Experimentation
An Evolutionary and
Ethical Perspective
Michael Allen Fox
(University of California)
- "Hey babareebear said the little wee bear,
Hey babareebear said the little wee bear..."
The first thing we do when beginning to read a book for review is look at the jacket picture of the author. Then, as we read, every 100 pages or so, we flip back to take another look. As we become absorbed in the book, familiar with the author's sensibilities, the photograph changes or new things appear in the frame. In a previous lifetime, the aptly named Mr. Fox may have been just that, or something close: a badger or ermine or ferret. He's a pleasant looking gentleman, a professor of philosophy, and may, we suspect, possess a particularly interesting angle on his bleak subject --- medical and other experimention on animals.
The book is published, not by the Sierra Club or the ASPCA, but by the University of California; an institution which must receive a substantial amount of grant dollars for such experimention, and therefore has a vested interest. Be that as it may, Mr. Fox has produced an exhaustive exploration of his subject. He dwells at length on the morality of animal experimentation, comparison with experiments carried out in the Nazi concentration camps, and the possibilities for using something other than a living creature for such research.
There's no denying that animal experimentation has often been the cornerstone of great progress in medical research, and yet there have also been terrible abuses and cruelties. Within the last decade smallpox has been virtually eradicated in Africa. The research which produced the vaccine employed animal experimentation. Women's makeup is often tested for its likelihood to cause irritation by dropping the substance into the eyes of rabbits --- it may painfully blind the bunnies, but it keeps the ladies' eyes and skin irritation free. Of the two examples we cite, both impose a cruel fate on the test animal, though the resulting benefit of the latter seems more superfluous than the first. In the case of animal experimentation, as with so much, it is left to us, finally, to remind ourselves that it was little more than luck, happenstance and a couple of opposing fingers that landed us at the top of the food chain. For those who believe in reincarnation (for which Mr. Fox's visage is a compelling argument) a mantra to the effect of "There but for the grace of God go I" may give guidance. If that doesn't work try "Hey babareebear said the little wee bear."
Confessions of a
Technological Optimist
Pamela McCorduck
(Harcourt-Brace)
McCorduck's writing is passionate and wise. With the exception of Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine), no other writer has conveyed the conceptual beauty of the computer.
Here it comes into our lives, this inevitable engine for the Age of Symbols, an age that marked its debut with the work of Sigmund Freud in one important domain, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in another, Ferdinand de Saussuve in still a third, all taking up as central to their separate disciplines the systematic idea of representation: standing for, the object as reference to another object. Thus the symbol, and now its own machine, the computer: It enters because we want it, we need it, a human machine in a way no other ever has been...As the microscope revealed the underlying structure shared by all living organisms, the cell, so the computer is revealing the underlying structures of all symbols, so varied and rich that it seems impossible to find connections among them that don't verge on superstition
To remain ignorant or indifferent to it is to step aside from our own century's contribution to all the other magnificent intellectual adventures that have exalted the human spirit, beginning, perhaps, with the invention of language itself.
It's commonplace that the twentieth century holds a ghastly store of tragedy for its children, who must clutch at their humanity against all despair and dread. We have seen poetry falter; we have seen the law fail us; formal religion was lost to us long ago. But in the distance, these troubled times may be remembered best for the invention --- the inevitable invention --- of an instrument to give us heart, for it liberates and magnifies the human property that has always served us best, our own intelligence.
A Novel
Thomas Hoving
(Simon & Schuster)
A Biography of
William James Sidis,
America's Greatest
Child Prodigy
Amy Wallace
(Dutton)
We always envision the Wallace Word Factory as the Swanson's of the publishing biz; Irving in charge of the Salisbury Steak, David parboiling the string beans, and Amy dredging up mashed potatoes.
The Prodigy certainly is a potato --- mashed together in record time in Amy's trusty spud cutter, facts and history glaucously amush, lumped up just in time for some new Dutton publishing deadline.
Sidis' history is not unworthy of interest nor pursuit: he was a certifiable genius, perhaps as great a prodigy as John Stuart Mill. He could type at three, write on anatomy by five, and speak seven languages at age six. He entered Harvard in 1909 when he was eleven years old; he composed poems and elaborate theories (he came up with a theory for the creation of the universe which is not unlike the Big Bang) --- but within a decade, he had dropped out of school and life --- spending the rest of his days hiding from the press and collecting streetcar transfers. His sad tale has great potential for in-depth probing (what happens psychologically to child pushed to the limits while still a prepubescent?) but the TV Dinner School of Journalism can kill an entertaining story deader 'n' an armadillo on a Texas two-laner just outside Waxahatchie at midnight.
In the War on Drugs
Steven Wisotsky
(Greenwood)
For the poor --- it even worse: the police now have tanks to shove down your front door and squash you and your family flat in efforts to make the ghettos safe for democracy.
Not satisfied with this, we destroy the governing systems of whole countries (like Colombia) because of our arrant needs, and then dump money on their governments to punish those who are merely feeding our habits --- habits which are a product of our strange neo-puritan lifestyle. The people of America had the grace, in 1933, to push through the 21st Amendment; perhaps it time to do the same for drugs.
Wisotsky, a professor of law at Nova University, has had a bellyfull, saying
- The War on Drugs inevitabIy is a losing and destructive policy; it reflects a set of unconscious, prejudicial, attitudes portraying the drug taker as victim rather than one exercising personal liberty in the pursuit of fundamental psychic needs. These attitudes imprison us, disabling us from taking meaningful and principled action. Breaking the impasse requires a new paradigm of individual responsibility for drug control.
Americans have always delighted in overseeing the morals of other Americans --- but fun as it may be to try to punish those who don't live up to our standards, our morals pitted against theirs creates a hellishly expensive public policy. For instance, Wisotsky points out that federal taxes on a legal drug trade could wipe out our national debt in two years; he also makes note of the fact that the Coast Guard has taken to chasing after drug dealers on the high seas in lieu of saving lives.
A few years ago, Consumer Reports issued a thorough study on drugs and drug use which claimed that the belief inaddicting powers of drugs is the most dangerous addiction of the operatives of the DEA. The War on Drugs makes us all out to be children, "treats people as though they were not morally responsible," says Wisotsky. He sees our policy as a rearguard action that has to change, and change drastically, in the coming years.