Almost 200 have had a long break from testing that dates to NASA's early days, but that could end. By Michael Haederle, Los Angeles Times September 3 2010 Ever since the first of their number arrived in New Mexico half a century ago as test subjects in the fledgling U.S. space program, nearly 200 government-owned chimpanzees were routinely injected with viruses and used to test everything from experimental vaccines to insecticides. They have enjoyed a decade-long respite from research at an indoor-outdoor habitat on Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, but now the government wants to move the chimpanzees to a Texas laboratory, where they might face renewed testing. The plan has animal welfare groups and elected officials squaring off against federal scientists at a time when Congress is considering legislation that could shut down federal chimpanzee testing altogether. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing between 94% and 98% of our DNA, which is why some scientists see them as ideal research subjects. The similarity extends to their cognitive abilities. Chimps are intelligent and self-aware, even able to plan future actions. “These animals have been put through the wringer and they deserve to be retired,” says Kathleen Conlee, a program manager with the Humane Society of the United States, who has worked in a primate breeding facility and a great ape sanctuary. “The Humane Society doesn't think a laboratory environment can ever meet the psychological needs of a chimpanzee.” Moving the chimpanzees to the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio is expected to save $2 million a year in upkeep, while making more of a dwindling number of research animals available for crucial medical testing, said Harold Watson, a program director in the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health. John L. VandeBerg, director of the San Antonio primate center, says the chimpanzees are needed to test potential vaccines for diseases, such as hepatitis C and hepatitis B, because they are the only species other than humans that can become infected with those viruses. “We only use chimpanzees when it's not possible to do critical experiments with any other species,” VandeBerg said. The primates are well cared for, he said, and only about 100 are used in research at any time. “They are not people, they are animals,” he said. “I believe it's our ethical responsibility to do the research to alleviate the pain, suffering and deaths of millions of human beings.” VandeBerg concedes past abuses in chimpanzee experiments, but he says research now “involves procedures that are no different than those that are used every day in human clinical medicine. It generally involves drawing blood samples from a vein, just as we do with people; we've all had that done.” There are fewer than 1,000 research chimpanzees in the U.S., about half of them under NIH management. Their numbers are slowly declining because of a federal moratorium on breeding and deaths due to old age. The oldest, a female named Flo, turns 53 on Sept. 29. Although the U.S. is virtually the last country in the world to permit invasive testing of chimpanzees, VandeBerg and others have argued for the resumption of a breeding program to permit further biomedical research. Meanwhile, the Great Ape Protection Act, which would phase out invasive research on federally owned chimps and retire them to sanctuaries, has been introduced in Congress with bipartisan support. Announcement of the plan to relocate the chimpanzees when the current third-party management contract at the Holloman facility expires in May 2011 prompted New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Tom Udall, the state's junior U.S. senator, to urge the NIH to reconsider. Richardson paid a visit to NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., in August to press the point but made little headway. The Holloman chimpanzee colony traces its origins to the 1950s, when NASA acquired chimps for research during the early days of Project Mercury. By the 1970s they had become part of a breeding program, and the Holloman facility was leased to the late Dr. Frederick Coulston, a controversial toxicology researcher who used them to test insecticides and cosmetics. Later, the chimps were managed by New Mexico State University, but during the early 1990s ownership was transferred to Coulston, who by then had started the nonprofit Coulston Foundation and built a nearby private facility in which the chimpanzees were housed in cramped steel-and-concrete cages with little room for exercise. There were persistent accusations of severe abuse and neglect on Coulston's watch, with nearly 50 chimpanzees and monkeys dying from disease, poor veterinary care and experimentation amid documented violations of the Animal Welfare Act. By the time the Coulston lab went bankrupt in 2002, nearly 300 chimpanzees had been transferred to Save the Chimps, a nonprofit organization that operates a sanctuary in Florida. The remaining 186 chimpanzees have been housed as a reserve population at the Holloman facility, which is now managed by Charles River Laboratories under a 10-year contract that expires next year. About 60 others that were at Holloman have been transferred to other facilities over the past decade. The plan to transfer the Holloman chimpanzees to Texas has riled national animal welfare organizations, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the New England Anti-Vivisection Society and Animal Protection of New Mexico. An alert from the Humane Society in late July resulted in 25,000 protest letters addressed to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, the society's Conlee said. “They're certainly not going to move these chimpanzees without hearing about it from the public,” Conlee said. “We're not against human disease research. We want them to use the money in a better fashion than they do.” Some experts question the scientific premise behind continued use of chimpanzees as an animal model for HIV and hepatitis research. Although it is true that chimpanzees can be infected with viruses like HIV and hepatitis C, they do not develop symptoms. “They're an abject failure,” said Dr. John Pippin, a retired cardiologist who works for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “They have contributed nothing to the development of a vaccine for either disease.” He chalks up the continued reliance on animal models to scientific inertia. “It's an enormous industry,” he said. Animal research accounts for between $12 billion and $13 billion annually in federal grant money, and 42% of NIH protocols are for animal research, he said. Pippin contends it is more appropriate to experiment on cell cultures grown from human tissue for vaccine development. In the quest to develop an HIV vaccine, some of the most promising research is in studying the immune response of so-called elite controllers — the small number of HIV-infected people who have never gone on to develop full-blown AIDS, he said. Watson of the National Center for Research Resources acknowledges the strides that have been made in developing new ways to develop and test vaccines, but he insists that the chimpanzees are still needed because their infection process closely mimics that in humans. “The alternatives are something that we're very sensitive to, and our scientists are constantly looking for and finding alternatives for certain things,” Watson said. “But as it stands right now, there's not really an alternative to chimpanzees for evaluating the vaccine.” added by: EthicalVegan
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Photo: Banksy.co.uk Poor Dolphin World-famous guerilla artist Banksy has made many environmental statements in the past, but we think this one is particularly clever, especially with the events of the past few months . Check out the video after the jump to see the coin-operated kiddie ride in action…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Banksy Turns Kiddie Ride Into Anti-BP Statement
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photo: Mr. T in DC via flickr A bit of a sustainable seafood smackdown is ongoing: In a new opinion piece in the journal Nature scientists from the University of British Columbia, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and other institutions have called out the Marine Stewardship Council for not doing a good job at marine stewardship. As is to be expected, MSC strongly disagrees. … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Marine Stewardship Council’s Marine Stewardship Questionable, Scientists Say
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On Thursday’s American Morning, CNN’s Deborah Feyerick continued her network’s promotion of the charge the “Islamophobia” is growing in the U.S. All but one of Feyerick’s sound bites during her one-sided report were from those who agree with this charge, with the sole exception being used an example of someone using ” Islam …[as] a political wedge issue .” Anchor Kiran Chetry and substitute anchor Ali Velshi introduced the correspondent’s report just before the bottom of the 7 am Eastern hour. Chetry stated that “attempted terror attacks aimed at the U.S. have come mostly from Muslim extremists born outside of America” and then claimed that “America’s Muslim community though has been quick to warn law enforcement about these potential threats.” Velshi added that “the question is, why does it appear that more and more that all Muslims are being portrayed as potential terrorists or as targets of hate .” Feyerick began by citing unnamed ” experts will tell you that there’s a great deal of misunderstanding when it comes to what Islam is all about. Add on politicians spreading rumors that Sharia law – Islamic law- is coming to the United States simply because a group of Americans wants to build a mosque . It’s time to ask, what’s really going on?” She then noted that the “Islamic center and mosque to be built near Ground Zero is not the only mosque drawing fire. About a dozen others across the country are also under attack, from angry protests and suspected arson in Murfreesboro, Tennessee to Temecula, California . American mosques, in some cases, [are] being portrayed as monuments to terror or terror training centers.” The CNN correspondent continued with a series of sound bites from those who allege a growing and threatening “Islamophobia,” and singled out conservatives for apparently persecuting Muslims: FEYERICK: Conservatively, figures show an estimated five million Muslims in America, and intensifying hostility and rise in hate speech is alarming to many, like these clerics who we met at a recent Islamic summit in Houston . YASIR QADHI, ALMAGHRIB INSTITUTE: You would never hear any mainstream commentator say, do you think another Christian sect could open up a mosque? Do you think Jews should be allowed to open their synagogues anywhere they want? We have mainstream news presenters just asking the question bluntly, do you think Muslims should open- should be allowed to open mosques anywhere they want? WISAM SHARIEFF, BAYYINAH INSTITUTE: What changed the game? Nineteen people changed the game? How did that happen? Because we’ve been your doctor, we’ve been your x-ray tech, your accountant. We’ve been serving you slushies for a long time. (unidentified man off-camera laughs) So, what tipped the scales? FEYERICK: Wisam Sharieff, Yasir Qadhi, and other prominent American clerics say American Muslims are under siege, both by Islamic extremists and some U.S. conservatives . QADHI: You have radical Islamic clerics, right, preaching from abroad, saying you cannot be an American and a Muslim at the same time. Well, low and behold, on the far right, you have quite a number of famous, prominent Islamophobes who are saying the exact same message. FEYERICK: The Ground Zero mosque, as some call it, has whipped up national debate, fueled, in part, by misinformation and fear-mongering. Yet, anti-Muslim feelings had been simmering. Feyerick’s example of a “famous prominent Islamophobe,” to use Mr. Qadhi’s term, was none other than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Before playing her sound bite of Gingrich, she used her “wedge issue” label, and afterwards, went on to cite other unnamed “experts” and highlight an apparent “hate crime” against a Muslim: FEYERICK: Islam has become a political wedge issue with politicians like Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis . NEWT GINGRICH: You know, Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center. FEYERICK: In fact, a Duke University study finds, rather than fuel terrorism in America, contemporary mosques prevent it. National security experts and American Muslims, like Saraj Mohammed, fear there’s a lot at stake . SARAJ MOHAMMED: The more they speak and the more they incite people, they themselves are a concern to be dealt with and they have to be told, you have to stop this rhetoric. It’s hurting American security. FEYERICK (on-camera): Right. Because it’s creating hatred? MOHAMMED: Yes, it’s creating a lot of hatred. FEYERICK: The latest 2008 FBI statistics on hate crimes against Muslims don’t reflect what’s going on now. But experts believe the spike that happened after 9/11 could repeat itself . FEYRICK (voice-over): In New York recently, a cab driver was stabbed after his attacker allegedly asked if he was Muslim. QADHI: Slowly but surely, we will counter this Islamophobia. Everybody had it. The Irish had it. The Catholics had it. The Italians had it. Now, it’s just time for the Muslims. FEYERICK: (“Allah ackbar” being chanted in an unidentified location) How long it will take to counter is anyone’s guess. At the end of the segment, the CNN correspondent, along with Chetry and Velshi, forwarded the claim that the Islamic cleric behind the Ground Zero mosque, Imam Faisal Rauf, was a “moderate” and bewailed what might happen if other “mainstream” Muslims were rejected by Americans: FEYERICK (live): Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the one who is at the head of the so-called Ground Zero mosque , will return to New York City sometime today. He’s been serving as an emissary for the U.S. State Department, reaching out to leaders in the Middle East, acting as a bridge between the U.S. and Muslim countries . He says, just as American Catholics were crucial in pushing reform in Vatican II, so will American Muslims be indispensable in bridging the chasm between America and the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. So, there’s a real danger that alienating or marginalizing Western moderate mainstream thinkers is going to be a problem, simply because of religion . VELSHI: It’s a big issue. I know Imam Faisal, as you do- you’d be hard pressed to ever be able to describe him as radical, or a radical thinker. He believes he’s building a bridge between different faiths, but when this label is applied, it gets applied and it sticks . FEYERICK: Well, absolutely- and you have people simply asking questions with no fundamental proof as to what they’re saying. It’s one thing to say, let’s find out where the money is coming from. Well, I can say that. But it doesn’t mean – VELSHI: Right- FEYERICK: That it’s coming from somewhere insidious. But that’s what the allegation- that’s what the insinuation is . So there’s a real, sort of- VELSHI: That’s right. It’s buried in the insinuation . FEYERICK: Yeah. CHETRY: And I know that you’re hoping to get chance to sit down and talk to him one-on-one, correct? FEYERICK: Absolutely. We spoke to the developer, who couldn’t have been more honest about what this is about, and we’re hoping to get a chance to speak to him as well . CHETRY: Good stuff. VELSHI: Thanks for your great coverage on this. Thanks, Deb. Exactly a week earlier, on August 26, Feyerick joined the mainstream media’s guessing game over the aforementioned stabbing of the Muslim taxicab driver, advancing the hypothesis that it may have been ” connected to this big Ground Zero controversy, where we’re hearing so much anti-Muslim sentiment .” Who would have thought that a mere six weeks or so earlier, the correspondent actually played hardball with the real estate developer behind the New York City mosque, Sharif el-Gamel.
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CNN Continues One-Sided Reporting on ‘Islamophobia’ in America
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Investigative Report: How the BP Oil Rig Blowout Happened Three Mile Island, Challenger, Chernobyl—and now, Deepwater Horizon. Like those earlier disasters, the destruction of the drilling rig was an accident waiting to happen. Here, engineers in the growing science of failure analysis identify seven fatal flaws that led to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and draw lessons on how to prevent future catastrophes. By: Carl Hoffman PART ONE… April 20 was a triumphant evening for British Petroleum and the crew of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon. Floating 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5000 feet of water, the oil rig was close to completing a well 13,000 feet beneath the ocean floor—an operation so complex it's often compared to flying to the moon. Now, after 74 days of drilling, BP was preparing to cap the Macondo Prospect well until a production rig was brought in to start harvesting oil and gas. Around 10:30 in the morning, a helicopter flew in four senior executives—two from BP and two from Transocean, to celebrate the well's completion and the rig's seven years without a serious accident. What unfolded over the next few hours could almost have been written as a treatise in the science of industrial accidents. As with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial core meltdown in 1979, the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the space shuttle Challenger disintegration in 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosions and fi re that same year, there is never one mistake or one malfunctioning piece of hardware to blame. Instead, the Horizon disaster resulted from many human and technical failings in a risk-taking corporation that operated in an industry with ineffective regulatory oversight. By the time the blowout came, it was almost inevitable. “It's clear that the problem is not technology, but people,” says Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the university of California–Berkeley. “It was a chain of important errors made by people in critical situations involving complex technological and organization systems.” Bea and other engineers subject catastrophes like Deepwater Horizon to the science of failure analysis for good reason: Studying industrial disasters can lead to understanding the root causes behind every accident, which is the critical first step toward improving safety and preventing future big bangs. If we learn from mistakes, failure can drive innovation, both technical and organizational. “A lot of intelligence came out of Three Mile Island,” says Larry Foulke, former president of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct professor at the university of Pittsburgh, knowledge that led to improvements like better control-room ergonomics and the standardization and accreditation of industry-wide training programs.Since Three Mile Island, there has not been another major accident in the U.S. nuclear industry. The following lessons drawn from forensic engineering should spur changes in the oil industry and government agencies that will lead to better risk assessment, more useful regulatory oversight, safer operating procedures and rapid crisis response. The blowout was a punishing lesson: 11 workers were killed and 17 injured in the accident itself. The resulting oil spill damaged the economy and environment of the entire Gulf Coast. But out of this calamity can come changes that will reduce the chances of such a tragedy occurring again, not just in deepwater drilling but in other high tech, high-risk industries as well. Success Breeds Complacency A simple but counterintuitive fact led to the Horizon disaster: wells, even ones drilled in deep water, had worked most of the time, just as the space shuttle and chemical and nuclear plants had functioned successfully, in some cases for decades. Although underwater drilling is complex and challenging, there are 3423 active wells in the Gulf of Mexico, 25 in water deeper than 1000 feet. Seven months before the blowout and about 250 miles southeast of Houston, the Horizon had drilled the world's deepest well—an astounding 35,055 feet. What was impossible just a few years earlier had become seemingly routine as BP and Transocean banged out record firsts on the farthest frontiers of technology and geography. The same offshore techniques and equipment that worked in shallow hydrocarbon formations seemed to function fine at ever greater depths and higher pressures. The offshore rush was on, and nothing was going to stop it. “when you think you've got a robust system,” says Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke university, “you tend to relax.” Other industries have lapsed into the same sense of false security. “By the time of Three Mile Island,” Foulke says, “the nuclear industry had not had a major mishap in 25 years. when you get an attitude that nothing bad happens, it leads you to believe that nothing ever will. ” It's called hubris, and it set the stage for the Deepwater disaster. “In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill,” read the exploration plan that BP submitted on March 10, 2009, to the u.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS), which then managed and regulated offshore drilling, “it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry-wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses . . . ” That was nonsense. Although offshore blowouts occur frequently—there were 173 in the Gulf of Mexico alone from 1980 to 2008—there had never been one in deep water. In fact, neither BP nor any of its competitors had “proven equipment or technology” or any backup plan for a catastrophic failure at great depth. “The industry has not developed an oil spill plan for the low probability, high- consequence event when everything fails,” says Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the university of Texas. CONTINUED… added by: EthicalVegan
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PBR+passion pit thats all you need. link: http://www.bite.ca/bitedaily/2010/09/how-to-catch-a-hipster/ added by: romanswietlik
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Man dives 40 ft. down, attempting to commit suicide, only to survive. added by: Geoffiroth
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link: http://www.bite.ca/bitedaily/2010/09/prestigious-and-notable-zombies/ added by: romanswietlik
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