaccines. “I thought, I’m afraid of a stupid needle,” she said. “And these animals have to deal with this all the time.” She reflected on how her newfound freedom, and quite possibly her health, came at the expense of animals suffering or dying to develop the vaccines. Merely being grateful for those animals seemed insufficient; Ms. Strohacker wanted to give something tangible in return. A little online research returned the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s sanctuary fund, which supports the care of retired lab animals. She made a small donation. “To give thanks was the very least I could do,” Ms. Strohacker said. Her gesture embodies a voice that is not often heard in debates about the use of animals in biomedical research. These tend to be polarized between opponents of the research, who claim that it is unethical and the benefits are overstated, and proponents who argue that the benefits are enormous and justify the harms to animals. The advancement of animal-free methods for developing drugs and testing product safety does raise the possibility that, at least in some cases, the use of animals can be avoided. But it will take years for that to happen, and few researchers think the use of animals will cease altogether. So long as animals are used, then, the question remains: What do people owe them? © 2023 The New York Times Company

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Link ID: 28636 - Posted: 01.25.2023

ByDennis Normile After 5 years of planning and debate, China has finally launched its ambitious contribution to neuroscience, the China Brain Project (CBP). Budgeted at 5 billion yuan ($746 million) under the latest 5-year plan, the CBP will likely get additional money under future plans, putting it in the same league as the U.S. Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which awarded $2.4 billion in grants through 2021, and the EU Human Brain Project, budgeted at $1.3 billion. The project “is really on the move,” says one of its architects, neuroscientist Mu-ming Poo, head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s (CAS’s) Institute of Neuroscience (ION). The details of the project remain murky. But China’s researchers “seem to be building on their strengths, which is great,” says neuroscientist Robert Desimone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who collaborates with colleagues in China. The CBP focuses on three broad areas: the neural basis of cognitive functions, diagnosing and treating brain disorders, and brain-inspired computing. Monkey studies will play a key part in the research, and project leaders hope the virtual absence of animal rights activism in China will help lure talent from overseas. (Poo himself studied and worked in the United States for 40 years, including a decade at the University of California, Berkeley, and moved to China full-time in 2009.) Neuroscience was first identified as a priority in China’s 2016 Five-Year Plan, but soon became “a very contentious project,” says Denis Simon, a China science policy expert at Duke University. “There was hefty debate and discussion about how to choose projects, set priorities, and allocate funds,” Simon says. Deliberations dragged on until brain science was again designated as a priority field in the 2021 Five-Year Plan, adopted in March 2021. Funding for the CBP finally started to flow in December 2021, Poo says.

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Link ID: 28483 - Posted: 09.21.2022

By David Grimm In an unprecedented move, members of a confidential group that oversees animal research at the University of Washington (UW) have sued their own school to block the release of their names to an animal rights organization. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has been trying to obtain this information for more than a year, charging that the makeup of the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) violates federal law. But the committee’s members—citing an uptick in animal rights activism at the school, including protests at the homes of individual scientists—say they fear PETA and other animal rights organizations will use their names to target them. “Animal rights groups have created a climate of fear at the university,” says the school’s IACUC chair, Jane Sullivan, who spearheaded the lawsuit. “I’m a huge fan of openness and transparency, but not when it threatens the safety of the members of my committee.” She and others fear PETA’s move is the beginning of a nationwide effort: The advocacy group also wants to name IACUC members at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. Kathy Guillermo, a senior vice president at PETA, says her organization just wants UW's committee to comply with the law. “The IACUC is the last line of defense for animals in laboratories,” she says. But PETA suspects the university’s committee is so biased toward research interests that it’s not fulfilling its federal mandate. “The IACUC members’ supposed fear of releasing their names would appear to be more about hiding a flawed process than anything else.” Every U.S. institution that receives federal money for animal research must have an IACUC with five or more members, including scientists, veterinarians, and at least one nonscientist and one person unaffiliated with the institution. That makeup is supposed to ensure that animals are properly cared for and only necessary experiments take place, according to the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW), which oversees these committees. Nonscientists can include ethicists and clergy members. © 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 28238 - Posted: 03.16.2022

By Sui-Lee Wee Mark Lewis was desperate to find monkeys. Millions of human lives, all over the world, were at stake. Mr. Lewis, the chief executive of Bioqual, was responsible for providing lab monkeys to pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which needed the animals to develop their Covid-19 vaccines. But as the coronavirus swept across the United States last year, there were few of the specially bred monkeys to be found anywhere in the world. Unable to furnish scientists with monkeys, which can cost more than $10,000 each, about a dozen companies were left scrambling for research animals at the height of the pandemic. “We lost work because we couldn’t supply the animals in the time frame,” Mr. Lewis said. The world needs monkeys, whose DNA closely resembles that of humans, to develop Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals. The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain. As new variants of the coronavirus threaten to make the current batch of vaccines obsolete, scientists are racing to find new sources of monkeys, and the United States is reassessing its reliance on China, a rival with its own biotech ambitions. The pandemic has underscored how much China controls the supply of lifesaving goods, including masks and drugs, that the United States needs in a crisis. American scientists have searched private and government-funded facilities in Southeast Asia as well as Mauritius, a tiny island nation off southeast Africa, for stocks of their preferred test subjects, rhesus macaques and cynomolgus macaques, also known as long-tailed macaques. But no country can make up for what China previously supplied. Before the pandemic, China provided over 60 percent of the 33,818 primates, mostly cynomolgus macaques, imported into the United States in 2019, according to analyst estimates based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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Link ID: 27703 - Posted: 02.23.2021

By James Gorman Montessa, a 46-year-old chimpanzee, has been through a lot. The first record of her life is the note that she was purchased from an importer in 1975 for the research colony in New Mexico at the Holloman Air Force Base, when she was about a year old. She’s still there. It’s now called the Alamogordo Primate Facility, and Montessa, who was probably born in the wild and captured for sale, is just one of 39 chimpanzees living in limbo there, all of them the property of the National Institutes of Health. Over the past 45 years, Montessa has been pregnant five times and given birth four times. Publicly available records don’t show much about what kind of experiments were performed on her, but she was involved in a hormone study one year, and in two other years underwent a number of liver biopsies. When Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the N.I.H., decided in 2015 that all federally owned chimps would be permanently retired from research, it seemed that Montessa might get a chance to wander around on the grass at Chimp Haven in Louisiana, the designated and substantially N.I.H.-supported sanctuary. No such luck. The retirement plan had one caveat: Any chimpanzees considered too frail to be moved because of age, illness or both would stay at Alamogordo. They would no longer be subject to experiments, they were supposed to be housed in groups of seven or more, and they would have access to outdoor space and behavioral stimulation (toys, for example). But a year ago, the N.I.H. decided that Montessa and 38 other chimpanzees could not move to Chimp Haven, relying on Alamogordo staff recommendations that the chimps, many with diabetes or heart disease, would suffer and might even die if they were transferred to the sanctuary. © 2020 The New York Times Company

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Link ID: 27507 - Posted: 10.07.2020

By David Grimm Last year marked the 60th anniversary of one of the most influential concepts in lab animal welfare—the three Rs. To promote the humane treatment of laboratory animals, these principles urge scientists to replace animals with new technologies, reduce the number of animals used in experiments, and refine lab protocols to minimize animal suffering. First outlined in the 1959 book, The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, the three Rs have become a cornerstone of lab animal legislation and oversight throughout the world. But as millions of animals continue to be used in biomedical research each year, and new legislation calls on federal agencies to reduce and justify their animal use, some have begun to argue that it’s time to replace the three Rs themselves. “It was an important advance in animal research ethics, but it’s no longer enough,” Tom Beauchamp told attendees last week at a lab animal conference. Beauchamp, an emeritus professor of ethics at Georgetown University, has studied the ethics of animal research for decades. He also co-authored the influential Belmont Report of 1978, which has guided ethical principles for conducting research on human subjects. Beauchamp recently teamed up with David DeGrazia, a bioethicist at George Washington University and a senior research fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), to lay out six principles for the ethical use of lab animals, which would replace the three Rs. The pair published both a scientific article and book on the topic late last year. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 27323 - Posted: 06.26.2020

Abby Olena Nicole Ward, who studies inflammatory skin diseases at Case Western Reserve University, was all set to ship the last six mice in a cohort to a collaborator at the University of Michigan for analysis next week. But then she got word that the University of Michigan would no longer accept any animals, as the university scaled back operations to only essential research to limit the number of people on campus and protect the community from COVID-19. Case Western followed with similar reductions in in-person research activities. “We’re lucky,” Ward says. “What we’ve been told is: don’t start any new experiments, but you’re allowed to continue the experiments that you have ongoing.” That’s not the case everywhere. About three weeks ago, Sarah Gaffen, an immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told her lab members to start shutting down experiments out of concern for their safety as the virus spread. On March 18, that reduction was formalized in a message from administrators at Pitt mandating that non-essential research stop two days later. “We are basically shuttered. We stopped everything except for minimal mouse maintenance,” she says. “We’re not allowed to buy them. We’re not allowed to breed them up.” Bianca Coleman, Gaffen’s lab manager, continues to report to work to care for the mouse colonies. But she is also taking steps to shrink the population, so that if she or the university’s animal care workers get sick, the mice that remain can be supervised by fewer people. Since the cut backs started, she’s reduced the colonies by about 80 cages, which might each have a handful of mice, and still expects to make further reductions of the 300–400 cages she typically oversees, she tells The Scientist in an email. © 1986–2020 The Scientist

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Link ID: 27158 - Posted: 04.01.2020

By James Gorman Among the many lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is how close humans are to the rest of the animal kingdom. We get diseases from other animals, and then we use more animals to figure out how to stop the diseases. As research ramps up treatments and vaccines, animals are crucial to fighting the pandemic. There are different animals at each end of the pandemic, of course. The new disease almost certainly began with a bat virus, scientists agree. That virus probably passed through another animal, perhaps pangolins, on its way to humans. But the animals that scientists will depend on in the lab are mice, first of all, and then perhaps ferrets or hamsters or monkeys. Around the world, different laboratories are racing to breed stocks of mice genetically engineered for research and testing the susceptibility of other animals to infection with the virus that causes Covid-19. There are, of course, many objections to animal testing, particularly when it comes to primates, but researchers are deeply concerned about the hazards to humans of treatments or vaccines that have not been tried on other animals first. No single kind of animal will serve all test purposes and scientists have several criteria for what makes an animal useful in testing therapies and vaccines for effectiveness. First, it must be susceptible to infection, and not all animals are. Despite the quarantining of one dog in Hong Kong, with a “weak positive” test for coronavirus, various health agencies are not taking a single, ambiguous result as evidence for concern. Advisories state there is no evidence yet that pets are susceptible to the disease. © 2020 The New York Times Company

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Link ID: 27125 - Posted: 03.17.2020

By David Grimm More than 3 years after it hosted a workshop on the science and ethics of biomedical studies on monkeys, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week convened another workshop on nonhuman primate research. And much like the previous event, the meeting is drawing sharply divergent reactions from biomedical and animal advocacy groups. “It was a very good look at the opportunities and challenges of doing this type of research,” says Alice Ra’anan, director of government relations and science policy at the American Physiological Society, a group that represents nearly 10,000 scientists, doctors, and veterinarians. It was “an excellent and robust discussion around fostering rigorous research in nonhuman primates,” adds Matthew Bailey, president of that National Association for Biomedical Research. But Emily Trunnell, a research associate at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group, counters that the event was a wasted opportunity to talk about the ethics of using nonhuman primates in the first place. “It was just a bunch of scientists clamoring for more money and more monkeys.” The workshop comes at a time when scientists are using a near-record number of rhesus macaques, marmosets, and other nonhuman primates in biomedical research. The animals, many researchers say, have become increasingly important in revealing how the human brain works and in developing treatments for infectious diseases. There’s been a particular surge in demand for marmosets, which are being genetically engineered to serve as models for autism, Parkinson’s, and other neurological disorders. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 27059 - Posted: 02.21.2020

Alison Abbott The use of animals in scientific research seems to be declining in the European Union, according to statistics gathered by the European Commission. The figures come from the first report on the state of animal research in the bloc since the introduction of tougher regulations 7 years ago. The report — published on 6 February — reviews the impact of an animal-research directive, legislation that was designed to reduce the use of animals in research and minimize their suffering. The directive, which came into effect in 2013, is widely considered to be one of the world’s toughest on animal research. According to the report, 9.39 million animals were used for scientific purposes in 2017 — the most recent year for which data have been collated — compared with 9.59 million in 2015. From 2015 to 2016, however, there was a slight increase, to 9.82 million. The report acknowledges that this prevents the confirmation of a clear decrease. But it concludes that, when compared with figures from before the directive came into force, the numbers suggest “a clear positive development”. In 2017, more than two-thirds of animals were used in basic or applied research (45% and 23%, respectively), and around one-quarter (23%) were involved in the testing of drugs and other chemicals to meet regulatory requirements. Other uses included the routine production of biological agents such as vaccines; teaching; and forensic investigations (see ‘Animals in science’). More than 60% of the animals used in 2017 were mice, 12% were rats, 13% were fish and 6% were birds. Dogs, cats and non-human primates made up just 0.3% of the total. © 2020 Springer Nature Limited

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Link ID: 27039 - Posted: 02.14.2020

By Gretchen Vogel A prominent neuroscientist whose German lab was targeted by animal rights activists is heading to China, where he says he will be freer to pursue his work on macaques and other monkeys. Nikos Logothetis, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, told colleagues last week that the first members of his lab would move in the coming months to a new International Center for Primate Brain Research (ICPBR) in Shanghai, which he will co-direct with neuroscientist Poo Mu-Ming, scientific director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology. Logothetis says he will follow as soon as remaining lab members have finished their projects, likely by late 2020 or early 2021. The Chinese institute is building a new facility in Shanghai’s Songjiang district, which will house as many as 6000 nonhuman primates, including many transgenic monkeys. “Scientifically it’s incredible,” he says. “They have excellent groups working with CRISPR and genetic engineering.” And, he adds, the acceptance of nonhuman primate research by authorities and the public in China is much higher than in Europe. They “know that no other brain (besides that of humans themselves) can be a true help in making progress.” The move is another sign that China’s investment in neuroscience research, especially involving primates, is paying off, says Stefan Treue, a neuroscientist and director of the German Primate Center. “China has made incredible progress in an unbelievably short period of time. That is the positive side of a political system that is able to move very quickly,” he says. “The combination of political will and necessary resources mean that they have put together an impressive collection of neuroscientists.” © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 27000 - Posted: 01.28.2020

Diana Kwon A few years ago, officials at Switzerland’s Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office approached Hanno Würbel, the head of the animal welfare division at the University of Bern, with the task of examining the quality of experimental design in the country’s animal research. Growing public awareness of the reproducibility crisis in science—which has emerged as researchers discover that a large proportion of scientific results cannot be replicated in subsequent experiments—had put pressure on the government authority to examine this issue, Würbel says. “They wanted to know, what is the situation in Switzerland . . . and is there anything that we need to improve?” To address this question, Würbel and his colleagues examined scientific protocols in 1,277 applications for licenses to conduct animal research that were submitted to and approved by the Swiss Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO). Their analysis, published in PLOS Biology in 2016, concluded that most of the experiments described in approved applications lacked scientific rigor. Only a fraction of the protocols included important measures against bias, such as blinding, randomization, or a clear plan for statistical analysis. It’s now one of several studies that have pointed to critical flaws in the way animal experiments are designed—and many researchers argue that these flaws are major contributors to the reproducibility crisis plaguing published pre-clinical research. In 2011, for example, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Bayer reported that they were unable to reproduce the findings from 43 of 67 projects on potential drug targets in oncology, cardiology, and women’s health. Meanwhile, a 2015 PLOS Biology paper reported that more than 50 percent of preclinical research is not reproducible. The latter study’s authors highlighted poor experimental design as one of the main causes of the problem and estimated that, in the United States alone, approximately $28 billion is spent each year on preclinical experiments that cannot be replicated. © 1986–2019 The Scientist.

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Link ID: 26606 - Posted: 09.13.2019

Nell Greenfieldboyce The Environmental Protection Agency says it will aggressively reduce the use of animals in toxicity testing, with a goal of eliminating all routine safety tests on mammals by 2035. Chemicals such as pesticides typically get tested for safety on animals like mice and rats. Researchers have long been trying to instead increase the use of alternative safety tests that rely on lab-grown cells or computer modeling. The EPA's administer, Andrew Wheeler, has now set some specific deadlines to try to speed up that transition. Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules Shots - Health News Federal Watchdog Warns EPA Is Failing To Enforce Lead Paint Abatement Rules In a signed memo made public Tuesday, he's directed the agency to reduce all requests for, and funding of, studies with live mammals by 30 percent by 2025. He says he wants the agency to essentially eliminate all mammal study requests and funding by 2035, with the use of live mammals only allowed after that with special permission. "I really do think that with the lead time that we have in this — 16 years before we completely eliminate animal testing — that we have enough time to come up with alternatives," says Wheeler. He notes that he wrote an op-ed for his college newspaper on the need to reduce animal testing back in 1987. © 2019 npr

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Link ID: 26598 - Posted: 09.11.2019

By Alison Abbott Marco Tamietto was aware that animal rights activists might target him after his team won ethical approval for an experiment in monkeys on blindness. But he hadn’t anticipated the threats of violence. “I found photographs of my face, my mobile phone number, and home address on Facebook posts,” he says, “with messages like: ‘We will find you and kill you.’” Tamietto, a neuroscientist at the University of Turin in Italy, is under police protection. Now, his colleagues may face similar threats. He learned this month that the Italian Ministry of Health, which approved the experiment in October 2018, has released the names and university affiliations of others involved in the study to Lega Anti Vivisezione (LAV), an animal rights group in Rome. “It’s unpleasant that a public office would do such a thing,” says Roberto Caminiti, a neuroscientist at Sapienza University of Rome whose monkey lab was filmed by undercover activists in 2014. “And paradoxical that the ministry that authorized the research would actually expose those doing the research to danger.” Lawyers at the University of Turin and University of Parma—where the monkey experiments will be carried out—say they are considering civil proceedings in relation to the leak of sensitive information and intellectual property associated with the experimental protocols. Animal research regulations in Italy are already the strictest in Europe. Yet in the past few years, activists have pressed their advantage. Tamietto’s case is a sign that they have a sympathetic ear in government: Minister of Health Giulia Grillo, a member of the populist Five Star party and a declared friend of animal rights groups. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

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Link ID: 26529 - Posted: 08.22.2019

Sara Reardon The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be required to reduce its use of non-human primates in research, under a spending bill approved on 8 May by a committee in the US House of Representatives. The bill would direct the NIH “to accelerate efforts to reduce and replace the use of nonhuman primates with alternative research models” in its laboratories. It would apply to the 2020 budget year, which begins on 1 October, 2019. The agency would also be required to produce a report on the number and purpose of primates it uses in research, the amount of pain they feel and a timeline for replacing and retiring the animals. To become law, the bill would need to win approval from the full House, the Senate and President Donald Trump. Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (Democrat, California), who has worked for years to curb and regulate animal research, added the provision to the spending legislation for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NIH’s parent. Roybal-Allard and three other members of Congress requested a bioethical review of experiments involving baby monkeys at an NIH lab in 2014. The review resulted in adjustments to some of the procedures involving the animals. The agency ended those studies in late 2015.

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Link ID: 26223 - Posted: 05.10.2019

Cindy Buckmaster Wasteful, outdated, and unnecessary. These are three of the most common claims voiced by animal rights groups about the use of animals in research. Are they accurate? Not in the least. Countless published papers and medical advancements demonstrate how animal studies lead to medical progress. But despite this reality, public opinion is no longer solidly behind science. Pew Research Center polling data from 2018 showed that only 47 percent of Americans are in favor of the use of animals in scientific research. This compares to 52 percent in 2009. Another recent poll, this time from Gallup, showed slightly more encouraging results. In 2018, 54 percent of respondents said medical testing in animals is morally acceptable. That’s down from 62 percent in 2004. Based on these sobering statistics, it’s abundantly clear that the science community needs to try a new communications approach. For several decades, most research organizations have shied away from sharing anything but the most minimal details about the role of animals in advancing human and veterinary medicine. This decision was historically based in part on security concerns. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a small group of animal extremists targeted individual scientists with harassment, home protests, and even firebombs and arson attacks. Thankfully, those days appear to be behind us. © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist.

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Link ID: 26136 - Posted: 04.13.2019

Diana Kwon When Adriano Aguzzi, a neuropathologist at the University of Zurich, learned that the application to renew his lab’s license for mouse experiments was rejected in December, he was stunned. Aguzzi uses rodents to investigate prions—misfolded proteins that cause fatal neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—and for the last two decades, he has successfully received authorization to conduct studies that involve inoculating animals with prions and monitoring their vital signs as they develop disease. The latest license request was “the same application that has been renewed every three years,” he tells The Scientist. Aguzzi is one of several scientists who say it has become increasingly difficult to get licenses for animal experiments in recent years. Switzerland has some of the strictest animal protection laws in the world, and as a result, the quantity of animals used in research has steadily declined over the years. Between 2008 and 2017, for example, the number dropped by more than 100,000 per year. “What I’ve seen over the past 20 years is that regulations have tightened quite a lot. It requires much more work to write a license application and to get it approved,” says Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigeneticist at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. “Most of the additional requirements are good, because they have optimized the research in terms of animal numbers and forced us to better plan and document our experiments—but some changes are not necessary and have complicated our work.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

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Link ID: 25853 - Posted: 01.10.2019

Alison Abbott A court in Germany has dismissed a high-profile case of alleged animal cruelty brought against neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, less than three weeks before hearings were scheduled to begin. The administrative court in Tübingen announced the decision on 19 December, citing new information in an expert report commissioned by the defence to review the evidence. The report was provided to prosecutors and the court at the beginning of this month. The charge against Logothetis — who is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen — was related to an alleged delay in euthanizing three sick research monkeys. Two other staff members, who have not been publicly named, were also accused of the same charge and have had their cases dismissed. The three people must now pay a small settlement, which is not associated with guilt, by mid-January. The case has roots in 2014, when an undercover animal-welfare activist infiltrated the facilities at the MPI-Biocyb and filmed the handling of some of the monkeys used in research in Logothetis’s lab. The German Animal Welfare Federation, a non-profit animal-rights organization in Bonn, used the footage to make multiple allegations of violations of animal-protection laws to police. In August 2017 a Tübingen judge dismissed all but one of the allegations, which related to the three sick monkeys. Two of the monkeys recovered after treatment, and the third was humanely killed after staff decided that it would not recover. © 2018 Springer Nature Publishing AG

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Link ID: 25820 - Posted: 12.23.2018

By Karin Brulliard Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie defended the agency’s ongoing experiments on dogs Friday and said he would continue to “reauthorize” them, eight months after Congress passed legislation limiting tests that are opposed by a bipartisan cast of lawmakers and several veterans’ groups. Speaking at the National Press Club, Wilkie rejected calls to end research that he said led to the invention in the 1960s of the cardiac pacemaker and the discovery in the late 1990s of a treatment for deadly cardiac arrhythmias. These days, he said, some of the testing is focused on spinal cord injuries. “I love canines,” Wilkie said. “But we have an opportunity to change the lives of men and women who have been terribly hurt. And until somebody tells me that that research does not help in that outcome, then I’ll continue.” Wilkie’s comments drew swift backlash from lawmakers who have criticized the experiments, which occur at three VA locations and are invasive and sometimes fatal to the dogs, as cruel and unnecessary. President Trump in March signed a spending bill that included language restricting such tests, and legislation has been proposed that would end all canine research at VA. “Having sustained catastrophic injuries on the battlefield, which included the loss of both my legs, I am acutely aware of the vital role dogs play in helping troops recover from war’s physical and psychological tolls,” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), an Army veteran and co-sponsor of the legislation. “The VA has not executed what we wanted as intent, which is to bring this to an end in its entirety, so we will keep up the pressure." © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

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Link ID: 25660 - Posted: 11.10.2018