Neuroscientist Halts Research to Stop Extremists 1047
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.'"
crude explosive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:With the war on terrorism... (Score:0, Informative)
~~~
Eco-terrorists targetting academics... (Score:1, Informative)
No, no... (Score:3, Informative)
Ooh, and here's an example [washington.edu]:
Way to go, retards...
Re:Terrorists (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Everytime I read a story like this... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:With the war on terrorism... (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:4, Informative)
You can see Ringach's scholarly publications for yourself:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ringach [google.com]
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.
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [google.com]. 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 [nobelprize.org].
What makes Ringach's research unique is (was?) the sorts of images he presented to the animals, and some clever data analysis.
Re:The cutest thing about animal rights activists (Score:1, Informative)
Torture. (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:4, Informative)
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: [nature.com]
(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
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:1, Informative)
Why not... (Score:5, Informative)
Why not crusade?
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:1, Informative)
What a load of made-up crap. You've completely mischaracterized the research, claiming that monkeys are being tortured while conscious (they're not, and you don't have nerve sensation in your brain anyway).
Re:With the war on terrorism... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is perfectly valid research. (Score:1, Informative)
"Surely knowing more about how the brain processes visual stimuli is beneficial, but is it so beneficial that these experiments are justified? Are there other ways of obtaining this information? New or future imaging technologies that might work non-invasively. If we had to wait 10 years for this knowledge would anyone suffer unjustly?"
How the brain processes visual stimuli can be simplified down to "how we see things." His type of work CANNOT currently be done in with non-invasive imaging (and none on the horizon), nor can it be done on lower mammals such as mice. The purpose of using monkeys is that the organization of their visual systems is very much like ours, and thus the research is directly relavent to how our brains are organized and function. This line of research is basic, which means it doesn't have direct clinical relavance in the form of advancing our understanding of how a single disease or treatment works, but it does advance our understanding of how the whole system works. Thus all clinical work sits atop this kind of basic research.
Additionally, no visual research ever uses 30 monkeys for an experiment. A single experiment generally uses two to make sure that results are consistent across individuals while keeping the sacrifice to a minimum. The thing is, no researcher WANTS to use monkeys. They are a pain in the ass to house, handle, feed, and (sometimes) breed. They are expensive too. If the scientific question COULD be answered without resorting to using monkeys, it would be for a variety of practical reasons in addition to the moral.
"people who study the IACUAC operations report that these and other "regulatory" bodies largely rubber stamp the requests--almost never questioning a researcher claim that the animal use is necessary or valuable."
This is absolutely misleading, and is basically trying to restate the oft quoted, "All of these researchers are using just the same experiments over and over, killing animals." The cometitiion for grants and to get your work published in science these days is more intense than getting into an Ivy League school, and researchers are under much pressure from their community and schools to do novel, significant work. IACUAC is there to make sure that researchers have animal protocols that are approved by the veternary community, and they do take a lot of time and work to get through, especially for monkeys. Validation of the research objectives comes at the grant level.
Science is never practiced in a vacuum, or enclosed space where people can forget what they're doing. In fact, much a scientist such a Ringach's time is spent communicating to a variety of audiences what is being learned in the experiments being performed by the group of people working under him. Scientists are forced to explain and defend their approaches regularly...this is how it works. If you're doing research, many people have agreed that it is worthwhile, not just in aim, but method.
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:3, Informative)
The studies are focused on visual cortex, which requires opening a hole into the occipital lobe (back of the skull). Of course, that happens under anesthesia.
This doesn't seem like the junk science the protestors claim it is, but I can easily see some people being violently opposed to this procedure.
Agreed.
Re:dear enraged Republican mods (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"animal" rights? (Score:3, Informative)
Welcome to anti-vivesectionist propoganda (Score:2, Informative)
The surgery desciption is a combination of pure sensationalism and ignorance. The "special device that was attached to him through the ears, eyes and mouth" is a stereotax -- a device used to provide coordinates relative to the major stable features of the skull (the optic and aural sockets), and is used so that the craniomoty can be placed precisely, rather than relying on guesswork. The screws placed in the skull are tiny, used to give the skull some texture to which the dental acrylic will bind (hence the number used). The reason the dental acrylic is put in place is to affix the recording chamber (the metal tube at the rear of the head cap), which allows for multiple recordings to be done from the same animal without doing a surgery each time -- a significant progress, from a welfare perspective, over just using a fresh animal for each experiment.
The "steel wire [inserted] into his eye" is a fine loop of stainless steel wire attached to the ring of ocular muscles surrounding the eye. It isn't used to fix the eye in place, but instead is part of clever method of monitoring eye position. The "eye coil" system is slowly being phased out in favour of non-surgically invasive techniques for doing the same; if you want to speed things up, lobby for better scientific funding so that scientists can afford the $30,000+ it would take to switch.
The head bolt -- the structure on the front of the head cap -- is used to fix the animal's head in place during an experiment. In a visual experiment, this is necessary to remove any possible confound arising from uncontrolled head position. You can't simply instruct an animal, "don't move your head," and the conclusion has been that the headbolt is less distressing to animals than other options such as external clamping mechanisms or neuromuscular blocking.
And so on and so forth. Of course the researchers didn't know as much about anesthesia as the veternarian; the veternarian wouldn't know jack about cortical organization either. The point is that there was a vet on hand, for exactly that reason. Telling tasteless stories during the surgery? Then don't spend time with surgeons, because they stuff they'll joke about would make you faint.
This is what the anti-vivesectionists do on their most charitable days: find photos that people find squeamish and shove them in people's faces without context or explanation. In this day and age, where you can find images of Clinton and Hitler shaking hands, and when even reputable news agencies have problems making certain that their photos haven't been touched by Photoshop, why do people insist on taking the press releases of the ALF at face value?
And if you're wondering why this is an AC post, you haven't read the parent article.
Re:With the war on terrorism... (Score:2, Informative)
The PCRM is a puppet organization set up by PETA to create propaganda under the guise of "objective" research. Source: one, [wikipedia.org] and two. [consumerfreedom.com]
Re:a "fossilization of the mind" -- what's that? (Score:1, Informative)
Does that excuse the bomb? No, especially when you realize the Japanese were closer to surrendering then is often taught over here, but it's not like some military guy threw a dart at a map of Japan and it just so happened to hit Nagasaki.
Same thing with Hiroshima, it housed one of the larger HQ's of the Japanese army. Again I might be a bit off on the specifics as it's been awhile since I've visited the memorials in Japan (everyone should go) but that's the jist of it. The one thing I still would like to know... apparently the US considered bombing a naval fleet initially, then somehow that turned into bombing a city. The only explanation I can think of was to provide better "scientific results" but that's a total guess on my part. If that was the case it would make it all the more sick.
One Nit (Score:5, Informative)
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.
URL for "Primate Freedom Project" (Score:3, Informative)
They seem to be gloating.
The site contains the profiles of various reseachers, including addresses, phone numbers, etc. They continue to list the man's home address and phone number. They offer cash prizes to anyone who helps further their goals, regardless of means.
Please let them know how you feel about their actions.
Primate Freedom Project:
(310) 495-0429
info@UCLAPrimateFreedom.com
Nagasaki and Dresden were military targets (Score:1, Informative)
Bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:crude explosive (Score:3, Informative)
The FBI has said the device, which was lighted but failed to ignite, was powerful enough to have killed the occupants.
These people are as much terrorists as as anyone else blowing up something to make a statement, either in the USA or the Middle East. It's really sad, and just a bit scary, how distorted the definition of terrorism has become.
Re:One Nit (Score:3, Informative)
This is a curious bit of misinformation.
So far as I know, there was never a campaign of forced conversion of Jews in Spain. Aside from the fact it is forbidden by the Koran (which as we know doesn't stop people from doing things), there does not reflect the opinion of historians who have studied this issue. Muslim conversions were largely driven by the tax advantages, to the degree that rulers had to issue laws restricting conversion. The theoretical deal was that the Muslims taxed the non-muslims, in return for which they protected the non-muslim's freedom of religion and provided civil order.
By in large, the loss of Sepharad (the Hebrew name for the Iberian peninsula) was the greatest single blow to the Jews of Europe outside of the Holocaust, because they lost their only secure home in Europe.
What makes this a curious bit of information is that it reflects Christian practices, which emphasize conversion and theological uniformity much more the Muslim practices.