Day: March 20, 2002

Our Bodies, Ourselves? Of Course Not!

Today a group made of liberal, pro-choice advocates held a press conference in Washington, DC, to speak out in favor of a proposed ban on cloning for research purposes. Once again, pro-choice advocates demonstrated that they really do not believe that women have the right to control their bodies and make their own reproductive decisions.

A group calling itself the Center for Genetic and Society has obtained 100 signatures on a petition in support of the bill which includes some prominent pro-choice feminists and liberals. There’s Judy Norsigian, author of Our Bodies, Ourselves; Alice J. Dan of the federally-funded Center of Excellence in Women’s Health at the University of Illinois; Barbara Dudley, former executive director of Greenpeace USA; Todd Gitlin, the former radical activist and now a professor at New York University; Tom Hayden, former radical activist; left wing radio commentator Jim Hightower; and a host of others.

The petition they signed not only calls for an outright ban on bringing a cloned human to term which makes sense given the limits of the technology at the moment, but also calls for a moratorium on the cloning of human embryos for research purposes. The petition says,

Second, the United States should enact a moratorium on the creation of clonal human embryos for research purposes (often prematurely called “therapeutic cloning”). The widespread creation of clonal embryos would increase the risk that a human clone would be born, and would further open the door to eugenic procedures. Fortunately, important research on embryonic stem cells does not yet require the use of clonal embryos. A moratorium would allow time for alternatives to research cloning to be investigated, for policy makers and the public to make informed judgments, and for regulatory structures to be established to oversee applications that society might decide are acceptable. A moratorium on research cloning is a middle ground between the two positions of an immediate permanent ban and an unconstrained green light.

So much for my body, my choice. Norsigian is the grossest offender. According to The New York Times, “She fears the science will place an undue burden on the women who donate their eggs for the experiments.” Of course isn’t this simply a rewording of the case against abortion, that society will put pressure on women to abort their fetuses? Norsigian is simply reverting to the anti-abortion claim that women cannot possibly make free choices about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

Similarly, a lot of the signers of this petition are clearly uncomfortable with what they mistakenly call potential “eugenics” — manipulating fetuses to have one characteristic or another. But wait a minute — I though pro-choice advocates did not think that fetuses had any rights at all. All of a sudden, it is still okay to kill an embryo but not for scientists to clone that same embryo to conduct research? These folks are trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths.

This is why the pro-choice movement is doomed in the long run. Too many people in that movement do not have any sort of philosophical view that informs their beliefs on abortion, but rather simply have a gut reaction in favor it (in many cases, I suspect, simply because the Right generally opposes abortion). Contrary to the rhetoric, few people in the pro-choice movement really believe that men and women should have complete control over matters of reproduction.

The only difference between the pro-choice movement and the pro-life movement is merely a minor disagreement over which group gets to control men and women’s reproductive options.

Sources:

Some for Abortion Rights Lean Right in Cloning Fight. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, January 24, 2002.

Liberal anti-cloners up to bat. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, March 19, 2002.

Open Letter To U.S. Senators On Human Cloning And Eugenic Engineering. Center for Genetic and Society, March 19, 2002.

Dave Winer Drops a Stink Bomb

Dave Winer announced the “bomblet” he was hyping on his site yesterday — a parternship deal with The New York Times to syndicate NYT headlines through Radio. Uh, sorry, this is a step backwards. According to his promotional page on the partnership deal,

The New York Times feeds are only available for Radio 8 users. If you haven’t got Radio yet, you can get a thirty-day free trial. If you already have Radio, you can be subscribing to fresh New York Times headlines in less than one minute.

So you can have a syndicated NYT feed, you just have to use Radio 8.

If City Desk or Blogger or any of his competitors reached such an exclusive partnership with the NYT, Winer would be throwing a royal fit on his web site, complaining about how it locks users into a single vendor (which it does). Why start ghetto-izing syndication just when it’s taking off so successfully?

The only thing Winer’s announcement means is that the NYT is still clueless (and reaffirms a lot of suspicions people had about working with Winer on things like RSS 0.92).

Better Tuberculosis Vaccine on the Way

There is a vaccine for tuberculosis available that has saved many, many lives but it has an odd feature — in some people it just doesn’t work. That would be fine if it didn’t work in a few people, as happens with many vaccines, but in some parts of the world, the vaccine has an 80 percent failure rate. What’s going on there?

Enter researcher Peter Andersen with a hypothesis about that as well as a lab full of mice to test it.

Andersen’s hypothesis was simple. The TB vaccine exposes human beings to a weakened version of Mycobacterium bovis — a from of TB that afflicts cows. Exposure to this causes an immune response which will also protect people from the human form of the disease.

So why doesn’t it always work. Well, in some parts of the world people frequently come into contact with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the strain that causes tuberculosis in human beings — long before having the vaccine.

Andersen hypothesized that what was happening was this. Some people were being exposed to a weak strain of human TB. This produced an immune response which that rendered the vaccine ineffective. People were essentially being immunized against the vaccine. Then, later in life, they were still vulnerable to the human form of TB.

To test this theory, Andersen used a mouse model of tuberculosis. He infected mice with three strains of mycobacteria taken from a part of Malawi where the bovine version of the disease does not exist. Then, later, he exposed the mice to the Mycobacterium bovis vaccine. Lo and behold, the vaccination did not work. In each case, when later exposed to full blown tuberculosis, the mice all contracted the disease.

Vaccines made from dead versions of TB, however, did protect the mice. There are currently several vaccines being developed that used dead versions of TB rather than weakened versions of live virus, and Andersen’s research is the first suggesting that these vaccines might offer protection to people for whom the traditional vaccine will not work.

Source:

New TB vaccines ‘in pipeline’. The BBC, February 13, 2002.

Drug Discrimination in Monkeys: How Animal Rights Activists Distort Medical Research

Someone sent me an e-mail today that was originally written by Rick Bogle that shows just how animal rights activists often blatantly lie about medical research involving animals.

In this case, the topic was a recent report by Harvard Medical School about research into heroin addiction with monkeys. Bogle sent an e-mail to an animal rights mailing list with the subject line: “Harvard announces major breakthrough in heroin research” and described the research in one sentence,

Researchers at Harvard University’s NIH supported New England Regional Primate Research Center have announced the breakthrough discovery that monkeys are able to distinguish between injections of heroin and a saline placebo.

The implication is pretty clear — what sort of idiots would sit around running experiments with monkeys to see if they can tell the difference between heroin and a saline placebo? The answer to that question is “no one,” because that is not at all what the study actually involved.

Given that drug addiction is such a problem in U.S. society, many people might think that researchers already know everything there is to know about addiction. In fact, the reality is that much about addiction is still poorly understood, especially when it comes to how specific drugs cause addiction.

To try to better understand addiction, researchers perform tests in monkeys called drug discrimination tests. Here’s the basic idea behind a drug discrimination test: suppose researchers have a drug like heroin and they want to find out what it is specifically about heroin that causes people to become addicted to it. One way to do that is to train the monkey to give a certain response when it is injected with heroin — for example, the monkey is trained to push a lever that rewards it with food. When the monkey is injected with a placebo, however, it is trained that if it wants the food reward, it needs to push a different lever. In this way, the monkey is able to tell researchers whether it is receiving an injection of heroin or of a placebo. The monkey can now discriminate between the two.

Now, the researchers move on to finding out what it is about heroin that makes human beings “high.” Heroin turns out to be a difficult drug to figure out for a number of reasons. As the Harvard researchers explain,

Heroin is a complicated drug with some unusual properties. For example, heroin is converted to a number of metabolites in the brain and liver. How this occurs is shown in the Figure below. Once heroin passes from the blood stream to the brain, it is rapidly converted to other chemicals by enzymatic activity. First, heroin in the brain is converted to a chemical called 6-MAM, then Metabolic pathway of heroin after intravenous injection. After activating the brain’s natural opioid system (by binding to proteins called “mu opioid receptors”), morphine returns to the blood stream where, like most drugs, it is metabolized by the liver. Enzymatic activity in the liver converts morphine into two other substances called M3G and M6G, which can re-circulate back to the brain.

So here’s what the Harvard researchers wanted to find out — do these 6-MAM, M3G, M6G, and morphine byproducts which go back to the brain contribute at all to the “high” that users feel after injecting heroin. Or, are they just an otherwise a relatively unimportant side effect in the way heroin is experienced? Before these studies, the general consensus was that M3G did not play much of a role in heroin experience.

To test this, they took a saline solution and put each of these byproducts in it, and then injected the monkeys with the solution. The result? When the monkeys were injected with a solution containing saline and 6-MAM, they pushed the lever just as if they had received a heroin injection. The results were exactly the same for solutions containing M3G, M6G and the morphine byproducts. As Harvard summarizes the importance of this research,

These studies, to our knowledge, provided the first demonstration of discriminative stimulus effects produced by i.v. injections of heroin in nonhuman primates. Also, the finding that M3G may contribute to the subjective effects of heroin was very surprising, since this compound previously was believed to be a harmless, inactive by-product of heroin metabolism. Another surprising finding was that the brain dopamine system the system most commonly implicated in the addictive properties of drugs seems to play almost no role in the subjective effects of heroin. The i.v. heroin discrimination model appears to be an especially useful tool for identifying potential medications that, by acting through the mu opioid system, may prevent the intense subjective experiences associated with heroin addiction.

This research, in other words, strongly challenged traditional thinking about heroin drug addiction.

But to animal rights activists like Rick Bogle, none of this matters. This is simply a case of researchers wasting time and tax dollars to prove that
“monkeys are able to distinguish between injections of heroin and a
saline placebo.”

And this will certainly enter animal rights lore in just this way — few activists (no activists, actually) seem interested in ever doing any sort of fact checking of these sorts of assertions. This will end up on some fact sheet at some group and be endlessly copied and pasted without any activist wondering if there might not be more to the story, much less anyone in the animal rights community bothering to do any research into the matter.

One of the ways to judge a social or political movement is by how accurately it presents the position of its opponents. The animal rights movement is apparently satisfied with distorting, obfuscating and outright lying about its opponents rather than try to make an extremely difficult case against them. Like creationists and other advocates of pseudo-science, animal rights activists rely on distorting science and playing to the general ignorance of the general public about medical research rather than objectively looking at research methods and ends and then critiquing those methods and ends from the animal rights position.

Source:

Heroin’s Effects in Monkeys. Harvard Medical School, Accessed: March 20, 2002.

Better Tuberculosis Vaccines Are on the Way

There is a vaccine for tuberculosis available that has saved many, many lives but it has an odd feature — in some people it just doesn’t work. That would be fine if it didn’t work in a few people, as happens with many vaccines, but in some parts of the world, the vaccine has an 80 percent failure rate. What’s going on there?

Enter researcher Peter Andersen with a hypothesis about that as well as a lab full of mice to test it.

Andersen’s hypothesis was simple. The TB vaccine exposes human beings to a weakened version of Mycobacterium bovis — a from of TB that afflicts cows. Exposure to this causes an immune response which will also protect people from the human form of the disease.

So why doesn’t it always work. Well, in some parts of the world people frequently come into contact with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the strain that causes tuberculosis in human beings — long before having the vaccine.

Andersen hypothesized that what was happening was this. Some people were being exposed to a weak strain of human TB. This produced an immune response which that rendered the vaccine ineffective. People were essentially being immunized against the vaccine. Then, later in life, they were still vulnerable to the human form of TB.

To test this theory, Andersen used a mouse model of tuberculosis. He infected mice with three strains of mycobacteria taken from a part of Malawi where the bovine version of the disease does not exist. Then, later, he exposed the mice to the Mycobacterium bovis vaccine. Lo and behold, the vaccination did not work. In each case, when later exposed to full blown tuberculosis, the mice all contracted the disease.

Vaccines made from dead versions of TB, however, did protect the mice. There are currently several vaccines being developed that used dead versions of TB rather than weakened versions of live virus, and Andersen’s research is the first suggesting that these vaccines might offer protection to people for whom the traditional vaccine will not work.

Source:

New TB vaccines ‘in pipeline’. The BBC, February 13, 2002.