- *The American Dossier Editors Note- We welcome and would love for you to talk amongst yourselves on this issue as these 2 articles below offer interesting perspectives.
A Different Pont of View:
Animal rights aren’t a priority
-Source-Salon-
I was talking to my friend the other day about her decision to stop eating meat and asked if she had made that choice for health reasons or ethical ones. She responded with an observation that stuck with me as I was writing this article — specifically, that it says a great deal about our culture that we find it easier, less shameful even, to justify not harming animals if we can claim to do so for selfish reasons, rather than selfless ones.
It's a valid point, but one that raises more questions than it answers. Why exactly do we feel the need, as a human society, to pooh-pooh the moral problems with mistreating animals?
This brings me to one of the big stories in science news right now. Nikos Logothetis, internationally acclaimed neuroscientist and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in the small German city of Tübingen, was indicted in February for allegedly violating animal protection laws, according to Nature. The criminal case occurred after an animal rights group drew attention to undercover footage taken of Logothetis in 2014 that supposedly showed him mistreating research monkeys. Logothetis used to run a primate laboratory at MPI-Biocyb; because he studies how the brain makes sense of the world, his research inevitably led him to experiment on primates.
As a result of his indictment, Logothetis has been banned from both conducting experiments with animals and from supervising other scientists doing the same thing. MPI-Biocyb scientists have protested Logothetis' treatment, arguing that it denies him the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty (a court date hasn't been chosen yet) and that it leaves scientists vulnerable to any criticism from animal rights activists, no matter how irrational it might be. These are all potentially legitimate observations — if animal research is going to be common in these facilities, then scientists do need to be protected from facing consequences when claims against them are potentially spurious — yet it ignores the underlying issue at stake here.
That issue was inadvertently raised by Max Planck Society president Martin Stratmann, who told Nature that the consequences imposed on Logothetis were necessary because they "must uphold public trust that animal research is carried out properly." He added, "Any public perception that animals are being treated incorrectly will damage the image of animal research as a whole."Read more
A Different Point of View:
The Ideal Subjects for a Salt Study?
-The New York times-
Leading scientists propose to track salt’s effects on health by controlling how much is given to inmate volunteers.
Suppose you wanted to do a study of diet and nutrition, with thousands of participants randomly assigned to follow one meal plan or another for years as their health was monitored?
In the real world, studies like these are nearly impossible. That’s why there remain so many unanswered questions about what’s best for people to eat. And one of the biggest of those mysteries concerns salt and its relationship to health.
But now a group of eminent researchers, including the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, has suggested a way to resolve science’s so-called salt wars. They want to conduct an immense trial of salt intake with incarcerated inmates, whose diets could be tightly controlled.
The researchers, who recently proposed the idea in the journal Hypertension, say they are not only completely serious — they are optimistic it will happen.
Using inmates as study subjects is controversial, to say the least. History is laden with horror stories. In the 1940s, prisoners were deliberately infected with malaria. In the 1950s, inmates were infected with hepatitis. A decade later, scientists irradiated prisoners’ testicles.
“Prisons are an inherently coercive environment,” said Ruth Macklin, an ethicist and professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
But “that doesn’t mean informed consent is impossible.”
The point of the proposed study is to put an end to decades of scientific disagreement over salt and its benefits and hazards.
On one side are researchers who say Americans eat too much sodium and that it is harming their health.
For healthy people, the American Heart Association recommends 2,300 milligrams a day. But for those with high blood pressure, the ideal amount is 1,500 milligrams, or less than half a teaspoon. Read more