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OSU President Cans Anthrax Vaccine Research On Primates
Wrath0fb0b writes "Oklahoma State University President Burns Hargis has abruptly canceled an NIH-funded study on an anthrax vaccine in primates. (The primates would have to be euthanized afterward.) There is suspicion that the decision was meant to appease large donor Madeleine Pickens, the wife of noted huntsman T. Boone Pickens, who had previously pressured the school over animal-rights issues. Scientists counter that the study was approved by the NIH peer-review process, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and subject to the Federal Animal Welfare Act (by virtue of using NIH money) and that the decision by the President has short-circuited months of planning and deliberation on the matter. Hargis has denied being influenced by Pickens and cited 'confidential factors' that he couldn't discuss, telling the faculty council that 'to go through every lurid detail is simply not prudent.' A post on Pickens' blog, on the other hand, obliquely takes credit for the 'great decision,' noting a faculty member's hunch that the 'generous benefactor to OSU and her ties to the Humane Society of the United States may have played a role in the termination of the project.' Meanwhile, the NIH expressed displeasure at the decision, stating, 'NIH fully expects institutions to honor these assurances and commitment to complete NIH supported projects as requested, approved and funded.' Some OSU scientists speculated that the fiasco would make it harder for them to receive NIH funding in the future."
The animal rights peopel have slowed down animal research in the US.
If you are thinking that anthrax is a virus then you'd be wrong. It's a bacterium and it isn't "impossible" to develop a vaccine for it. Viruses like Influenza tend to mutate and adapt faster than bacteria generally do and there are vaccines for Influenza so...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Ah of course, all of those PhDs and researchers at Oklahoma State University have been wasting their time. They should have just asked robinstar1574 on slashdot if it was possible.
Silly them.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I insist on only genuine, all-natural, organic, peer-reviewed research! Preferably it should also synergize multiple externalities whilst being fully recyclable and good for the environment.
Caveat Utilitor
While I am sure that Oklahoma State University refers to itself as 'OSU' if you go to osu.edu you will get The Ohio State University.
Look, you might as well be honest about it. T Boone owns your university at this point, everyone knows it. You may as well just rename it for him and get it over with.
Will he be marketing this canned anthrax to the general public? Does Homeland Securitah know about this?
Anthrax is a becteria that lives in soil. It's usually not life-threatening unless inhaled. In fact, you may have had it -- it's usualy from falling down and skinning an elbow in the dirt, and will leave a black mark that heals slowly, but will heal. The anthrax that's dangerous is "weaponized" anthrax that's engineered to hang in the air, and if inhaled is indeed deadly.
A Vaccine would make infected sores less painful, and could possibly make weaponized anthrax less deadly.
Free Martian Whores!
Too bad. It would be better to use something closer to humans.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
NIH should put OSU on a blacklist and not fund anything involving them until OSU provides a valid (as judged by NIH) explanation for why they wasted the time (and money) of NIH.
OSU is of course free to not do so and rely on non-NIH funding. Or there might be a perfectly valid reason that they don't want to disclose publicly that they can provide to NIH.
I worked at a Humane Society once. Animal Testing is not Animal Cruelty.
I wish that everyone who thinks we shouldn't do animal testing would volunteer to be have said tests run on themselves. Maybe then they would understand that Human Life is more valuable than Animal Life.
Just as it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer, so it is better that ten animals die in the name of science than one human being die because a vaccine was not properly tested, or, worse still, never brought to market because of a lack of testing.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Try this url -
http://www.tboonepickensfoundation.org/pdf/PCQU%20Pickens%20FINAL.pdf
There are others as well.
...carrier dead.....
What a stupid move.
NIH study sections will now perceive Oklahoma State as an institution that isn't prepared to do research that they have been awarded a grant to do. There are plenty of other institutions willing keep their promises; why take a chance on this one?
They'll also have a harder time attracting good faculty who can win grants. Why would a good scientist go to an institution that will arbitrarily stop her research? And why would good scientists who get offers from other institutions choose to stay? That will impact their bottom line.
Not to mention competent biology students will want to go someplace where politics doesn't interfere in their education.
It doesn't even mention his hunting in his Wikipedia article, which at the very least casts doubt onto his huntsmanship being "noted," as the summary suggests. As far as I can tell, he's hardly a Ted Nugent.
There already is a vaccine for at least some strains of anthrax, first developed by Pasteur in 1881, which is why it's rare in domestic animals in modern times. Soldiers being deployed to areas where bioweapons attacks are possible are also vaccinated against it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax#First_vaccination
It sounds like in this particular case they were trying to develop a vaccine that would be especially for use in humans (hence primary research subjects), and they were probably targeting some of the particularly virulent strains that were developed in bioweapons programs from World War II through Vietnam.
animal rights boils down to a simple statement. Is a (non-human) animals life worth less than a humans. If you say yes, then animal testing is a no brainer. If you say no, then its not. Of course you have sub-issues like behaving in a humane manner, but that is really not the root of the issue.
This same simplicity can also be put to things like abortion, guns, and even healthcare***. The problem in our country is that we dont actually try to answer the question at the root of the issue, we nip at the corners, trying to get what we want from laws without making folks actually think or choose. We end up with crappy laws with all kinds of exceptions. Its a very bad way to manage a country IMHO.
*** Note: Im saying the question is simple, the answer may not be.
From a perfectly rational perspective, allowing, for instance, ten violent criminals to go free probably does more overall harm to society than imprisoning one innocent man. That doesn't mean that it's OK, but it's better than the alternative. You can argue what the threshold should be. Maybe you really think that it would be better to release every imprisoned person in the world, because there are bound to be innocent people among them, but I don't think you'd get much support for that idea.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Sure, and they can call the Agricultural College "Boone's Farm."
There is a probability that it will make mistakes and punish the innocent, and there is a social cost for that, and there is a cost to setting guilty men free.
The cost of letting a guilty man go free is always less than the cost of punishing the innocent, since unless the crime was completely fabricated, a guilty man went free so that the innocent man could be punished.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
For one thing, only the boy has any chance of understanding such a philosophically complex concept as "Morality". It is an entirely human construct required for civilization to work. That is it entirely subjective and does not possess a single fixed universal rule appears to escape most people becuase so many of the more popular definitions of what is "Moral" are similar. That is becuase, as a result of cultural evolution, selective pressure on societies favor those that define morality to include concepts such as Don't murder, Don't steal, Don't lie, etc.
The moral value of non-human animals is currently being redefined. I'm of the opinion that raising the moral value of animals is based on misplaced belief that without such value, their suffering is guaranteed and a tendancy for humans to anthropomorphise their pets and extend that compassion to other animals. I work with research and production animals. I frequently think of the behaviors I see in terms of human behavior and human emotional responses even though I know that they are wrong. The motivation and perception of a pig is incredibly different from that of a human, even a child at a similar level of intellectual development. The perfect person to readup on to learn about how fundamentally damaging the "anthropomorphic" view is to our understanding of animals is Temple Grandin.
As to your original snarky remark:
why not experiment on the mentally ill, or children born with severe learning disabilities
A. We do if we are trying to learn about the specific conditions that those individuals represent. You learn about Autism by working with autistic children.
B. More in line with what you probably intended to get a response to, Humans of any kind make horrible research subjects. The diversity within human groups, even within specific ethnic groups, is orders of magnitude greater than that between 2 strains of rats. That is why much of our biomedical and nutritional research is piloted in animals and only replicated in humans if it seems like the research is going somewhere.
I realize that you were probably hoping to get into a flame war with someone over your emotional decision to consider the quality of life for a child and a rat to be equivalent, but you won't get one from me. You can make that argument, I just don't buy it.
That you've used such an obvious and flawed comparison leads me to believe that you probably haven't had an original thought on the topic in your life. You're probably just parroting arguments you've seen others use. Saying so may make me look like a Troll, but it needs to be said. This is an issue that most people argue based on an emotional decision to accept a given viewpoint regardless of what any science may have to say on the matter. The vast majority of those posting have probably never spent more than a half an hour actually reasoning out their position.
I don't pretend to have an answer that will address the concerns of all. However, I can state with a high degree of certainty that those monkey's that were going to be used for the Anthrax study were subjected to far less fear and pain in their life than most humans. I've worked with primates (in a behavior lab) and the regulations for working with and caring for them put the laws governing the rearing of human children to shame.
Much of the modern Animal Rights movement is based on a book by Peter Singer. IIRC, there is a line in there in which he indicates that the use of animals for agricultural or research purposes is acceptable as long as their use for that purpose ends up being a net positive for the individuals involved. However, that point seems to be ignored by many who claim to desire animal rights, but have not bothered to do t
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Picking "not guilty" for the guy who committed the crime in no way implies that there'll be a second trial involving some other poor schmuck.
Picking "guilty" for some other poor schmuck directly indicates that there will be no second trial involving the guy who committed the crime.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
As one observer noted, most university presidents are not idiots. Any that were in there were Darwinned out during the 1960s and not replaced (my own was replaced at that time by a labor negotiator). Hence, we can assume the alternative was worse.
There's a likely scenario: Clarabelle Pickens drops her support. It's a huge chunk of change. The legislature, strapped, does not replace it. The NIH grants can't come close to covering it, not to mention the fact they're not growing anyway. Result: everything gets cut, including the athletic budget. At this point, for the first time, the alumni get PO'ed and cut their contributions, and all life on earth as we know it comes to an end.
At that point, losing NIH looks like the best of a bad lot, so the tap-dancing begins.
the wife of noted huntsman T. Boone Pickens, who had previously pressured the school over animal-rights issues.
If you are going to quote, you could at least include the parts of the sentence that give context and flow... like the part right before your "snip."
Also, just because I hunt, it doesn't mean my mom does. Nor do I give the deer I shoot a vaccine of anthrax to test out before I shoot them.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786