Huntingdon Life Sciences to Become Life Sciences Research in Effort Aimed to Thwart Animal Rights Activists

Huntingdon Life Sciences has apparently found what it think is a solution to at least some of the problems it faces by being chartered in Great Britain and have its stock grade on the London Stock Exchange. A company, Life Sciences Research Inc. has been set up for the purpose of acquiring all Huntingdon Life Sciences stock.

Assuming this goes through, current Huntingdon Life Sciences stock will be converted into stock for Life Sciences Research. Rather than be listed on the London Stock Exchange, the new company will be listed on the NASDAQ Over the COunter Bulletin Board.

In a press release, Andrew Baker, Huntingdon’s Executive Chairman, said the move was being made both for long term strategic reasons as well as because of a more favorable regulatory climate in the United States. Baker said,

The US securities markets offer both a more developed market for our industry and greater shareholder privacy, which, as everyone is aware, has been a serious issue for our shareholder.

Brian Cass, Huntingdon’s Managing Director added, “This transaction offers us the best of both worlds, with the benefits of an American stock trading facility, and the continuance of our existing UK and US laboratory operations.”

Source:

Huntingdon and LSR Announce Transaction. Huntingdon Life Sciences, Press Release, Business Wire, October 9, 2001.

Does a Genetic Disorder Cause Some Anorexia Cases?

A claim popularized by feminists is that anorexia (and other eating disorders) are caused by unhealthy media images of thin women. In the past decade this claim has been undermined by cross-cultural studies of societies with very different ideal female body images, but a recent Dutch survey is the first to provide any evidence that anorexia may have a genetic as well as psychological component.

American researchers began by studying mice who experience an eating disorder similar to anorexia. Research determined that the mice were deficient in a protein called agouti, which was involved in the formation of skin pigment. The substance had a second use, however — its presence in the brain was necessary to stimulate the mice to eat. Those mice who produced too little of this protein suffered from an anorexia-like eating disorder.

Dutch researchers then turned to human beings. Taking blood samples from 145 patients diagnosed with anorexia, the researchers found that 16 of the patients had genetic mutations of the gene that produces the agouti protein in human beings.

This follows up on earlier research that found high risks of anorexia in people whose relatives also suffered from the disorder. According to the BBC, studies of twins have shown that when one twin suffers from anorexia, the other twin has an extremely high 50 percent risk of suffering from anorexia as well. Having a family member who suffers from anorexia increases the risks of suffering from the disorder from 1 in 200 to 1 in 30.

Rather than being simplistically caused by images of thin females in the media, anorexia is turning out to be a very complex disorder with a number of likely factors contributing to its development.

Source:

Anorexia ‘has genetic basis’. Marlene Smits, The BBC, October 7, 2001.

The Face Recognition Scam

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, politicians and companies are lining up to bring Orwellian invasions of privacy in order to give the illusion of safety. One technology, already famously used earlier this year at the Super Bowl, is computerized face recognition technology. But when you dig into the details of how this works not only is it an unwarranted invasion of privacy, but the technology doesn’t even work as claimed.

Take, for example, the system being sold by FaceKey which has been evaluated by several government agencies. The system works great in artificially controlled conditions created by the company, but when deployed in the real world, it has a false positive rate that will render it almost useless.

Deploying it in normal lighting conditions and comparing a quick scan of individuals with prior photographs of the test subjects, the best success rate was a 33 percent false positive with a 10 percent false negative. In other words, at best 1 in 3 people who weren’t listed as terrorists were nonetheless flagged as such, while 10 percent of the people designated as terrorists were cleared and allowed to continue on their way.

Consider what this would mean in a real world situation like the rather small Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan. About 2.4 million people pass through Ford International airport. Using this system, assuming that 100 terrorists pass through the airport and the system manages to catch every one, another 660,000 people would be wrongly flagged as terrorists and require some sort of investigation with security officials.

Assume that each such investigation takes only 15 minutes to clear up and the security folks are being paid $9/hour. That amounts to $1.5 million each year just to identify people who are not terrorists.

This system would quickly be ignored by security officials (“there goes the damn face recognition software again. What a piece of crap.”) as it would be completely unworkable.

Source:

Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance. Thomas C Greene, The Register, September 27, 2001.

Tajikistan: The Hunger the World Forgot?

The BBC’s David Shukman recently visited the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan and wrote a compelling report of the hunger he observed in the Asian country. Hunger which has largely been ignored with the recent emphasis on Afghanistan’s humanitarian disaster.

As Shukman notes, even he found it hard to believe that Tajikistan could go so quickly from part of one of the biggest superpowers in world history to abject poverty and famine. Agricultural conditions in Tajikistan are so bad, that some are experiencing what Shukman calls a negative harvest — the grain they are getting out of the land is actually less than what they originally planted in the form of seeds.

On the other hand, part of the problem is those former Soviet patterns of agriculture. the people Shukman visits are still living on one a giant collective farm — a method of organizing agriculture that caused a couple major famines and numerous smaller food shortages during more than 70 years of Communist rule.

Unfortunately, Tajikistan’s problems have yet to generate much worldwide interest. According to Shukman, “The Red Cross never receives anything like the money it asks for. Donors don’t seem interested. It doesn’t fit the stereotype of a starving country.”

Source:

Fear and famine in Tajikistan. The BBC, October 6, 2001.

Milk Consumption Prevents Breast Cancer!

Okay, the headline was a bit deceptive since milk consumption probably won’t reduce your risk of breast cancer, but that’s exactly the sort of conclusion I’d draw from a new study if I were as careless about treating dietary studies as many animal rights activists are.

Researchers in Norway studied 48,844 women in an attempt to measure the relationship between childhood and adult milk consumption and breast cancer incidence. Researchers obtained information about the women’s milk consumption in 1991-92, and then followed up 6 years later by obtaining information about breast cancer incidence among the study group.

Childhood milk consumption was slightly negatively associated with breast cancer among women 34-39 but not for women 40-49. Adult milk consumption had a large negative relationship, with women who drank 3 glasses of milk per day have a roughly 40 percent lower risk of breast cancer than women who did not drink milk (this result persisted even after controlling for age, reproductive and hormonal factors, body mass index, education, physical activity and alcohol consumption).

Should young adult women start consuming milk to prevent breast cancer? Probably not, for much the same reason that women shouldn’t abandon drinking milk if the study had found a 40 percent increased risk. These are interesting findings, but even with such a large study, this is still an awfully small association to warrant altering one’s lifestyle over.

Not to mention that, like most dietary studies, the Norway researchers relied completely on self-reporting of milk. Its questionable whether or not people can accurately report how much milk they consumed (in fact, studies of self-reporting find people often make gross errors in reporting contemporary behavior, much less behavior that occurred years and decades ago).

But there is still one conclusion that is probably warranted from the various studies of milk consumption and cancer. None of these studies shows the sort of increased risk of cancer from milk drinking that would be required to establish a causal connection between the two. Whatever else one can say about milk, there seems to be a death of evidence linking milk drinking to cancer, despite what animal rights activists would like you to belive.

Source:

Childhood and adult milk consumption and risk of premenopausal breast cancer in a cohort of 48,844 women – the Norwegian women and cancer study. International Journal of Cancer, Volume 93, Issue 6, 2001.

Courts Rule Against Anti-Abortion Protesters in Cases that Could Profoundly Impact the Animal Rights Movement

In the last few years there have been a couple of lawsuits filed under the |Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization| statutes against animal rights activists and groups. Long before these lawsuits, however, abortion rights groups were testing the limits of the RICO statutes by suing anti-abortion protesters charging that even if the protesters didn’t directly engage in violent acts, they were nonetheless part of a criminal conspiracy designed to shut down a legitimate enterprise. In the first week of October, developments in two such cases emerged.

In the first case, NOW v. Scheidler, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected an appeal by anti-abortion activist Joseph Scheidler that a court order against him violated his First Amendment rights.

Scheidler and several other people who were members of an anti-abortion group repeatedly engaged in acts of civil disobedience at abortion clinics (which occurred prior to the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act). Among other things, Scheidler and others obstructed access to abortion clinics, damaged clinic property, and on occasion threatened people try to enter the clinic. Pretty much the same tactics often used by animal rights activists.

NOW argued in court that the pattern of actions by Scheidler and his associates constituted evidence of a criminal conspiracy designed to illegally interfere with the operation of a legitimate enterprise. Scheidler, for his part, argued that individuals in his organization were acting on their own ethical principles, and that in fact some members had acted in ways that he disapproved of. The Court rejected that argument, essentially arguing that because the defendants were board members of the same group, had written letters in support of illegal acts, and participated in the planning of illegal acts, that the organization itself had a criminal purpose.

The second case, Planned Parenthood of Columbia/Williamette, et al. v. American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA), et al. revolves around a web site known as the “Nuremberg Files.” The Nuremberg Files site posted pictures and personal information of abortion providers in the form of Wanted Posters.

The anti-abortion activists argued that the web site content was a legitimate form of free speech, but a jury ruled against the activists in a RICO lawsuit and awarded abortion providers a $107.5 million judgment. The Ninth Circuit Court had originally ruled in 1999 that at the Wanted Posters constituted “true threats,” allowing the lawsuit to proceed. But after the jury’s verdict, a three-judge panel reversed the judgment saying that the Wanted Posters were protected by the First Amendment.

Now, the Ninth Circuit Court has agreed to review that decision, and is very likely to restate its original thinking about the wanted posters and reinstate the jury’s verdict. Either way, this lawsuit is definitely headed to the Supreme Court.

If these lawsuits ultimately are successful, they will provide ample tools that will inevitably be used to pursue legal action against animal rights activists. For example, under most circumstances it would be difficult to pursue legal action against an organization such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but under RICO a lawsuit arguing that PETA’s pattern of actions constitute a criminal conspiracy might be successful. And PETA’s pretty careful about putting some distance between itself and those who commit acts of violence — many other groups would be sitting ducks for such lawsuits.

At the very least, as they did with the anti-abortion movement, such lawsuits would cripple many of the more extremist parts of the animal rights movement by tying them up in court for years and forcing them to try to keep up with very expensive legal bills.

Sources:

“Nuremberg Files” Case Will Be Reconsidered. Feminist Daily News Wire, October 4, 2001.

Anti-abortion extremists suffer major court defeat. Feminist Daily News Wire, October 2, 2001.