Vivisection, originally defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on living organisms is now commonly used to describe any form of testing on live non-human animals. Anti-vivisection groups often criticize vivisection in the latter definition on the grounds that it is both cruel and a poor means of gathering knowledge that can be applied to our own species.
There is no question that a great deal of cruelty is involved in current vivisection practices, but is there any basis to the poor science accusation? The National Anti-Vivisection Alliance writes:
“The prime reason as to why animal testing cannot be applied to humans is due to the difference in species, genetic make-up and vary in physiology and biology. We simply cannot get the results from one species and apply it to another. Beagle dogs, for example, cannot get heart disease due to being designed for a high intake of meat in their diet due to being solely carnivores, yet heart disease is rife in the human population. Lemon juice, something used commonly, can kill cats as do grapes to dogs.”
The site is certainly correct that we would be ill advised to draw many conclusions about heart disease by studying another species that does not get it, but does this mean there is no knowledge to be garnered by using other species as models?
In the case of diet, other animals tend to make fairly poor models for humans since we have all evolved along different evolutionary paths to fill differing dietary niches. For many other things we might study this is not the case. Many other animals break down alcohol very similarly to the way we do. Why should we not be able to model the breakdown of alcohol in these animals? Many other animals have skin that bruises or burns and bones that break under similar conditions to our own. Why should we not be able to model the effects of trauma and injury on humans in these animals? Many other animals possess a very similar structure in their brains as we possess in the core region of our own. Why should we not be able to learn something about a drug's effect on the core of our brain by studying its effect in these other animals.
The American Anti-Vivisection Society claims, “Nine out of ten drugs that appear promising in animal studies go on to fail in human clinical trials,” as a reason why vivisection cannot be useful. Yet if we look back at the example of using other animals' brains as models for the core of our brain, it will certainly be necessary after this trial to ensure that a drug has no effect on other systems of our brain and that it doesn't have negative consequences on other areas of our body. We haven't learned this from the animal tests, but we still may have gathered valuable information about the way a drug operates in the area of our primary concern.
While many of the experiments currently being conducted we might not see as having any practical and applicable purpose, Carl Sagan makes the point incredibly clear in The Demon Haunted World why we must be careful when criticizing any striving for new knowledge as being without practical value:
Giving money to someone like Maxwell might have seemed like the most absurd encouragement of mere “curiosity-driven” science, and an imprudent judgment for practical legislators. Why grant money now, so nerdish scientists talking incomprehensible gibberish can indulge their hobbies, when there are urgent unmet national needs? From this point of view it's easy to understand the contention that science is just another lobby, another pressure group anxious to keep the grant money rolling in so the scientists don't ever have to do a hard day's work or meet a payroll.
Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communication satellites when he first understood the motion of the moon; Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it “X-rays”; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Rowland and Molina weren't planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.
Members of congress and other political leaders have from time to time found it irresistible to poke fun at seemingly obscure scientific research proposals that the government is asked to fund. Even as bright a senator as William Proxmire, a Harvard graduate, was given to making episodic “Golden Fleece” awards – many commemorating ostensibly useless scientific projects – including SETI. I imagine the same spirit in previous governments – a Mr. Fleming wishes to study bugs in smelly cheese; a Polish woman wishes to sift through tons of Central African ore to find minute quantities of a substance she says will glow in the dark; a Mr. Kepler wishes to hear the songs the planets sing.
We do not know the results that may come from our curious seeking of new knowledge. That said, this doesn't give researchers a blank check to use anyone or anything however they should please. Just imagine how much more we could learn with unrestricted testing on other humans! All the shortcomings and difficulties of tests in other species would be eliminated, yet for some reason modern society has nearly universally condemned the non-consensual medical experiments of Nazi Germany. Many of the animals we currently experiment on suffer much as we would in these experiments. We may require anesthesia, but by no means would we find this small token acceptable as we brutally violated humans in the same ways we do to other animals today. From an ethical perspective, our reckless testing on non-human animals is behind only our consumption of them for the greatest misdeeds of our day in terms of suffering caused.
The guidelines we place on animal testing ought to change to more resemble the ones we currently have in place protecting our fellow humans, but what effect would this have on science?
Prior to sending the first human into space, the United States had launched five different monkeys and a mouse into space between five individual missions. At the time we had little idea what effect the lack of gravity and radiation at high altitude might have on any travellers. Since these animals had all evolved with a similar dependence on gravity and ordinary radiation levels as we had, and we saw no evidence of systems in humans that should be uniquely sensitive to these conditions, these other animals made good sense as models for what might happen to a human in space. We found from these missions that the animals did survive and were able to continue to function in space with no obvious health consequences. What would the United States have done had we not been able to test on these animals? I suspect our first mission would have been to build an airplane similar to the current “Zero G” plane capable of flying in parabolic arcs for up to 30 seconds at a time simulating the weightlessness of space. Next we would have probably designed a mission to launch someone to an altitude where they could experience free fall for roughly 10 or 15 minutes. Finally once all of these had proved to be safe we would attempt a full earth orbit mission.
This would have required additional time and cost for all of the safety precautions we expect in human missions, but by no means would it have prohibited the space race. There may be other experiments that may not be as easy to replace, but we must also be careful not to underestimate our own combined ingenuity when presented with new problems to solve. A good ethical system should be able to weigh the potential harm caused to the subjects against the potential benefit for results. Today our system only begins to do that with human subjects, and comes nowhere close with non-human animals.
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Climategate – 1 Year Later
For those of you not familiar with the Climategate scandal, on the 17th of November, 2009 the servers for the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked, leading to the leak of thousands of private e-mails and other documents to the public and eventually the press. In the days afterward, news outlets like Fox News would describe the e-mails as, “brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims.”
The first statement from the University of East Anglia, where the researchers were employed and of which the Climate Research Unit (CRU) was a part, came a week after the e-mails were initially released. The University expressed at this time that they saw no reason for the resignation of professor Jones and that, if offered, they would not even accept his resignation. The University said it planned to conduct an independent review in order to address data security. Two weeks after the initial release of the e-mails the University announced that professor Jones would step aside from his post during the review, and a couple days later it indicated that a thorough investigation into the content of the e-mails would be included as well to determine whether there was suppression or manipulation of data.
The United Kingdom’s meteorological service, known as the Met office, works with the CRU in order to provide temperature data. The Met office initially stated that the incident was of no concern, but three weeks after the incident they agreed to reevaluate 160 years worth of temperature data and to make a large portion of this data available to the public.
The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, was scheduled to begin on Dec. 7, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a mere three weeks after the initial hacking incident. The Copenhagen Summit was intended to serve as a follow up to the Kyoto protocol, and many had hoped that it would bring specific international agreements to cut emissions. 194 nations sent delegates to the Summit; however, in the midst of the public outcry created in the initial aftermath of the hacking incident, progress was difficult, and the incident may have played a large role in the lack of any binding climate change agreement at the Copenhagen Summit.
On January 22, 2010, the Science and Technology Select Committee of the House of Commons announced a review into whether requests made under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act had been handled properly. The committee invited written responses from all relevant parties and published 55 submissions it had received on the 10th of February including submissions from The University of East Anglia, The Met Office, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Institute of Physics. An oral evidence session was also held before the House of Commons on March 1st. On the 31st of March the Science and Technology Select Committee published its official report on the review announcing that:
“On the accusations relating to Professor Jones's refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA [University of East Anglia], not CRU.”
“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones's alleged attempt to "hide the decline"—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”
Perhaps in its greatest endorsement of the scientists’ reputations, the committee added that, “there is independent verification, through the use of other methodologies and other sources of data, of the results and conclusions of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.”
Despite the harmless nature of the e-mail’s contents upon review, the media outcry surrounding the incident may have had a significant effect on the public’s opinion of climate change. Gallup polls taken in March of 2010 on global warming showed a sharp decline in public confidence and support from the previous poll in March 2009.
Figure 1: Polls of the American public show a significant increase in the number who think global warming is being exaggerated in the news, and a decrease in the number who think global warming has already begun or will begin in the next few years in the aftermath of the Climategate incident.
Science is not without its share of scandals. In science, as with all fields, there will always exist some temptation for individuals to try to get ahead, and sometimes through using methods other than the merit of their accomplishments. Scientific scandals, when discovered, often make large news in the media as can be witnessed in the case of cold fusion or the nanotechnology experiments of Jan Hendrik Schön. Carl Sagan commented on this in his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. “If you examine science in its everyday aspect, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotion, personality, and character. But there’s one facet that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism considered acceptable or even desirable.” Science could not function without this criticism given at every step of the way. “At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track.”
Scientists who are found guilty of falsifying data should absolutely face severe career consequences. Science, however, is not controlled by a single individual. Our knowledge of climate change is supported by a number of independent sources and is constantly being tested and retested worldwide. In science alternative hypotheses can always be presented and tested for their merits, experiments can be repeated, and experiments can yield data that is not congruent with the present theory. Sagan argues that our knowledge is benefited when our current hypotheses are put to the most rigorous tests. “General Relativity is certainly an inadequate description of Nature at the quantum level, but even if that were not the case, even if General Relativity were everywhere and forever valid, what better way of convincing ourselves of its validity than a concerted effort to discover its failings and limitations?”
The attacks on the researchers at the CRU were not attempts to retest their results, test alternate hypotheses, or find areas where their conclusions broke down and could be improved upon. The attacks on the CRU scientists were nothing more than ad hominem attacks attempting to challenge their science without doing the science that would call into question their results.
There is one area in which the researchers could be accused of not living up to the ideal of the scientific method, and that is in refusing to share all of their information with potential skeptics. As stated earlier, science thrives on and should encourage legitimate skepticism, and this means making available the tools and resources to make critiques of the methods being used and the conclusions being drawn. This need for transparency in research was also mentioned by the Science and Technology Select Committee’s report. “We recognise [sic] that some of the e-mails suggest a blunt refusal to share data, even unrestricted data, with others. We acknowledge that Professor Jones must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew—or perceived—were motivated by a desire simply to seek to undermine his work. But Professor Jones's failure to handle helpfully requests for data in a field as important and controversial as climate science was bound to be viewed with suspicion. He was obviously frustrated by other workers in the field trying to "undermine" his work, but his actions were inevitably counterproductive.”
The first statement from the University of East Anglia, where the researchers were employed and of which the Climate Research Unit (CRU) was a part, came a week after the e-mails were initially released. The University expressed at this time that they saw no reason for the resignation of professor Jones and that, if offered, they would not even accept his resignation. The University said it planned to conduct an independent review in order to address data security. Two weeks after the initial release of the e-mails the University announced that professor Jones would step aside from his post during the review, and a couple days later it indicated that a thorough investigation into the content of the e-mails would be included as well to determine whether there was suppression or manipulation of data.
The United Kingdom’s meteorological service, known as the Met office, works with the CRU in order to provide temperature data. The Met office initially stated that the incident was of no concern, but three weeks after the incident they agreed to reevaluate 160 years worth of temperature data and to make a large portion of this data available to the public.
The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, was scheduled to begin on Dec. 7, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a mere three weeks after the initial hacking incident. The Copenhagen Summit was intended to serve as a follow up to the Kyoto protocol, and many had hoped that it would bring specific international agreements to cut emissions. 194 nations sent delegates to the Summit; however, in the midst of the public outcry created in the initial aftermath of the hacking incident, progress was difficult, and the incident may have played a large role in the lack of any binding climate change agreement at the Copenhagen Summit.
On January 22, 2010, the Science and Technology Select Committee of the House of Commons announced a review into whether requests made under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act had been handled properly. The committee invited written responses from all relevant parties and published 55 submissions it had received on the 10th of February including submissions from The University of East Anglia, The Met Office, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Institute of Physics. An oral evidence session was also held before the House of Commons on March 1st. On the 31st of March the Science and Technology Select Committee published its official report on the review announcing that:
“On the accusations relating to Professor Jones's refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA [University of East Anglia], not CRU.”
“In addition, insofar as we have been able to consider accusations of dishonesty—for example, Professor Jones's alleged attempt to "hide the decline"—we consider that there is no case to answer. Within our limited inquiry and the evidence we took, the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact. We have found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus as expressed by Professor Beddington, that ‘global warming is happening [and] that it is induced by human activity’.”
Perhaps in its greatest endorsement of the scientists’ reputations, the committee added that, “there is independent verification, through the use of other methodologies and other sources of data, of the results and conclusions of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.”
Despite the harmless nature of the e-mail’s contents upon review, the media outcry surrounding the incident may have had a significant effect on the public’s opinion of climate change. Gallup polls taken in March of 2010 on global warming showed a sharp decline in public confidence and support from the previous poll in March 2009.
Figure 1: Polls of the American public show a significant increase in the number who think global warming is being exaggerated in the news, and a decrease in the number who think global warming has already begun or will begin in the next few years in the aftermath of the Climategate incident.
Science is not without its share of scandals. In science, as with all fields, there will always exist some temptation for individuals to try to get ahead, and sometimes through using methods other than the merit of their accomplishments. Scientific scandals, when discovered, often make large news in the media as can be witnessed in the case of cold fusion or the nanotechnology experiments of Jan Hendrik Schön. Carl Sagan commented on this in his book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. “If you examine science in its everyday aspect, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotion, personality, and character. But there’s one facet that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism considered acceptable or even desirable.” Science could not function without this criticism given at every step of the way. “At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track.”
Scientists who are found guilty of falsifying data should absolutely face severe career consequences. Science, however, is not controlled by a single individual. Our knowledge of climate change is supported by a number of independent sources and is constantly being tested and retested worldwide. In science alternative hypotheses can always be presented and tested for their merits, experiments can be repeated, and experiments can yield data that is not congruent with the present theory. Sagan argues that our knowledge is benefited when our current hypotheses are put to the most rigorous tests. “General Relativity is certainly an inadequate description of Nature at the quantum level, but even if that were not the case, even if General Relativity were everywhere and forever valid, what better way of convincing ourselves of its validity than a concerted effort to discover its failings and limitations?”
The attacks on the researchers at the CRU were not attempts to retest their results, test alternate hypotheses, or find areas where their conclusions broke down and could be improved upon. The attacks on the CRU scientists were nothing more than ad hominem attacks attempting to challenge their science without doing the science that would call into question their results.
There is one area in which the researchers could be accused of not living up to the ideal of the scientific method, and that is in refusing to share all of their information with potential skeptics. As stated earlier, science thrives on and should encourage legitimate skepticism, and this means making available the tools and resources to make critiques of the methods being used and the conclusions being drawn. This need for transparency in research was also mentioned by the Science and Technology Select Committee’s report. “We recognise [sic] that some of the e-mails suggest a blunt refusal to share data, even unrestricted data, with others. We acknowledge that Professor Jones must have found it frustrating to handle requests for data that he knew—or perceived—were motivated by a desire simply to seek to undermine his work. But Professor Jones's failure to handle helpfully requests for data in a field as important and controversial as climate science was bound to be viewed with suspicion. He was obviously frustrated by other workers in the field trying to "undermine" his work, but his actions were inevitably counterproductive.”
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