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Neuroscientist Halts Research to Stop Extremists
FleaPlus writes "UCLA neuroscience professor Dario Ringach, known for his contributions to our understanding of how the visual system processes information, has been forced to give up his experiments by the actions of animal-rights extremists. Although he and his family had endured harassment and vandalization by animal-rights activists for years, Ringach reconsidered after extremists tried to firebomb a colleague's home and accidentally left their Molotov cocktail on an elderly neighbor's doorstep. Ringach sent an email to animal activist groups saying, 'You win... please don't bother my family anymore.'"
It's interesting to note that the LA Times article calls it a crude explosive (which could be anything from firecracker to pipe bomb) while the other article calls it a Molotov Cocktail (which IS crude, but more specific). All that aside, obviously these people (if they did it) are complete and utter morons. One does not light a Molotov Cocktail and place it on a porch. One lights a Molotov Cocktail and throws it through a window (or air vent on a Soviet tank, which was the device's original purpose). The glass container breaks, spraying flammable liquid all over the place which then ignites, burning the place down. THAT is how one firebombs a house correctly.
I happen to work in an academic department where some of the faculty conduct animal research. For these people, you will notice such details as their name is not posted anywhere in the hallways and there are no directions to their office or lab anywhere. And believe me, there is nothing particularly interesting or scandalous about what they do. The university also has oversight bodies and there are lots of strict regulations they have to comply with (a few decades ago the situation was much more lax). However, the animal rights people do not really care what the research is for or the details of how it is conducted. They harrass people mostly based on the type of animal that they use for experimentation. For example it used to be that cats were very popular lab animal, but that practice has since ceased completely because of how much trouble it caused with activists. Currently monkeys are the most controversial animal. One of the tactics for getting out of the way of the animal people is to use obscure animals that people are not very familiar with, for example ferrets, because they just don't invoke the same emotional response (regardless of how intelligent they may be).
The interesting thing is that ALF, etc have never actually hurt anybody (at least there are no police records indicating they have)
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The thing is, the Animal Liberation Front isn't really a "proper" organization. Rather, just about anybody who engages in some sort of "direct action" that doesn't involve violence can claim that it was done by the ALF. Although the ALF has a system of covert cells which engages in illicit activity, you don't necessarily be part of such a cell to do something and claim it in the name of the ALF. On a similar note, the ALF tends to disclaim association with any activity which happens to be violent.
That said, some people have been physically hurt by extremists who at least tried to claim they were associated with the ALF. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_Fr
In 1999, British documentary-filmmaker Graham Hall, himself an animal-rights activist, told the police and the Mail on Sunday [9] that he was kidnapped and branded with the letters "ALF" across his back after filming ALF activists, including Robin Webb, "boasting about bomb making and choosing sites for violent attacks." [10] His film was shown on Channel 4 in the UK during the 1998 hunger strike of Barry Horne. Hall said he was taken by several masked men, one of whose voices he said he recognized from a previous gathering of activists, to an unknown house, then was tied to a chair for several hours and branded.
No direct action that has involved violence may be claimed on behalf of the ALF, although ALF spokespersons won't condemn the use of violence by people who have previously acted in the name of the ALF. When David Blenkinsop and two others assaulted HLS director Brian Cass outside his home with pick-axe handles, ALF founder Ronnie Lee said: "He has got off lightly. I have no sympathy for him," [17] and Robin Webb said: "The Animal Liberation Front has always had a policy of not harming life, but while it would not condone what took place, it understands the anger and frustration that leads people to take this kind of action."
What I don't get is what exactly the research was. UCLA is a public institution right? So if they aren't telling, chances are that it really is something pretty upsetting -or- it's being paid for by a drug company / the gov't, in which case you can be really sure it's not something respectable.
You can see Ringach's scholarly publications for yourself:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ringach
Each of his experimental papers includes a methodology section which describes the procedures he used. The papers also say who the funding sources were for the research.
That's a question only UCLA and the researchers can really answer, by providing us with the information about what the research was. They refuse to do so.
In all likelihood, it's because they don't want to give activists some convenient soundbite they can distort.
In any case dude, it's not like Ringach's research is some big secret. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, all you need to do is a Google Scholar search. Ringach's experiments are pretty much standard visual electrophysiology, where you record from neurons in visual cortex while you present stimuli to an animal. It's the same basic technique which Hubel and Wiesel got the 1981 Nobel Prize.
What makes Ringach's research unique is (was?) the sorts of images he presented to the animals, and some clever data analysis.
Wow, I didn't know they made dictionaries with only one definition per term! Here's what you forgot to mention when you were making the semantic argument against torturing animals (using just def 1 for the noun form that wasn't even used, sheesh):
noun-
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.
verb-
1. To subject (a person or an animal) to torture.
2. To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another). See synonyms at afflict.
3. To twist or turn abnormally; distort: torture a rule to make it fit a case. (cite: online AHD)
So when the GP said (quoting) "torturing monkeys" -- a valid moral concern, assuming that afflicting physical or mental pain to sensate/sentient beings is, you know, undesirable -- your entire post could have been just this: "Also, primates in these studies are under anesthesia, so they don't feel pain." That would have been sufficient to rebut his claim with out all the pandering bullshit.
So -- when I got all my wisdom teeth out and had stiches in my jaw-muscles I'll honestly say the next few weeks of trying to eat were... torture. I agree though, having some warts removed might not be torture.
In short, you can torture people and animals without punishment, coercion or sadism in mind! Cheers!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
The "Methods" section only says the methods are the same as in "Ringach DL, Hawken MJ, and Shapley R. Dynamics of orientation tuning in macaque primary visual cortex.", which I did not find on-line.
... [math equation]. Circular variance is a measure of orientation bandwidth which is bounded between zero and one. Cells not tuned for orientation have a circular variance of one. Cells that are very sharply tuned have circular variance values close to zero.
Nature generally requires an institutional subscription to read their papers (which I'll admit is pretty lame). Here's the methods section from the Ringach, Hawken, & Shapley (Nature, 1996) paper:
(It doesn't want to copy-paste, so I'm typing the text by hand. My apologies for any typos.)
Acute experiments were performed on adult Old-World monkeys (Macaca fascicularis). Animals were initially tranquilized with i.m. acepromazine (50 ug kg-1), anaesthetized with i.m. ketamine and maintained on i.v. opiod anaesthetic (sufentanil citrace, 6 ug kg-1 h-1). During recording, anaesthesia was continued with sufentanil (6 ug kg-1 h-1). During recording, anaesthesia was continued with sufentanil (6 ug kg-1 h-1) and paralysis induced with pancuronium bromide. Electrocardiogram and expired CO2 were continuously monitored and blood pressure was measured non-invasively at intervals of 5 min by a Hewlett-Packard Model 78354A patient monitor. Extracellular action potentials were recorded with glass-coated tungsten microelectrodes, exposed tips 5-15 um. Spikes were detected using a Bak (Maryland, USA) DDIS-I dual window discriminator and were time-stamped with an accuracy of 1 ms using a CED-1401 Plus (Cambridge, UK) data acquisition system. Strict criteria for single-unit recording included fixed shape of the action potential and the absence of spikes during the absolute refractory period. Small electrolytic lesions (2-3 uA for 2-3s, tip negative) were made along the length of each penetration. Details of the reconstruction of the penetrations and the assignment of cells to cortical layers can be found in ref. 30.
A Silicon Graphics Elan R4000 computer generated the stimuli in real time. The screen measured 34.3 cm wide by 27.4 cm high. The refresh rate of the monitor was 60 Hz. The mean luminance of the display was 56 cd m-2. The contrast of the gratings was 100% and their spatial frequency was optimal for each cell. The size of the stimulation patch was large compared to the receptive field of the cell; the side of the stimulus was between 6 and 10 times the spatial period of the optimal grating. The receptive field of the cell was centred in the middle of the stimulus. Therefore, both the classical receptive field of the cell and its surround were stimulated. Most cell responded with mean spike rates ranging between 2 and 40 spikes per second. A few cells with very high directional selectivity did not respond at all to the stimulus and could not be studied.
We ran stimulus sequences for 15 min (900 s or 54,000 frames). In a typical experiment we used an angular resolution of ~10^0. Thus, the set S usually contained 72 different images (18 orientations X 4 spatial phases). During the 15-min presentation each image appeared, on average, 750 times. If a typical cortical neuron fired ~5 spikes per second to the stoachastic stimulation sequence, we obtained a total of 4,500 spikes. We distribution these 4,500 spikes in only 18 orientation bins (because we average across spatial phases). Thus, for a uniform distribution, about 250 spikes are found in each bin. The large number of spikes and small number of orientation bins allowedc us to obtain smooth and accurate orientation probability distributions.
The circular variance v of a cell which has responses Rk at angles 0-180 is given by
For some additional context, here's the abstract: Orientation tuning of neurons is one of the chief emergent characteristics of the primary visual
English, does not have an adequate word for this kind of struggle, but ironically Arabic does: jihad.
Why not crusade?
As a matter of fact, it did. By the time the Crusades got going, Muslims had invaded Spain and forced the Jews to either convert or be killed. They did the same to the Christians. Had the Pope the audacity to start the Crusades many years earlier, the multitudes of Jews in Spain and Jerusalem could have been spared their lives.
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