All this is in preface to the topic at hand, a blog post that Maggie at Okay, Fine, Dammit wrote earlier this week. Maggie is an exceptionally good writer and her post reflects her skills. Like any good writer she seeks to convince the reader of a point of view or to take an action. What she wants her reader to do with this post is to think about scientific research involving animals. Certainly there are turns of phrase and particular questions posed that imply that the author frowns upon animal research, but it is certainly not a rant, not a polemic, not a diatribe. Maggie achieves her goal if the stream of comments that follows is any indication – she gets people thinking about animal welfare. The problem is that I fear Maggie is, perhaps unwittingly, supporting the position of and giving fodder to extreme anti-vivisectionists.

Maggie knows that it is unlikely that we’d be having this “conversation” without animal testing. Prior to the golden age of medicine that began with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the anti-bacterial properties of penicillin (itself tested on mice) we would both be well past middle-age and perhaps to sick to be typing away into the interspace. The fact that both Maggie’s kids and my kid woke up this morning healthy and uninfected by crippling diseases like polio, which was eradicated by a vaccine that was originally tested on animals, is testament to the necessity of animal research. Most of the academic research done that involves animals is done on critters like nematodes, fruit flies, mice and rats – hardly the warm fuzzies that you see being abused in anti-research ads. Most of this research is done in the interest of gaining a better understanding of devastating human diseases – cancer, Alzheimers, ALS, diabetes, and so on. I’m not a fan of big pharma I can not and will not attest to what happens in corporate labs. This is where most of the horror stories come from – bunnies blinded by mascara and what not. But, as are most of the facts presented by anti-vivisectionists, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. As Maggie points out, all the drugs that are approved for human use must be tested on animals. Some of these drugs make you erect or put you at ease in social situations, but the vast majority save lives on a daily basis. They save your friends’ lives, your family’s lives and, at some point for most people, your own life.

Research scientists are not in the business of torturing animals. I have yet to meet a research scientist that is flippant about his or her use of research animals. I have yet to meet a scientist who approached the animal testing portion of their job with any more than grim determination of something that had to be done. Animal welfare is governed by strict ethical standards. The animals themselves are treated with as much respect and dignity as possible. Both the RSPCA and ASPCA recognize the need for animal testing and focus their attention on ethical treatment of research animals and the search for alternatives. The fact of the matter is that if there were viable alternatives then most researchers that I know would use them. The only alternative in most cases is to do primary testing on human subjects – most people would not consider that a viable alternative.

Many animal rights groups are completely blinded to these realities in their obsession to eliminate animal testing. Someone wiser than me said that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink. I have no problem with animal rights activists as long as they don’t become like their opinions, as long as they don’t become assholes. An animal rights campaigner becomes an asshole when he stalks and threatens a contractor working on a building that is designed to improve housing conditions for research animals. An animal rights campaigner becomes an asshole when she torches a university building, without regard for whether or not it was occupied in protest of the school’s policy on animal testing. An animal rights campaigner becomes an asshole when he digs up the remains of a Guinea pig farmer’s mother-in-law in some kind of twisted protest against animal testing. I experienced some of this madness first hand. Before a series of court orders silenced protestors that stood outside my building on almost a daily basis, I would have these people hurling abuse at myself and my colleagues. They called us “torturers”, “killers” and “terrorists”. Just a reminder, I work on plants.

So, Maggie, my problem is not with your questions, your qualms or your desire to have people explore a topic that they may not think about enough. I agree entirely, people should be aware of what is happening in animal research labs. My problem is that they are getting junk information and junk science from animal rights extremists. Most animal rights campaigners are earnest, if in my opinion misguided, people with a real concern for animal welfare. Many of them are unknowingly being led by wild-eyed, violent, extremists that have no concern for the truth. They use shock tactics and horrifying images to mislead compassionate people. They have less regard for human life than they do for animal life. They are like climate change deniers, Maggie, they latch on to one or two poorly researched studies that say there is an alternative to animal testing and spout the same crap science over and over. By all means, then, think about animal research but make sure that you have accurate information in hand.

I would encourage people who want to know more about the truths behind animal testing to check out Pro-test and the Research Defense Society.

As a fellow that got a Ph.D. in maize genetics it hurts me to say that the ethanol fuel hype is a boondoggle. In a story of rich irony, one scientist points to ways in which increased ethanol production is beginning to induce environmental consequences worse than those it was supposed to curtail. Because of generous government subsidies, U.S. corn production has risen 19% since 2006. At the same time, soy production has dropped 15% resulting in a near doubling of soy prices. According to William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in a letter to Science this week, this has led to a sharp increase in Amazonian deforestation either directly by clearing for soy farms, or indirectly by pushing ranchers further into the forests. In case anybody is still not clear – ethanol is not the magic bullet to end our fossil fuel crisis.

Finally, another German group have discovered how ants – who live in very close quarters – deal with potentially epidemic diseases. The research, published a couple of weeks ago in Current Biology, demonstrates that ants are pretty clever in the ways that they deal with exposure of the colony to a disease – in this case a fungal parasite. Workers exposed to the parasite were not isolated from other adult ants. In fact exposure to the infected ants provided a beneficial immunity to subsequent infection. Infected ants did stay away from larva and eggs in the brood chambers and their uninfected cohorts took over childcare duties from the sick workers. Just another example of how societies can work well from social insects, who continue to prove that they’re better at this whole civilization thing than we are.

Image credits:

Fungal lasso

Deforestation

Ants

The research itself is pretty exciting. The Japanese group published first, demonstrating that mouse somatic cells could be reprogrammed by overexpressing four genes that had previously been shown to be upregulated in stem cells. The induced pluripotent step cells (iPS) cells looked like and acted like embryonic stem cells. Then the Wisconsin group, headed by James Thomson, found that by expressing the human versions of the same genes in human somatic cells they could induce human iPS cells. Again, these human iPS cells look like and act like embryonic stem cells. There are a few problems with these studies – the frequency of induction is very low, one of the genes that has to be overexpressed to generate iPS cells is also upregulated in cancerous cells and the viral vectors used to deliver the genes in human cells are unacceptable for in vivo use. These results don’t get us anywhere nearer to curing any diseases using stem cells. Nonetheless, these two reports are huge for stem cell biologists – basically it means that human embryos may not need to be destroyed for stem cell therapies eliminating the moral debate that has been going on in the States since George Bush took office.

And this, for me, is what is most interesting about these papers – the political implications. The Bush Administration has got to be sitting back feeling pretty smug about the decision they made a few years ago to restrict funding on stem cell research to existing lines – a decision which massively restricted stem cell research in the States. I guess it was inevitable after seven years that they would bumble into a decision that looks like the right one. The thing is, they did get it right – but not because of wise decision making but dumb luck. The Bushies did not get advice from the science advisor saying that scientists were very close to being able to create stem cells without destroying embryos. Their decision was made over a moral stand based on the president’s religous belief and I won’t make any judgements about the morality or immorality of that decision – not a can of worms that I want to get anywhere near!

What worries me here is this sets a precedent for any wacko fringe group – on the right or left – to cite in a quest for political interference into independent scientific research. With rare exceptions, science works better when it is allowed to explore with freedom, independent of political causes or social mores. These discoveries make what Bush did in controlling stem cell research much, much worse.

It is unlikely that these discoveries will mean the end of research using embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka himself says that there are concerns regarding safety that need to be addressed and embryonic cells will need to be used for the time being. Because stem cell biology is not my area of expertise, I am willing to take his word for it. And that is the kind of logic I would love to hear coming from the mouths of our religious, political and scientific leaders. These disciplines just do not mix well and it is best if all three of them are allowed to operate independently and under their own auspices. It is a bad idea, for example, for a scientist to try and tell a religious leader how to run his church (Dawkins attempts this now and again and illustrates why it is a horrible idea). Likewise, it is a bad idea, and almost always generates bad results (except in cases of dumb luck), for religion or politics (or religious politicians) to tell scientists how to conduct research. I think the best idea is for each of these three groups to keep their own sides of the street clean.