A Boundless Ethic

From NPR:

A Pakistani teenager who entertained street crowds by walking on hot coals and sticking knives through his arms has led scientists to find a genetic defect that renders its carriers unable to feel pain.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge in England pinpointed the cause: a defect in a gene that codes for a protein on the surface of pain-sensing nerve cells.

The boy’s secret was found out prior to his 14th birthday, when he attempted to jump off a roof and fell to his death, prompting an autopsy and a genetic analysis. When the results came back, scientists discovered that they boy, as well as 6 members of his extended family, could not feel pain.

This story spread quickly and scientists are studying this phenomenon with the hopes of developing new pain medications. But the discovery raised another question: is it unethical to conduct tests and experiments on animals if they do not feel pain?

Dr. Alan Goldberg, Director emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, along with PhD student Renee Gardner, surveyed members of the animal protection community as well as scientist to find out their feeling on this pressing issue.

Click here for the article by Andrea Appleton from for June 2009 (Volume 61 Issue 3) edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine.

Sources:

-NPR

Over the past 7 years, scientists around the globe have been experimenting with a protein strand in animals that allows them to literally glow in the dark. It’s called Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP for short. First discovered in jellyfish by Osamu Shimomura in 1961, this protein has been used by scientists to mark the protein strands of their choice to help study formerly invisible processes under ultraviolet light, such as cranial nervous tissue deterioration due to Huntington’s disease, the spread of cancer, or the development of nerve cells, for which Shimomura and colleagues have earned a 2008 Nobel Prize.

The rhesus monkey, which is being used as a vehicle for tracking Huntington’s disease, as well as the marmoset, which is one of the first cases in which the GFP gene was passed on for more than 1 generation, have been the focus of many scientists research. These recent successes have brought new hope to the tracking and cures of neurological disorders in humans. But, primates are not the only animals to have been injected with the protein strand. Cats, dogs, pigs, mice and fish are among the other animals that have been tested in hopes of learning more about stem cells, genetic disorders, and brain functions.

Sources

From Wired News:

With wild chimp populations plummeting — some populations by 80 percent in three decades — and captive research slowed by rising costs and ethical qualms, primatologist Pascal Gagneux has a compromise: free-range research sanctuaries.

“You can learn incredible things by not mistreating chimpanzees,” said Gagneux, a University of California, San Diego, geneticist.

Gagneux, who is noted for both his comparisons of human and chimpanzee genetics and his critical bioethical analysis of chimp research, says it’s about time we studied chimpanzees humanely. He’d like to see forest-size chimp-research facilities that would allow scientists to continue studying our closest relative, while protecting the endangered species in something close to its natural habitat.

Not everyone agrees, however:

“Chimpanzees should be in sanctuaries to live out the rest of their lives without any blood drawing or having their bodies studied after death,” said Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. She is renowned for her work with Washoe, the first non-human primate to learn sign language. “Humans can volunteer to have their bodies used for science after death. Chimpanzees cannot.”

What should humans do when a wild animal tries to befriend us? It sounds like a fairy tale, but in 2001, in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, it actually happened. A lone killer whale (Orcinus orca) nicknamed Luna was separated from his pod. Without the company of other whales, this highly social mammal sought out human contact.

More at The Scientist.

New Scientist has a fascinating account of research from the University of Auckland, New Zealand:

Crows seem to be able to use causal reasoning to solve a problem, a feat previously undocumented in any other non-human animal, including chimps.

From Times Online:

A new species of insect, nicknamed “the ant from Mars” because of its strange and unique physical characteristics, has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.

The Martialis heureka ant, a blind predator that lives in soil and grows to between 2mm and 3mm long, was identified as belonging to an entirely new branch that is extremely close in nature to the first ants to evolve.

The ant is so unlike any other that its Latin name means “eureka ant from Mars”. The name derives from a comment by the renowned biologist E.O.Wilson, who jokingly told the discovery team that the ant looked so strange it must come from Mars. The “heureka” species epithet, meaning

“I’ve found it”, comes from the way that a single specimen was discovered five years after the first examples had been lost.

Cow pointing North

Cows have joined the list of animals and microorganisms that can apparently orient themselves to magnetic north, if the findings of Czech researchers can be confirmed. From the Los Angeles Times:

German scientists using satellite images posted online by the Google Earth software program have observed something that has escaped the notice of farmers, herders and hunters for thousands of years: Cattle grazing or at rest tend to orient their bodies in a north-south direction just like a compass needle.

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.

There is definitely a “Far Side” cartoon in this story somewhere. . . .

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Magpies have joined the short list of animals that exhibit self-recognition—i.e. recognizing themselves in a mirror—along with dolphins, elephants, and chimpanzees.

Los Angeles Times has the story.