the mellow tigger's musings

They say that man's best friend is the dog, but another creature has suffered on our behalf and contributed more to our well being than all the canines ever have. The lowly mouse is so very similar to us in genes and health and disease. This similarity costs it a great deal of ill treatment. I'm not opposed to learning from animal experimentation, but I would like to believe that the usefulness of a particular animal test has been appropriately reviewed and validated.


So, we use them.

We freeze them for 16 years, thaw their carcass, then extract cells to clone them into new mice. (Japanese or English)	To A Mouse; On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough by Robert Burns in November 1785 ... I'm truly sorry Man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An' fellow-mortal! ... But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! ... http://www.electricscotland.com/burns/mouse.html	We inspire creativity by encouraging people to build a better mouse trap.
We use them as hosts for our parasitic additions to their bodies, like this cow cartilage shaped into a human ear configuration.		In the interest of science, of course, we even levitate them by lifting magnetically every molecule of water in their body.

And yet... and yet... every once in a while, this timid relative of ours (who looks more like the first mammal than we ourselves do) can surprise us when it's driven by bravery or curiosity or plain old-fashioned hunger.


I hope that we can accumulate sufficient knowledge to eventually make live animal testing unnecessary. I hope we reach a point where we can turn the animals loose and thank them for their generations of service. Although they'd likely not understand the gesture (Rats of NIMH excepted?), perhaps we could still hold a small ceremony to commemorate that their descendants are finally free from such poor treatment. I hope we can keep an accounting and someday provide to them the same medical benefits that they have provided to us.

It was 5 years ago (2004 September 13) that I found a story about researchers at Columbia University (City of New York) producing mice with autistic behaviors by injecting them with thimerosal.   I suspected that the mice in such experiments would be killed in order to examine their brains post mortem. Just in case, though, I emailed the researcher to offer my services to coordinate a "mouse relocation program". If any mice survived their experiments and were no longer of use to the scientists, I would pay to ship them to new adoptive homes. I was willing to adopt the autistic mice similar to the way that used greyhound dogs are rescued from their industries too. Patricia Clark offered to adopt a pair of them, if I ever got my relocation program running. I never heard back from the researcher, unfortunately.

I make no apologies for myself having descended from omnivores. My diet already leaves me short of appropriate B12 resources. I will continue to eat animals, although I'd rather pick genetically engineered berries that alone can meet all of my nutritional needs. Even if someone finally engineers such a plant, how will we determine the safety of these berries in the human diet?

Before any human, of course, we will feed such berries to a mouse.

For some people, technology seems to be a dizzying force that perpetually brings them new and previously unfathomable possibilities.  The thrashing of expectations forces them to constantly re-evaluate their understanding of the operation of the universe.  (Therefore it also threatens their understanding of God(s), therefore it is to be summarily distrusted as a destabilizing force.)

That's probably why some people are still stuck in the debate over stem cell research into conditions like Parkinson's disease.  They don't realize that they've already lost that debate and the next one too, because these processes are already producing useful knowledge about human ailments.

The "next one" debate that I mean is the creation of chimeras.  A chimera in folklore is a creature made up of several animals.  The traditional Greek example included a lion's head and body, a goat's head from the back, and a snake's tail with the head at the end (pictured here from Wikipedia).  A chimera in the medical sense is an animal whose dna incorporates sequences from other animals, particularly humans.  Human chimera also occur naturally (people have dna from two different people in them), but newly designed animal creations are the issue that I intend here.

I still think that the world very quickly needs to come up with a doctrine of species' rights.  We need to know immediately how to deal with current animals whose intelligence is frequently being revealed to be much like humans'.  We need specific thresholds of understanding (and therefore suffering) that trigger specific prohibitions against certain ill treatment.  Ill treatment is a certainty, as life is very messy, but we need to define when government will or will not become involved. Anyone can claim that their deity abhors a given practice, but I've noticed that it's generally up to humans to define when to enforce a standard.  (Deities seem to never intervene in time to prevent some impatient humans from taking matters into their own vigilante hands.)

So we need standards.  We need them yesterday.   "No" is an insufficient standard, as it's already too late and it's utterly impossible to enforce.  I think that a workable solution may involve making people responsible for the creatures they produce, just as parents are responsible for the creatures that they produce using the old-fashioned horizontal mambo.   I think the concept of chimeras is pretty cool.  I think it does provoke lots of moral questions that seriously need answers.  I'd be pleased if someday the process resulted in a creature that we could ask, "What do you think of the practice of animal experimentation?", and then we receive a thoughtful reply.

Anyway, the news that brought on this blog entry?


More specifically, those animals are re-introduced to their own modified chimeric blood cells.  Not true chimeras, but obviously pointing at the next step of the research, getting an animal's body to continuously produce its own cure.  They think this treatment "might also be effective against other autoimmune disorders like Crohn's disease, lupus and arthritis" and even for organ transplants.  Again, too late to have a debate about the process.  We have important medical knowledge already.  That genie isn't going back into the bottle.

For what it's worth, I would suspect (with weak conviction) that my own mother is a chimera.  She has said before that every time she's had her blood type tested, it's come back as a different type.  Chimera is one possible explanation, at least.

(p.s. Okay, it's an hour later.  I promise I'll stop repeatedly editing the original post now.  *laugh*)

I've been doing some websurfing to try to learn more. My economic view has a name after all. You'd never guess what it is. I was surprised when I found it.  I'll give you a hint first.

You cannot have a satisfactory society made up of competitive, self-interested individuals! In a satisfactory society there must be considerable concern for the public good and the welfare of all, and there must be considerable collective social control and regulation and provision, to make sure all are looked after, to maintain public institutions and standards, and to reinforce the sense of social solidarity whereby all feel willing to contribute to the good of all.
- Ted Trainer

Note that first sentence. Does it give you any ideas? :)  It turns out that the name I found is "Post-Autistic Economics". Imagine that! *laugh*

One group has been publishing a newsletter since 2000 September 01. So of course I expect to be doing some reading of their archives in the coming weeks. A few other people seem to have hit on the same idea, including one guy who has thoughts on how to transition from one economy to another, rather than just waiting patiently for the inevitable implosion.

The links:
http://www.paecon.net/, Post-Autistic Economics Network
(created by French economics students, later joined by Cambridge students)
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/, "The Simpler Way" by Ted Trainer
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/, New Economics Foundation

So I'm not the only person to see the fatal flaw in any economic system based on growth.  Growth happens, and it must be accounted for in any stable economic system.  Growth is the flaw, though, rather than the salvation.  Change is the only certainty.  Growth is not guaranteed.