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."

Comments

Re:Vaccine funding useless

[Sir_Lewk]

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.

Re:Vaccine funding useless

[mcgrew]

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.

Simple solution

[nedlohs]

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.

Bullshit

[PakProtector]

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.

a rat != a pig != a dog != A boy

[crmarvin42]

Because, despite the propaganda you hear to the contrary, a rat != a pig != a dog != A boy. There are important and meaningful differences between each one of those four mammals that makes them unique from each other.

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