Children as Test Subjects

The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research concluded in 1977 that children were an especially vulnerable population because they could not offer consent. Yet, children today are more likely to become research subjects now that federal policies begun in the mid-1990s have changed the face of the “typical research subject.” The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Revitalization Act mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in all research in 1994 and added children in 1998. So far, the new FDA and NIH policies have placed stress not on protecting children but on ensuring children’s access to research—unfortunately, this too often means researchers’ access to children. This is an ominous paradigm shift for black children, who already are overrepresented in nontherapeutic and stigmatizing medical research.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

Radioactive Experiments on Orphans

Vanderbilt University physicians administered radioactive cocktails to pregnant women in Nashville. The University of Chicago fed the radioactive elements strontium and cesium to 102 unwitting patients at state schools. One Dickensian institution, the Fernald School in Waltham, Massachusetts, added radioactive oatmeal to the menus of thirty orphans in a program sponsored by the AEC with the support of the Quaker Oats Company. Old videotapes reveal that some of these Fernald boys were African American, but no records with racial identifiers were ever released. When victims died, government scientists obtained their bodies and autopsied them carefully, measuring the levels of radioactivity and biological damage. To enable large numbers of these grim assessments, at least fifteen thousand bodies were exposed and collected for one project alone: Operation Sunshine. Until the mid-1980s and without the knowledge of patients or their next of kin, this program shipped the bodies and body parts of radiation experiment victims to be dissected at headquarters in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

Scientific Lie

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An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.

On the Decay of the Art of Lying by Mark Twain

Note: See the review.

 

Giggle Book Award: Science of Bodily Functions

This month the award goes to a book that makes science fun: Belches, Burps and Farts, Oh My! written by Artie Bennett and illustrated by Pranas T. Naujokaitis.

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True to its title, the book delves into the word of gas, covering the expulsions of many animals (humans included) and providing a litany of fascinating facts in the form of lyrical poetry:

Snakes “cut one” to drive away
A predator in search of prey.

Fish fart to communicate.
The bubbles help them congregate.

Lonely beetles need a mate.
Tooting draws a candidate!
A chemical within each fart
Helps to win a beetle’s heart!

Combine these catchy science rhymes with fun illustrations and it’s one fun book!

Bubble Gum

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“To finish off his grand creation, he needed some color. “Pink coloring was the only one I had at hand,” said the inventor, so in it went!

A batch was cut into pieces and five pounds of it was brought to a local mom-and-pop store. It was the day after Christmas, and the kids who came into the store got the present of a lifetime! They were the first people in the world to try bubble gum that worked.”

Pop! The Invention of Bubble Gum by Meghan McCarthy

Frogcasting the Weather

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 “At first Freddy’s mom thought all this weather watching was cute. But Freddy was right so many times that Mama Frog couldn’t help but boast to her friends about Freddy’s amazing weather-prediction abilities.

Before long, the whole town knew about Freddy’s frogcasting ways.”

Freddy the Frogcaster, written by Janice Dean and illustrated by Russ Cox

Laika

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“She had been rescued from the broken spaceship and taken far away from the lonely life she had known by a loving family that she had always dreamed of finding.”

Laika Astronaut Dog by Owen Davey

Author’s Note:

On November 3, 1957, Laika became the first animal to orbit Earth when she was launched into space in the Sputnik 2 rocket.

A few hours later, Laika‘s spacecraft malfunctioned. Though many think she perished, this story, with its happy ending for the brave little dog, is the one I choose to believe.

Prejudices and Proof

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It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Waldon by Henry David Thoreau

Nature and the Lack of Connection

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Most of the quotes I post to this website will describe nature as a place of respite, adventure, and just plain old-fashioned goodness. The wild world is a place that I love. It makes me feel at home, even more so than the domesticated wild we commonly call ‘country’ (as in farm-country).

That said, the following quotes deviate a bit from this trend because I believe they are equally important. While I often feel a spiritual connection to nature (in general), there is often a lack of respect, or simple misunderstanding, of the reality that is the wild.

Preserving and protecting nature is important, but respecting the wild, on it’s own terms, is imperative. You cannot have a spiritual connection to nature and refuse to protect it’s existence. Neither can you effectively protect the natural world without respecting, and providing space, for the wild things to be…well…wild.

Anyhow, enough of my opinion. If you get the chance to read the full article, I strongly encourage you to do so. But, for now, here are the quotes:

QUOTES:

But above all else, the actual experience of being in nature seems to affirm its essential holiness. The natural world feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves.

Compared to the cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily life—driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating a shape-shifting digital culture—that seems hostile. Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because we have made it so.

We have created an imaginary connection with nature because we lack a tangible one, and we carry that connection in spirit because we no longer follow it in body. The sense of the divine that many feel in wild places is less a bond with nature than another symptom of the absence of that bond.

the way you see the world determines much about the world you are willing to live in, and the spiritual lens has failed us as a tool for seeing clearly.

It hasn’t been my experience that full-force nature directs the mind toward thoughts of positive vibrations or divine master plans. Nature itself is enough, its stories written in blood and shit and electrons and birdsong, and in this we may ultimately find all the sacredness we seem to need.

False Idyll,” by J.B. MacKinnon – An entry in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013, Edited by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Right To Live As Nature Designed

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(Note: I have scheduled this commentary for Wednesday because the research described was primarily focused on Linguistics with some commentary about the subtle cruelty of pun-based name. Otherwise, it is primarily science, conservation and outdoors focused.)

When I was a teenager, working in the boundary waters or northern Minnesota (many years ago), I had the privilege of working alongside a wilderness guide. He was a man who knew true respect for the wild, the water, and the unique area in which he worked. He was a hunter and, as such, had some interesting arguments with a fellow student – a sometimes vegetarian and extremely youthful animal rights activist. One of the arguments he made has stuck with me over many years (paraphrased from memory): “…you eat that animal that was raised on a farm. It spent its whole life locked in a cage or trapped behind a fence. this deer [venison stew he’d brought to share] lived in the wild. It got the chance to be a deer. Now you tell me which is worse, the animal that dies on the farm, or the animal that lived in the wild?”

At the time I thought he’d made sense in a very important way. It wasn’t about whether or not humans lived up to their predatory nature by eating the flesh of other animals. It was only partially an issue of quantity – do we eat entirely too much meat? What was at the core of the issue of animal rights was the quality of life as dictated by the animal’s ability to live within its own birthright, as an animal. Being hunted is part of the deer’s life experience, just as hunting is part of the life experience of a wolf, cougar or bear. By trapping animals in cages and pens, we remove their ability to live and die, according to their own nature.

This long-ago argument kept resurfacing in my memory as I read this article. The author provides some heartbreaking descriptions of cruelty toward animals at the hands of researchers. It was hard to pull out quotes because my heart kept going out to the animals described in the story. I wanted to heal their pain and set them free to experience the life, pleasure, hardship, and pain that an animal deserves to experience – the life they were meant to live as the creature they were made to be.

However, the core of that cruelty seemed to be based on the human perceptions, and individual arrogance, about the nature of both animals and humans. The following quotes (hopefully) illustrate that lack of respect for the animals subjected to research and lack of understanding of both human and animal nature.

QUOTES:

Speculation on the origin of human language was long discouraged among linguists; inquiry into the subject was formally banned by the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866, and the taboo thereby established persisted for nearly a century.

“What makes us human?” The way we phrase the question—which presupposes that the answer must be a definite thing we possess—tends to make language the most satisfactory answer.

There is something glib and thoughtless about bestowing on another conscious being a pun for a name. Glibness and thoughtlessness, as one sees in the documentary, are just a couple of Terrace’s winning traits, and Nim Chimpsky’s name was only the first indignity in a life full of indignity and suffering, which is the main subject of Marsh’s film.

“We enjoy mocking that sliver of biological difference between us and chimpanzees. Yet anyone who has ever looked with curiosity and respect into the face of a chimpanzee has seen a presence there. If we abandon the notion that language is necessarily the bedfellow of consciousness, we get a better understanding of ourselves, while our relationship to the other beings we share this planet with becomes more enlightened, more humble, and more humane.

The Last Distinction,” by Benjamin Hale – An entry in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013, Edited by Siddhartha Mukherjee