In late December we asked the provocative question “Should Animals Be Considered People?” in exploring the philosophy of legal scholar Steven Wise. Since 1984, Wise has followed a 25-year plan to have animals declared “legal persons” and afforded basic common law rights. As we wrote then, “He hopes to bring the first lawsuit in 2012. A case, he says, will not be hard to find, although the exact plaintiff — circus elephant, research lab primate? — hasn’t been determined.” An adjunct professor at Oregon’s Lewis and Clark Law School, Wise is the founder and president ... Read More
Who Owns Government-Funded Research Papers?
January 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Who owns publicly funded research — and the knowledge that comes from it? Is it the researchers themselves? The taxpayers who make their work possible? The community of academics who volunteer to peer review it? Or the academic journals that package and distribute all of this under respected titles? Maybe this sounds like inside baseball within the already too-insular world of academia. After all, is the public really clamoring to access the contents of the Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography? But there is a big question at play here as the U.S. Congress considers a bill called the ... Read More
Pets, Vets and Stalking Horses
December 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It’s not just on campus research labs that some are feeling the heat brought by increasingly sophisticated efforts to enshrine animal rights. Veterinarians are right on the front lines of animal rights litigation, veterinary ethicist Jerrold Tannenbaum told attendees at a 2010 Society for Neuroscience panel titled “Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the Crosshairs.” That’s because of a trend that started in the 1990s to push for what lawyers would call “non-economic” damages like “emotional distress” or loss of companionship. Pepperdine University law ... Read More
Should Animals Be Considered People?
December 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
This is the second of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community that insists animal research is essential to medical progress and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. In part one, we examine pressure put on the biomedical research community by an increasingly savvy animal-rights effort. On December 19, 1994, animal protection lawyer Steven Wise — a deeply patient man — was frustrated. A decade into his 25-year plan to upend the fundamental legal principle that animals are property or “things” with no ... Read More
Teens Weigh Ethical Animal Research Dilemmas
December 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, 65 Seattle-area high school students spent a day at the University of Washington’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine as part of the 2011 Youth Ethics Summit, co-sponsored with the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR). The institute’s co-director, Dr. C. Anthony Blau, gave an overview of stem cell ethics, medicine, and biomedical research. The students then toured labs and watched beating heart cells in a petri dish. They also worked hands-on with planaria, a non-parasitc flatworm, and Play-Doh to learn about worm regeneration: one worm ... Read More
Animal Research’s Changing Equation
December 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
This is the first of several stories exploring the contentious relationship between the scientific community that insists animal research is essential to medical progress and the animal rights activists working to abolish animal experimentation. In part two, we examine the push to grant animals “personhood.” One morning in late 2010, a few of the 32,000 registered attendees for the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting gathered in a room of the San Diego Convention Center for a panel whose name exemplified their fears: Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the ... Read More
Feds Put Chimp Experiments in Cage
December 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Arguing that in most cases there are better alternatives, the National Institutes of Health announced Thursday it will drastically limit future biomedical research using federally owned chimpanzees. No new awards for research involving chimps will be issued pending a review of some three dozen current studies to see whether they meet the new guidelines, and as many as half may be phased out, NIH director Francis S. Collins told reporters during a news conference. But he left open the possibility of maintaining a population of potential research subjects in the event of an unforeseen future ... Read More
If LSU Cuts Football, Academia Can Panic
December 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
History professor John V. Lombardi, the president of the Louisiana State University System, inevitably takes a long view when asked about the parlous state of research universities in the United States. “You pick your decade and there will be a whole bunch of books on how things are in crisis,” he observes. “You know: an American university in crisis. You could have an American university in crisis book written every 10 years, and they’ll all say the same thing. You know: ‘we’re coming to a dramatic shift in the way in which universities are operated, and they’ll never be the ... Read More
Innovation Must Get in Line for Academic Funding
October 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“I think researchers are really struggling to survive in a world where resources are really scarce and innovation is not always the highest priority,” says Francine Berman, a computer scientist and vice president for research at upstate New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Speaking as part of Miller-McCune.com’s series of interviews on the challenges facing research universities, she explained that the innovation enterprise requires complex scaffolding, access to a pool of adequately paid graduate students, up-to-date equipment and money for things like travel to professional ... Read More
Are Professors Picking the Public’s Pockets?
August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
From his arrival in the U.S. some 25 years ago, Tatsuya Suda deftly cut a path to the upper echelons of academic computer research. Fresh from prestigious Kyoto University, he steadily rose to become a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine, earning a reputation for dynamic theories in computer networking at the dawn of the cell-phone age. He even wed Grammy-winning singer Rita Coolidge. But along this intellectual course, studded with access to valuable discoveries—Suda was one of the first nanotechnology researchers to explore the idea of using biological molecules ... Read More
