Close a Deadly Loophole, Protect Chimpanzees

Thanks to Jim F for the link

go HERE to sign the petition

Target: Division of Policy and Directives - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services
Sponsored by: Center for Biological Diversity
Please speak up to protect chimpanzees who can't defend themselves. The worldwide population of wild chimpanzees has fallen by nearly 70 percent in the past 30 years -- take action now to save these animals.

Wild chimpanzees have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1976, but a special rule exempts captive chimpanzees from protection. This loophole in the Act is preventing the recovery of the species in the wild by encouraging their illegal trade.

Chimpanzees are endangered due to habitat loss, poaching and illegal trafficking -- wild chimpanzees are captured and sold for use as entertainment, as pets and as test subjects.

We have a critical moment right now to help captive and wild chimpanzees: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering whether to protect captive chimpanzees under the Endangered Species Act. Send your comments today in support of protecting every chimpanzee as endangered.

Former Lab Beagles See the Sun for the First Time

Beagle Freedom Project - Second Rescue - June 8, 2011 from João Allex on Vimeo.

By TERRI POUS
from Time

Dog videos never fail to conjure up some sort of emotion. And this one really brings the waterworks. The above footage shows male beagles that were rescued from a California university animal testing lab seeing sunlight and stepping on grass for the first time.

The rescue mission, which happened in June, was recently followed by a much larger one from a lab in Spain. The group that undertook the cause, Animal Rescue Media Education (ARME), rescued a total of 72 dogs in the most recent effort, 32 of them having already been adopted in Europe, according to NBC Los Angeles.

ARME’s Beagle Freedom Project spokesman Gary Smith told the station that the beagles, all between ages 4 and 7, had lived in cages their entire lives.

Unfortunately, beagles’ notoriously obedient dispositions makes them ideal for experimentation. According to the Beagle Freedom Project’s website, they are the breed of choice for lab testing of pharmaceutical, household, and cosmetic products due to their ability to adapt to life in a cage and the fact that they are relatively inexpensive to feed.

When the beagles are no longer needed for research, some labs contact organizations such as ARME, who then work to find good homes for the dogs.

This heartbreaking video was filmed back in June, when the organization brought nine beagles to Los Angeles to get a second chance at life. We dare you not to be moved by that first beagle’s initial tentative steps and soulful eyes.

ARME is a non-profit advocacy group and 501(c)(3) organization funded by tax-deductible contributions. Information on how to make a donation or adopt a beagle is available on the organization’s website.

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeagleFreedomProject
homepage: http://www.beaglefreedomproject.org/

Great Op-Ed: Apes and Anthropomorphism

from NPR
by BARBARA J KING

Autumn begins tomorrow. Suffused already with a seasonal nostalgia, I'm replaying scenes of summer in my head. Among them is sitting in a dark theatre, watching apes clamber across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

In the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, alpha-male chimpanzee Caesar leads a band of apes against humans in a bid to escape the grip of their tyranny.

Before he is a battle-hardened rebel leader, however, we get to see Caesar as he grows up, transforming from playful primate child in a human household to confused adolescent to powerful adult.

"Careful, human no like smart ape," he's told by the orangutan Maurice. Nevertheless, Caesar learns human speech, and has the temerity to use it.

Two aspects of the film caught my attention. Marvelously, no living primates were forced to work on the set; CGI apes were used instead. What made ROTPOTA work as a film is our collective willingness — at least while watching it — to embrace anthropomorphism.

Defined as the attribution of human qualities or abilities to non-human animals, anthropomorphism is familiar to most anyone who lives with animals. Let's say I'm in a room with two of my cats. One jumps in my lap, and purrs as I stroke and whisper endearments to her. The other glares at me, and acts aloof for the next hour. "He's jealous!" I may think to myself. Or, after a tough day at work, you slump on the couch. Your dog nuzzles your hand and looks into your eyes. "He understands," you may conclude.

But is it valid to label animals' emotions and actions in this way?

It's one thing for Hollywood to dazzle audiences with anthropomorphic screen apes, but when we apply human terms to real-life animals do we wrongly superimpose our experiences onto theirs?

Real, breathing apes offer a good starting place for thinking about anthropomorphism. (Cats, dogs, and other creatures matter too; I'll expand my scope at a later date.) I often recount the following event noted by the biologists Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann. It stars the chimpanzee Brutus at Tai National Park in the Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa.

A young female chimpanzee, Tina, was killed by a leopard. Her body lay in the forest. Twelve of Tina's companions sat silently around her body, sometimes touching it gently. Brutus, the community's alpha male, sat with Tina for nearly five hours. When youngsters approached, he shooed them away, with a single exception — Tina's younger brother Tarzan, who came near, pulled on his big sister's hand many times, and gazed at her body.

We know, thanks to decades of field research uncovering aspects of chimpanzees' minds and emotions, that careful anthropomorphism is appropriate here. Working in context, it makes good scientific sense to conclude that Tarzan felt grief for his sister, that Brutus was able to recognize Tarzan's bond of affection with Tina and that Brutus chose to act upon that knowledge by compassionately allowing Tarzan to do what other youngsters could not.

A skeptic would balk. Maybe Tarzan was only curious about why his sister's body lay so still. Perhaps Brutus had noticed some kind of connection between the brother and sister, but had no deep motives for what he did.

Science needs skeptics in order to stay true to its self-correcting nature. I can't emphasize enough, though, the relevant weight of cumulative knowledge about chimpanzees. A new source to consider is Andrew Westoll's The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary. Westoll tells the stories of 13 chimpanzees, once trapped in biomedical testing facilities and now living in a Canadian sanctuary run by Gloria Grow.

One chimpanzee's tale seared itself into my mind. Westoll writes about Tom:

"For more than thirty years, he was repeatedly infected with increasingly virulent strains of HIV, went through numerous hepatitis-B studies, and survived at least sixty-three liver, bone marrow, and lymph-node biopsies. Tom has gone through more surgeries than anyone else at Fauna — by Gloria's estimate, he was knocked unconscious at least 369 times."

Upon arrival at the sanctuary, Tom readily complied with verbal instructions that enabled staff to care properly for his foot injury. When offered a tray of antibiotic cream and other supplies, Tom even treated his own wound. Later, Westoll recounts:

"The chimpanzee Regis sustained a bad bite wound. At first, Grow treated him, but when Regis's strength returned, that option was no longer safe. She then left for Tom all the medical materials on a trolley; Tom cleaned and treated Regis's wound for a week."

With the skeptic's help, we might dismiss Tom's behavior toward Regis as a product of curiosity or boredom, or as a conditioned response to human praise. Yet is it so hard to believe that Tom, who himself had suffered badly, might clean Regis's wound because he realized Regis's discomfort and wanted to help?

Wide discussion of Westoll's book could sustain the summer's ape buzz well into autumn. Along the way, we might ask this question: Does a reluctance to assign human depth to chimpanzees' thoughts and feelings make it easier to tolerate what's done inside biomedical labs in this country to chimpanzees like Tom?

non-hormonal birth control pill

From Eureka Alert

OHSU researchers eye newer, safer birth control method

PORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon Health & Science University researchers have uncovered a new contraceptive that is more focused, safer and, therefore, available for use among a larger population of women. The research took place at OHSU's Oregon National Primate Research Center. It is published online in the journal Endocrinology.

Today's birth control methods are several decades old. The Food and Drug Administration for example, approved "The pill," in 1961. It prevents contraception by boosting hormone levels through the use of synthetic hormones. These higher hormone levels interrupt the normal menstrual cycle. In short, the synthetic hormones inhibit the release of the hormones responsible for triggering ovulation.

"While the method works, it has its downsides," explains ONPRC scientist Jon Hennebold, Ph.D. "The biggest concern is that by boosting hormone levels, this contraceptive method affects systems throughout a woman's body. Therefore, there are some risks associated with current contraceptive methods, primarily cardiovascular disease."

An additional downside is that hormonal treatments like the pill require the user to conform to a daily medication schedule. Because of this requirement, the pill is only about 80 to 90 percent effective.

In comparison, the contraceptive OHSU researchers are developing is not hormonal and more focused on mechanisms that directly result in the release of an egg. This new approach targets the key enzymes responsible for the release of an egg. Hennebold and his colleagues were able to determine exactly which enzymes to focus on by studying rhesus macaque monkeys that have a very similar reproductive system to humans.

This research in monkeys has demonstrated that targeting these enzymes can prevent the release of an egg from the ovary. The next step for Hennebold and colleagues is to determine the delivery method of such a drug and the timetable for medication.

"Our hope is that the next generation of birth control is more targeted and has a higher effectiveness level," added Hennebold. "Much more work is necessary to further our proposed solution, but we believe that better, safer contraceptive methods are possible."

A scientific basis for vampires - Study Finds That Injecting Old Mice With Young Mouse Blood Has a Rejuvenating Effect

From POPSCI

By Dan Nosowitz

Researchers at Stanford University just published a study in Nature that may give new hope to those looking to stop the effects of aging on the brain. The study found that when blood from a young mouse was injected into an older mouse, that older mouse enjoyed what could almost be termed a "rejuvenation effect": it began producing more neurons, firing more activity across synapses, and even suffered less inflammation.

Interestingly, performing the reverse, in which a young mouse was injected with blood (or, more accurately, plasma, which is the parts of blood without blood cells), resulted in young mice with distinctly elderly attributes--increased inflammation, a reduction in the production of new neurons, that kind of thing. The researchers used plasma because blood cells are actually too large to travel through the blood-brain barrier into the brain. But certain chemokines, small proteins secreted by cells, are indeed small enough to pass through, and the team actually isolated several that could be causing this effect.

It's a pretty fascinating study, as nobody had ever really believed that the degeneration of the brain with age could have been due to blood from elsewhere in the body, rather than merely a natural slowdown in the production of new neurons. The lack of new neurons can cause things like forgetfulness, specifically in spatial memory--forgetting where your car is parked, that kind of thing--so the ability to halt or reverse that process could mean amazing things for older people.

It may not make you live longer, but it's still a pretty amazing discovery.

Magnets destroy tumours in mice without side effects

Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors
by TIM WOGAN
From Science NOW

Any parent fretting over a child's fever knows that temperatures just a few degrees above normal can kill. But cancer researchers have now found a way to make high temperatures heal. In a new study, a team found that injecting mice with tiny magnets and cranking up the heat eliminated tumors from the animals' bodies with no apparent side effects.

The idea of killing cancer with heat isn't new. Researchers know that, like normal cells, cancer cells start to die when the mercury rises above 43˚C. The trick is figuring out how to kill the cancer without harming the body's own cells. One promising idea, known as magnetic hyperthermia, involves injecting minuscule "nanoparticles," basically microscopic lumps of iron oxide or other compounds, into tumors to make them magnetic. The patient is put into a magnetic field that reverses direction thousands of times every second. The magnetic nanoparticles are excited by the applied field and begin to get hot, heating and potentially destroying the surrounding cancer tissue. Because healthy tissue is not altered by the magnetic field, it does not heat up and is not damaged.

But the therapy has yet to make its way to the clinic, with only a single reported trial in humans (with modest success). This is largely because conventional nanoparticles interact only weakly with the applied field, so quite a large dose is needed to generate enough heat to damage the tumor. Although nanoparticles aren't particularly toxic, in large quantities they can trigger the body's immune system to attack them, causing allergic reactions.

Nanoscientist Jinwoo Cheon of Yonsei University in Seoul and colleagues set out to create a nanoparticle that would get hotter than traditional nanoparticles so that not as many would need to be injected into the body. They made two-layer nanoparticles, each containing a core of one magnetic mineral inside a shell of another. Because of an esoteric interaction between the two minerals, called exchange coupling, these "core-shell" nanoparticles interacted far more strongly with the magnetic field than do traditional nanoparticles and released up to 10 times as much heat. That means one would need to give only 10% of the original dose to patients to achieve the same degree of hyperthermia as with traditional nanoparticles.

The team tested its technique on three mice whose abdomens had been grafted with cells from human brain cancer. The researchers injected the tumors with core-shell nanoparticles and placed the mice inside a coil of wire (see illustration). They turned on an alternating current in the coil, creating an alternating magnetic field. Although the researchers weren't able to measure the precise temperatures inside the tumors, their estimates are between 43˚ and 48˚C. After 10 minutes, the team removed the mice from the coil and monitored the tumors for the next 4 weeks.

All traces of cancer disappeared from the mice with no apparent side effects, the team reported online 26 June in Nature Nanotechnology. For comparison, another group of mice were treated instead with a single dose of doxorubicin, a traditional anticancer drug. Although it initially shrunk some of the tumors, they grew back to four times their original size by the end of the trial. Heat treatment after an injection of traditional iron oxide nanoparticles had no significant effect on the tumors.

Nanoengineer Naomi Halas of Rice University in Houston, Texas, is impressed. "This group has solved the key impasse that has arrested the development of magnetic nanotherapies, that is, the weak response of the nanoparticle to the applied magnetic field," she says. "I am so happy that more of these types of nanoparticle-based hyperthermal therapies are being developed to increase the arsenal of weapons against cancer."

--
Reference
Lee J-H, Jang J-t, Choi J-s, Moon SH, Noh S-h, Kim J-w, Kim J-G, Kim I-S, PArk KI, Cheon J (2011) Exchange-coupled magnetic nanoparticles for efficient heat induction. Nature Nanotechnology doi:10.1038/nnano.2011.95

Abstract
The conversion of electromagnetic energy into heat by nanoparticles has the potential to be a powerful, non-invasive technique for biotechnology applications such as drug release, disease treatment and remote control of single cell functions, but poor conversion efficiencies have hindered practical applications so far. In this Letter, we demonstrate a significant increase in the efficiency of magnetic thermal induction by nanoparticles. We take advantage of the exchange coupling between a magnetically hard core and magnetically soft shell to tune the magnetic properties of the nanoparticle and maximize the specific loss power, which is a gauge of the conversion efficiency. The optimized core–shell magnetic nanoparticles have specific loss power values that are an order of magnitude larger than conventional iron-oxide nanoparticles. We also perform an antitumour study in mice, and find that the therapeutic efficacy of these nanoparticles is superior to that of a common anticancer drug.

Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life

pic is from my personal stash from this years' WGT

Its one of my two most favorite times of the year in Leipzig - Wave Gotik Treffen (Wave Gothic Festival) - when the goths of the world descend upon the 'zig to colour (decolour) our little world in all things beautiful and grotesque. So with that in mind, you can imagine how absolutely vampiric this posting by NPR seemed today. I wonder if anyone will do it for cosmetic reasons? -MA
(PS: it may not seem obvious why I picked this pic, but its because the lovely lady on the left has an open heart wound...)

Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life
by CARRIE FEIBEL
From NPR

The search for the perfect artificial heart seems never-ending. After decades of trial and error, surgeons remain stymied in their quest for a machine that does not wear out, break down or cause clots and infections.

But Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute say they have developed a machine that could avoid all that with simple whirling rotors — which means people may soon get a heart that has no beat.

Inside the institute's animal research laboratory is an 8-month-old calf with a soft brown coat named Abigail. Cohn and Frazier removed Abigail's heart and replaced it with two centrifugal pumps.

"If you listened to her chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn't hear a heartbeat," says Cohn. "If you examined her arteries, there's no pulse. If you hooked her up to an EKG, she'd be flat-lined."

The pumps spin Abigail's blood and move it through her body.

"By every metric we have to analyze patients, she's not living," Cohn says. "But here you can see she's a vigorous, happy, playful calf licking my hand."

Human Trials
In March, after practicing on 38 calves, Cohn and Frazier felt confident enough to try their device on a human patient. They chose Craig Lewis, a 55-year-old who was dying from amyloidosis, which causes a buildup of abnormal proteins. The proteins clog the organs so much that they stop working.

In Lewis' case, his heart became so damaged, doctors said he had about 12 hours left to live.

His wife, Linda, said they should try the artificial heart.


"He wanted to live, and we didn't want to lose him," she says. "You never know how much time you have, but it was worth it."

Lewis worked for the city of Houston, helping to maintain the city's vast system of wastewater pumps.

At home, in his garage, Lewis dabbled in woodworking, metalsmithing and what his wife calls general "piddling around."

"He would go into his shop and create or fix or modify something to make it work," she says.

That's what his two doctors did, too. Linda Lewis says her husband appreciated how the doctors cobbled together the pulseless heart from various materials.

"Dacron on the inside and fiberglass impregnated in silicone on the outside," Cohn says. "There's a moderate amount of homemade stuff on here."

Cohn and Frazier did not start totally from scratch. They took two medical implants known as ventricular assist devices and hooked them together.

A ventricular assist device has a screwlike rotor of blades, which pushes the blood forward in a continuous flow.

"I listened and it was a hum, which was amazing," Linda Lewis says. "He didn't have a pulse."

The doctors say the continuous-flow pump should last longer than other artificial hearts and cause fewer problems. That's because each side has just one moving part: the constantly whirling rotor.

But Cohn says they will still have to convince the world that you don't need a pulse to live.

"We look at all the animals, insects, fish, reptiles and certainly all mammals, and see a pulsatile circulation," he says. "And so all the early research and all the early efforts were directed at making pulsatile pumps."

However, the only reason blood must be pumped rhythmically instead of continuously is the heart tissue itself.

"The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."

Progress and Setbacks
After the implant, Craig Lewis woke up and recovered somewhat. He could speak and sit up in a chair.

But then he began to fade as the disease attacked his liver and kidneys.

"Amyloidosis is horrible," Linda Lewis says. "I could see the other organs were not cooperating."

Craig Lewis lived for more than a month with the pulseless heart. He died in April, due to the underlying disease. His doctors say the pumps themselves worked flawlessly.

"We knew if it wasn't a success for Craig, if they could get data that would help them, if it helps the next person, then you did good," Linda Lewis says.

Biomedical companies worldwide are still trying to perfect a pulsing artificial heart.

But Cohn says those companies are like the last buggy-whip manufacturers: fine-tuning a product that will soon become obsolete.

He is sympathetic to their efforts, though. He points out that the history of invention is full of dead ends.

"When man first tried to come up with machines that flew, he looked around and saw bats and birds and butterflies and mosquitoes," Cohn says. "Everything had wings that flapped."

But what works in nature is often not the only mechanical solution, or even the best one.

"When they saw that you could create wind, and that wind over a fixed wing was a great way to provide lift, then the whole field shifted," Cohn says. "There are very few flying machines in modern times that have flapping wings. And I think this is the same intellectual leap in pumping blood or pumping fluids."

In order to bring a continuous-flow artificial heart to the market, the doctors will have to decide on a final design, find a manufacturer and get FDA approval.

Although there's more work to be done, Frazier says he's confident the pulseless approach will win out in the end.

"These pumps don't wear out," he says. "We haven't pumped one to failure to date."

The tradeoff, of course, is the loss of the familiar, primordial sound of a beating human heart. For these surgeons, though, that's a small, poetic price to pay to make medical history.

Burgers From A Lab: The World Of In Vitro Meat

From npr.org

Imagine picking up a nice juicy burger and taking a bite, only to find out that the meaty burger you're biting into didn't come from an animal — it was grown in a lab.

Sound far-fetched? The reality of test-tube burgers in supermarkets may be close to becoming a reality. Scientists at laboratories around the world are currently working to make meat in labs that will eventually look and taste like the real thing, without any animal parts.

Science writer Michael Specter recently traveled to laboratories in the Netherlands and North Carolina to examine the progress scientists have made in developing in vitro meat. He writes about his trip, and the arguments in favor of lab-made steaks, in the May 23 issue of The New Yorker.

Motivation For Lab Meat
Specter explains that part of the motivation for growing meat in laboratories is animal welfare: billions of cows, chickens and pigs would no longer spend their lives force-fed grain and antibiotics or cooped up in factory farms.

"There is something inherently creepy about [growing meat in labs]," Specter tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "But there is something more inherently creepy about the way we deal with the animals that we eat. ... They live a horrible life, and they often die quite cruelly. So the idea of being able to eliminate some of that is extremely exciting for a lot of people."

Another motivation, Specter says, is the positive environmental impact test-tube meat could have on the planet. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, global livestock is responsible for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions. And as the population grows, he says, more resources will be needed to sustain the agricultural industry.

"We have 7 billion people on the planet, and there will be 9 billion [people] by 2050," he says. "Those people need food. They need protein — and they tend to eat better as they get wealthier. And better, unfortunately, means eating more like Americans — a lot of meat. And a lot of meat means a lot of water, a lot of grain, a lot of grass. And we don't have that much room for any of it."

How It Works
Currently tissue scientists are taking stem cells from pigs and putting them in nutrient broth-filled petri dishes, where they rapidly grow. The biggest slab of meat grown so far is about the size of a contact lens and contains millions of cells. The next step, Specter says, is trying to take these cells and turn them into muscle tissue, using biodegradable scaffolding platforms.

"The idea is you grow these cells into muscle tissue, and you eventually have the same sort of meat that you would take from the flesh of an animal," he says.

But muscle cells or tissue cannot just be placed on a platform and left alone. Muscles require stimulation and exercise or they will atrophy and die. Scientists currently use electrical impulses to stimulate the muscle cells grown in the laboratory, but haven't yet figured out how to do it on a mass-factory scale.

"If you're growing it in a factory, [there's a mass] quantity of meat," Specter says. "It's difficult to see our way to zapping tons of electricity into muscle cells, because it will just be, if nothing else, extremely costly. So while that works in a lab and it works well, they are looking at other ways of doing it."

In addition to the technical complexities of making test-tube meat, there's also the issue of taste. Specter says scientists assured him that there will be no taste differential between animal meat and test-tube meat.

"I talked to one scientist and I mentioned this as 'synthetic meat,' and she got annoyed," he says. "She said, 'This isn't synthetic. It's organic. It's meat. It's two meat cells growing to become more meat cells.' And depending on what your definition of any sort of life is, this is as fundamental as any animal is."

Did President Obama Play Secret Santa to the Alamogordo chimpanzees?

NB: "The 200 chimpanzees living at Alamogordo ... should not be confused with the 266 chimpanzees STC [save the chimps] rescued in 2002 from The Coulston Foundation. The STC chimps are safe and will never be returned to biomedical research. However, Save the Chimps believes that the APF chimps, who have not been used in biomedical research for nearly ten years, deserve permanent retirement.
[STC's Statement on the APF's Chimpanzees - July 2010]
previous DNApes post can be found HERE

From the Huffington Post
Did President Obama Play Secret Santa?
BY INGRID NEWKIRK

As Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico packed his bags and prepared to relinquish his office, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave him a beautiful going-away present. It was something that the governor had journeyed to Washington back in August to ask the NIH to do: call a halt to the federal government's absurd and cruel plan to take 202 chimpanzees -- who had once involuntarily served as research subjects for the U.S. Air Force and were now supposed to be "retired" -- and subject them once again to years of experiments. I wondered on this very blog if President Obama would step in to save the chimpanzees, and perhaps now he has.

The "Alamogordo chimpanzees," as they are known, had been in limbo for years, left to languish alone at Holloman Air Force base, isolated from each other and locked in barren cells, with only a cement slab to sleep on and with nothing to see or do -- certainly sheer torture for a thinking, feeling being of any species, let alone the species closest to our own. Then, some years ago, the process of rehabilitation and socialization had begun, some 200 chimpanzees having been released to sanctuary, until, that is, the NIH put the kibosh on it. The chimpanzees had finally been given blankets, which they wrapped around themselves at night and used to cover their heads; they had started to hold hands with fellow chimpanzees through holes knocked in the walls; and they were given objects to handle and rattle and puzzle over. Plans were made to bring them to lush plots of land in Florida, surrounded by moats, where they could become themselves again, forming troupes and tribes. You can see "the ones that got away" before the NIH's foul decision here. You can even sponsor one of them, like Gromek, who was captured as a baby in Africa in 1962, wrenched away from his mother for use in the U.S. Air Force space program. Gromek spent more than 40 years in a cell and makes it clear, by turning his back, that he wants nothing to do with human beings anymore.

As recently as two months ago, NIH had stubbornly refused to listen to Mr. Richardson or anyone else appealing for mercy for the chimpanzees. But, over the months, hundreds of thousands of people have come forward to join the governor, including retired astronauts; the world's leading authority on chimpanzees, Dr. Jane Goodall; and, or so it seemed, almost everyone who has ever watched a National Geographic special or read anything about chimpanzees in the wild or in captivity. Chimpanzees are known for their ability to use tools, which they have sometimes secreted away until their zookeepers have left and then used to undo locks and escape their cages. They are known for their fierce defense of their families, their dances of great abandon in the rain and under waterfalls, and their perhaps less attractive but very "human" traits, like the propensity to lie, cheat, steal, and be craftily unfaithful to their mates.

In the end, the weight of public and professional opinion won for the apes, or was it that President Obama, who is known for taking the more diplomatic route over the swift kick up the backside that I would have favored, had a quiet word in the secretary's ear?

It has been almost 30 years since chimpanzee experimenter Dr. Alfred Prince appealed to his colleagues, gathered at an NIH symposium in Washington, to join him in recognizing chimpanzees as the intelligent, social animals they are and urged the NIH to adopt a "Chimpanzee Bill of Rights." Over the holidays, the NIH said, in announcing the cancelation of the transfer plans, that it has simply "put on hold" the plan to ship the chimpanzees to Texas -- to be treated as living test tubes, to be infected with viruses, and to have their organs biopsied -- while it studies the situation for a couple of years. But let us hope that, in reality, this announcement of a halt to the plan means that the moment has arrived when the chimpanzees' right to live unharmed and as individuals, rather than as test tubes, will be accepted as part of our evolving understanding of other forms of life.

Regrettably, 14 chimpanzees had already been trucked out of Alamogordo and into laboratory cages when the call came. They were not lucky enough to scrape by under the wire. The NIH must be asked to return them to Alamogordo and allow them to resume their long-awaited rehabilitation.

Telomeres: Fountain of youth proven in mammals

One of the best talks/debates I ever went to was at U of Toronto BACK in the day (like 2002 maybe?!?!) which asked, what is the default state for cells: death or life? That is, could cells persist forever if death pathways are blocked or can cells simply not handle excessive replication events and just get worn out?
This new research definitely makes it seem like cells are programmed for life, which is great news for those of us who plan on staying beautiful forever ;) -MA

from Harvard.edu Via Geekologie

(I am stealing the intro from Geekologie because it is beyond brilliant):

In a recent act of actually doing something useful instead of trying to kill us all with robots/determine which animal has the biggest balls, scientists have taken a step towards the proverbial fountain of youth.

Harvard scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, resulting in new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function.

In a report posted online by the journal Nature in advance of print publication, researchers led by Ronald A. DePinho, a Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor of genetics, said they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene. The telomerase enzyme maintains the protective caps called telomeres that shield the ends of chromosomes.

As humans age, low levels of telomerase are associated with progressive erosion of telomeres, which may then contribute to tissue degeneration and functional decline in the elderly. By creating mice with a telomerase switch, the researchers were able to generate prematurely aged mice. The switch allowed the scientists to find out whether reactivating telomerase in the animals would restore telomeres and mitigate the signs and symptoms of aging. The work showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain disease and infertility.

While human applications remain in the future, the strategy might one day be used to treat conditions such as rare genetic premature aging syndromes in which shortened telomeres play an important role, said DePinho, senior author of the report and the director of Dana-Farber’s Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science. “Whether this would impact on normal aging is a more difficult question,” he added. “But it is notable that telomere loss is associated with age-associated disorders and thus restoration of telomeres could alleviate such decline.” The first author is Mariela Jaskelioff, a research fellow in medicine in DePinho’s laboratory.

Importantly, the animals showed no signs of developing cancer. This remains a concern because cancer cells turn on telomerase to make themselves virtually immortal. DePinho said the risk can be minimized by switching on telomerase only for a matter of days or weeks — which may be brief enough to avoid fueling hidden cancers or cause new ones to develop. Still, he observed, it is an important issue for further study.

In addition, DePinho said these results may provide new avenues for regenerative medicine, because they suggest that quiescent adult stem cells in severely aged tissues remain viable and can be reactivated to repair tissue damage.

“If you can remove the underlying damage and stresses that drive the aging process and cause stem cells to go into growth arrest, you may be able to recruit them back into a regenerative response to rejuvenate tissues and maintain health in the aged,” he said. Those stresses include the shortening of telomeres over time that causes cells and tissues to fail.

Loss of telomeres sends a cascade of signals that cause cells to stop dividing or self-destruct, stem cells to go into retirement, organs to atrophy, and brain cells to die. Generally, the shortening of telomeres in normal tissues shows a steady decline, except in the case of cancer, where they are maintained.

The experiments used mice that had been engineered to develop severe DNA and tissue damage as a result of abnormal, premature aging. These animals had short, dysfunctional telomeres and suffered a variety of age-related afflictions that progressed in successive generations of mice. Among the conditions were testes reduced in size and depleted of sperm, atrophied spleens, damage to the intestines, and shrinkage of the brain along with an inability to grow new brain cells.

“We wanted to know: If you could flip the telomerase switch on and restore telomeres in animals with entrenched age-related disease, what would happen?” explained DePinho. “Would it slow down aging, stabilize it, or even reverse it?”

Rather than supply the rodents with supplemental telomerase, the scientists devised a way to switch on the animals’ own dormant telomerase gene, known as TERT. They engineered the endogenous TERT gene to encode a fusion protein of TERT and the estrogen receptor. This fusion protein would only become activated with a special form of estrogen. With this setup, scientists could give the mice an estrogen-like drug at any time to stimulate the TERT-estrogen receptor fusion protein and make it active to maintain telomeres.

Against this backdrop, the researchers administered the estrogen drug to some of the mice via a time-release pellet inserted under the skin. Other animals, the controls, were given a pellet containing no active drug.

After four weeks, the scientists observed remarkable signs of rejuvenation in the treated mice. Overall, the mice exhibited increased levels of telomerase and lengthened telomeres, biological changes indicative of cells returning to a growth state with reversal of tissue degeneration, and increase in size of the spleen, testes, and brain. “It was akin to a Ponce de León effect,” noted DePinho, referring to the Spanish explorer who sought the mythical Fountain of Youth.

“When we flipped the telomerase switch on and looked a month later, the brains had largely returned to normal,” said DePinho. More newborn nerve cells were observed, and the fatty myelin sheaths around nerve cells — which had become thinned in the aged animals — increased in diameter. In addition, the increase in telomerase revitalized slumbering brain stem cells so they could produce new neurons.

To show that all this new activity actually caused functional improvements, the scientists tested the mice’s ability to avoid a certain area where they detected unpleasant odors that they associated with danger, such as scents of predators or rotten food. They had lost that survival skill as their olfactory nerve cells atrophied, but after the telomerase boost, those nerves regenerated and the mice regained their crucial sense of smell.

“One of the most amazing changes was in the animals’ testes, which were essentially barren as aging caused the death and elimination of sperm cells,” recounted DePinho. “When we restored telomerase, the testes produced new sperm cells, and the animals’ fecundity was improved — their mates gave birth to larger litters.”

The telomerase boost also lengthened the rodents’ life spans compared to their untreated counterparts — but they did not live longer than normal mice, said the researchers.

The authors concluded, “This unprecedented reversal of age-related decline in the central nervous system and other organs vital to adult mammalian health justifies exploration of telomere rejuvenation strategies for age-associated diseases.”

---
Reference:
Jaskelioff M, Muller FL, Paik J-H, Thomas E, Jiang S, Adams AC, Sahin E, Kost-Alimova M, Protopopov A, Cadiñanos J, Horner JW, Maratos-Flier E, DePinhoron RA (2010) Telomerase reactivation reverses tissue degeneration in aged telomerase-deficient mice. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09603

Abstract
An ageing world population has fuelled interest in regenerative remedies that may stem declining organ function and maintain fitness. Unanswered is whether elimination of intrinsic instigators driving age-associated degeneration can reverse, as opposed to simply arrest, various afflictions of the aged. Such instigators include progressively damaged genomes. Telomerase-deficient mice have served as a model system to study the adverse cellular and organismal consequences of wide-spread endogenous DNA damage signalling activation in vivo1. Telomere loss and uncapping provokes progressive tissue atrophy, stem cell depletion, organ system failure and impaired tissue injury responses1. Here, we sought to determine whether entrenched multi-system degeneration in adult mice with severe telomere dysfunction can be halted or possibly reversed by reactivation of endogenous telomerase activity. To this end, we engineered a knock-in allele encoding a 4-hydroxytamoxifen (4-OHT)-inducible telomerase reverse transcriptase-oestrogen receptor (TERT-ER) under transcriptional control of the endogenous TERT promoter. Homozygous TERT-ER mice have short dysfunctional telomeres and sustain increased DNA damage signalling and classical degenerative phenotypes upon successive generational matings and advancing age. Telomerase reactivation in such late generation TERT-ER mice extends telomeres, reduces DNA damage signalling and associated cellular checkpoint responses, allows resumption of proliferation in quiescent cultures, and eliminates degenerative phenotypes across multiple organs including testes, spleens and intestines. Notably, somatic telomerase reactivation reversed neurodegeneration with restoration of proliferating Sox2+ neural progenitors, Dcx+ newborn neurons, and Olig2+ oligodendrocyte populations. Consistent with the integral role of subventricular zone neural progenitors in generation and maintenance of olfactory bulb interneurons2, this wave of telomerase-dependent neurogenesis resulted in alleviation of hyposmia and recovery of innate olfactory avoidance responses. Accumulating evidence implicating telomere damage as a driver of age-associated organ decline and disease risk1, 3 and the marked reversal of systemic degenerative phenotypes in adult mice observed here support the development of regenerative strategies designed to restore telomere integrity.

The tortured monkeys (fail) are self aware (win!)

when i first saw the article, I thought it was cool news (although am surprised it is being touted as novel), however when i saw and read the study, I decided not to post it because of the torture these monkeys had to endure for the finding (and I am not an end justifies the means type). But then i saw this great blog post from the primate freedom blog, and it so nicely summarized my feelings on the issue that I have re-posted it below. (Also see this discover magazine blog entry for an interesting review, including a strange splitting of hairs from Dr. de Waal which seems to convolute the existence of self-awareness and passing the self-awareness test) -MA

From Primate Freedom
Classic Evidence of Self-Awareness Not Sufficient to Deter UW-Madison Invasive Brain Experiments on Monkeys; Vivisectors Delighted by News

From the UW-Madison Press Release:

For first time, monkeys recognize themselves in the mirror, indicating self-awareness
Sept. 29, 2010
by David Tenenbaum

..... a study published today (Sept. 29) by Luis Populin, a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shows that under specific conditions, a rhesus macaque monkey that normally would fail the mark test can still recognize itself in the mirror and perform actions that scientists would expect from animals that are self-aware.

..... Populin, who studies the neural basis of perception and behavior, had placed head implants on two rhesus macaque monkeys, while preparing to study attention deficit disorder. Then Abigail Rajala, an experienced animal technician who is in the university's Neuroscience Training Program, mentioned that one of the monkeys could recognize himself in a small mirror. "I told her the scientific literature says they can't do this," says Populin, "so we decided to do a simple study."

Much to his delight*, it turned out that the graduate student was right.

*Poplin thought to himself, "It's delightful that the monkeys I'm mutilating actually realize what's happening to them. My job's even more fun now!"

You can read the entire paper here: Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Do Recognize Themselves in the Mirror: Implications for the Evolution of Self-Recognition. be sure to look at the movies and the images.

Here's what Populin writes about one of the movies: "The view of the head implant has been blocked for discretion."

Discretion: circumspect; heedful of circumstances and potential consequences; prudent.

Here's one of the images -- also censored out of concern over the potential consequences of allowing the public to have a feeling for what these isolated monkeys undergo in a university lab:
You can glean a little of what Populin's lab does to monkeys (and cats) in this paper, in which he writes about his experiments on Shepard, Glenn, and Conrad: Monkey Sound Localization: Head-Restrained versus Head-Unrestrained Orienting. Luis C. Populin. The Journal of Neuroscience, September 20, 2006.

Op-ed: Chimp tests don't help advance human medicine

Image from chimprescue

A really great and succinct op-ed piece about why chimpanzee research is quite simply useless and wasteful. Thanks to Jen F for the link! -MA

Chimp tests don't help advance human medicine
From Alamogordo Daily News
Daily News Letter to the editor
John Pippin, Dallas, Texas

As a physician, educator and former animal researcher, I know that moving more chimpanzees into laboratory cages will not help advance human medicine.

Chimpanzees share 98 percent of our genes, but millions of immutable differences in genetic structure and expression make these human cousins scientifically unsuitable for the study and treatment of human diseases.

The director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center that hopes to receive the Alamogordo chimpanzees touts the importance of chimpanzees in research regarding hepatitis C, HIV-AIDS, monoclonal antibodies and cancer. It is compelling that these are all areas of dismal failure for chimpanzee research.

After decades of chimpanzee experiments, there still is no hepatitis C vaccine. All of the 200 human trials of HIV-AIDS vaccines have failed. The TGN1412 monoclonal antibody that was safe and effective in primates nearly killed all human volunteers tested. And chimpanzees are rarely used for cancer research because the results are unreliable.

There are also better ways to do this research. Hepatitis B vaccines have been produced in human cultures for many years, and this is an active area for hepatitis C research. The best work being done on HIV-AIDS vaccines involves so-called "elite controllers," patients who are resistant to HIV. Safer monoclonal antibodies are routinely developed using human cultures instead of animals.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that still conducts invasive chimpanzee experiments. We must urge NIH not to make the Alamogordo chimpanzees more fodder for scientifically and ethically flawed experiments. NIH should instead focus on modern, ethical research that offers the most hope for human medicine.

--
For more on the Alamogordo reserach chimpanzees go to "200 chimps are being put back in US lab testing - here's how you can help!"

200 chimps are being put back in US lab testing - here's how you can help!

From Save the Chimps
STC's Statement on the APF's Chimpanzees

The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), one of the components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that provides funding for federally owned or supported chimpanzees. recently announced plans to relocate over 200 chimpanzees living at the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) on Holloman Air Force Base to The Southwest National Primate ResearchCenter (SNPRC) near San Antonio, TX, where they may be subject to invasive biomedical research. These chimpanzees should not be confused with the 266 chimpanzees STC rescued in 2002 from The Coulston Foundation. The STC chimps are safe and will never be returned to biomedical research. However, Save the Chimps believes that the APF chimps, who have not been used in biomedical research for nearly ten years, deserve permanent retirement. Taxpayer dollars being used to relocate the chimps, construct new housing at SNPRC, and provide for their daily care in the laboratory should instead be used to fund their lifetime care in a sanctuary. Save the Chimps encourages our supporters to contact their representatives on behalf of the APF chimpanzees, requesting that the chimps be retired permanently to a
sanctuary, with funding provided for their lifetime care.

Please visit Animal Protection of New Mexico or Project R & R for further information on how to help.

For more details on the difference between the Alamogordo Primate Facility chimps, and the chimpanzees rescued by Save the Chimps, click here.

For additional info go to the humanesociety.org and click here to send an online letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

Sam Harris' TED talk - Science can answer moral questions

A short but poignant TED talk by Sam Harris on why we absolutely do not need religion to answer moral questions. For more info visit the TED website.

Thanks to Cleve H or the link!

80% of people chose torture

From BBC.com
A French TV documentary features people in a spoof game show administering what they are told are near lethal electric shocks to rival contestants.

Those taking part are told to pull levers to inflict shocks - increasing in voltage - upon their opponents. Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to pull the lever. Programme makers say they wanted to expose the dangers of reality TV shows. They say the documentary shows how many participants in the setting of a TV show will agree to act against their own principles or moral codes when ordered to do something extreme.

The Game of Death has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting "punishment" and a glamorous hostess urging the players on. Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary, said they were "amazed" that so many participants obeyed the sadistic orders of the game show presenter. "They are not equipped to disobey," he told AFP. "They don't want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don't manage to."

Yale experiment

The results reflect those of a similar experiment carried out almost 50 years ago at Yale University by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Participants took the role of a teacher, delivering what they believed were shocks to an actor every time they answered a question incorrectly. Mr Nick says that his experiment shows that the TV element further increases people's willingness to obey. "With Milgram, 62% of people obeyed an abject authority. In the setting of television, it's 80%," he told Reuters.

The documentary was broadcast on the state-owned France 2 channel on Wednesday evening.

Thanks to Linn G for the link

US Congress Considers Banning Medical Experiments on Chimpanzees

To quote from this article:

says Vandeberg. "It would be unethical for us to turn our back on these people and not conduct the research that is so desperately needed to develop the drugs to treat these diseases and the vaccines to prevent them in the future."

And what if the only way to not turn our backs on these people was to test on people? Does Dr. Vandeberg support human testing, or does he draw lines? And if he draws lines, what are his criteria? cognition? adult apes are "smarter" than small children and "smarter" that some mentally challenged will ever be. Is it at those that possess an emotional life? We know apes care for kin and others as we do. And if its some "species" designation, lets not forget that less than 100 years ago "blacks" and "whites" were considered different species. If you have ever watched apes, then you know that biomedical tests on them is as wrong as tests on humans. -MA

For more info please visit: releasechimps.org and please watch the video below!

from VOANEws.com
Congress Considers Banning Medical Experiments on Chimpanzees
Scientists, animal rights advocates, spar over lab tests on chimps
by Julie Taboh

The United States is the only country in the world that still allows federally-funded medical experiments on chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees are our closest animal relative. So close, in fact, that 98 percent of a chimpanzee's DNA is identical to that of humans.

The highly intelligent primates share many of our physical and behavioral characteristics and that similarity has made them attractive to medical researchers, sparking a heated debate over animal rights and medical ethics.

Essential or inhumane
The United States is the only country in the world that still allows federally-funded medical experiments on chimpanzees. The practice includes developing and testing new vaccines and drugs that might prevent or cure potentially-fatal human diseases.

Supporters of the practice say medical tests involving chimps have helped save millions of lives worldwide. Animal welfare activists argue that subjecting chimpanzees to painful, and often lethal, experiments is cruel and inhumane.

Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, director of research policy at the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), says chimpanzees used for HIV and hepatitis research are anaesthetized with a dart gun before being subjected to harmful and invasive procedures. Besides its ethical objections, PCRM argues that the use of chimpanzees in the lab is an ineffective way to advance medical research.

"Over 80 different vaccines have worked in chimpanzees with respect to HIV virus; none of them have worked in human beings," says Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, director of public affairs, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Ineffective in humans?
Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is a long-time animal welfare advocate. She also serves as director of public affairs for the Physicians Committee.

Kucinich says science has evolved since the 1920s when primates were first used for experimentation. "Since that time we've really learned that as close as they are to human species, they're not close enough for any real scientific outcomes for drug testing."

According to Kucinich, over 80 different HIV-related vaccines have worked in chimpanzees but none have proven effective in human beings.

A recent undercover investigation conducted by the Humane Society of the United States found chimpanzees in a Louisiana research center being subjected to harsh treatment and painful medical experiments.

They also found these highly social animals living in small, prison-like cages where some have languished for decades.

Ethical Questions
Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle says it isn't just the physical abuse of the chimpanzees that's troubling. "I think the larger issue is the psychological torment; animals isolated, kept away from others who can give them companionship, fearing what's going to happen next, and animals living in this constant state of confinement."

Hope Ferdowsian of the Physicians Committee says chimpanzees don't have to suffer like this and explains that there are alternatives to the use of chimpanzees in research. "For example, in HIV research, we've learned a lot from human epidemiological studies and ethically conducted clinical trials," she says. "We've also learned a lot about the virus from mathematical and computer modeling. For hepatitis C vaccine we're learning a lot from in vitro or cell-based methods."

Banning experiments on chimps
Both Kucinich and Ferdowsian were on Capitol Hill recently, campaigning for newly introduced congressional legislation that would eventually ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees.

According to Ferdowsian, the Great Ape Protection Act, or GAPA, "would ban all invasive and harmful research on chimpanzees in American laboratories." It would also "release federally-owned chimpanzees, about half of the thousand chimpanzees that are languishing in American laboratories today, to sanctuaries."

But the legislation is not to everyone's liking. John VandeBerg, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, says the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research is essential.

He argues that there are no other animals that can be infected with Hepatitis C virus, Hepatitis B Virus or HIV.

"So in order to develop drugs to treat people who have Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, particularly, we need to use chimpanzees to determine if the drugs can reduce the level of viruses in their blood and in their livers," says VandeBerg.

While he acknowledges that there is much to be learned from alternative research methods like cell culture - a process by which cells are taken from a living organism and grown under controlled conditions - VandeBerg says they have learned a lot more from research on chimpanzees.

"There are hundreds of millions of people who suffer from hepatitis-B and hepatitis-C, the two diseases which are most important for the moment for chimp research," says Dr. John VandeBerg, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center.

"For example," he says, "we cannot determine if a drug is going to work in a human being, and be safe in a human being by testing that drug in cell culture models. We must determine first if it's going to work in a living animal that has all the complexities of a human being."
VandeBerg says he and his colleagues go out of their way to use lower forms of animals before experimenting on chimpanzees. "When the research progresses to a stage when the information coming from mice and rats is not sufficient, we may move up to using monkeys. And when monkeys can't give us the answers we need, only then, do we move to the chimpanzee."

Benefiting millions
VandeBerg also points out that the research that's been conducted on chimpanzees so far has already benefited much of the world's population.

"Three hundred and fifty million human beings in the world are infected with Hepatitis-B virus. Three hundred million people in the world are infected with Hepatitis-C virus. That's almost a tenth of the world's population." says Vandeberg. "It would be unethical for us to turn our back on these people and not conduct the research that is so desperately needed to develop the drugs to treat these diseases and the vaccines to prevent them in the future."

Vandeberg also defends his research facility, saying that the animals in his primate research center receive better care than most people in the world. "They live in social groups, they live in indoor-outdoor enclosures, they have heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer; our chimps even have televisions," he says.

World renowned primate expert Jane Goodall believes using chimpanzees in medical research is "morally wrong and unacceptable".

But such creature comforts don't change the fact that chimpanzees used in medical research may suffer or die, and that's unacceptable to famed primate expert Jane Goodall. She spent decades studying and living among Central African chimpanzees in the wild and now campaigns to protect the endangered species.

"We need to recognize at the outset that what we do to animals - from their perspective certainly, and probably from ours - is morally wrong and unacceptable, and that it's really important to follow through on all these exciting new leads into ways of doing research without using animals," says Goodall.

But John VandeBerg of the Southwest National Primate Research Center says if the proposed legislation to phase out medical research on chimpanzees is passed, scientists like him will have to end their work. "It will be a great tragedy for humanity if research with chimpanzees were stopped."

The Great Ape Protection Act is currently making its way through the U.S. Congress. It has more than 140 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. Until the measure becomes law, medical testing on chimpanzees will continue to be a highly divisive, and hotly debated, issue.

For more info please visit: releasechimps.org

and check out this video on exactly what is going on in labs:

From the NYTimes - The Case for Vegetariansim

Great Article today on NYTimes.com about one writer's story on how he and his family chose to go vegetarian. The arguments are rather compelling, take 10 minutes and please read it :)

Against Meat

By JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

THE FRUITS OF FAMILY TREES
When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. On my way in, Friday night, she would lift me from the ground in one of her fire-smothering hugs. And on the way out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me.
My grandmother survived World War II barefoot, scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits. So she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes. I remember hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the apple is edible.
Her obsession with food wasn’t an obsession with money. (Many of those coupons I clipped were for foods she would never buy.)
Her obsession wasn’t with health. (She would beg me to drink Coke.)
My grandmother never set a place for herself at family dinners. Even when there was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens checked — she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn’t require her to eat it.
We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients.
And why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark food is inherently more healthful than light food, or that the bulk of the nutrients are found in the peel or crust? (The sandwiches of those weekend stays were made with the saved ends of pumpernickel loaves.) She taught us that animals that are bigger than you are very good for you, animals that are smaller than you are good for you, fish (which aren’t animals) are fine for you, then tuna (which aren’t fish), then vegetables, fruits, cakes, cookies and sodas. No foods are bad for you. Sugars are great. Fats are tremendous. The fatter a child is, the fitter it is — especially if it’s a boy. Lunch is not one meal, but three, to be eaten at 11, 12:30 and 3. You are always starving.
In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met — her otherwordly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation — and while I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.
The story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joy, humiliation, religion, history and, of course, love. It was as if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

POSSIBLE AGAIN
When I was 2, the heroes of all my bedtime books were animals. The first thing I can remember learning in school was how to pet a guinea pig without accidentally killing it. One summer my family fostered a cousin’s dog. I kicked it. My father told me we don’t kick animals. When I was 7, I mourned the death of a goldfish I’d won the previous weekend. I discovered that my father had flushed it down the toilet. I told my father — using other, less familial language — we don’t flush animals down the toilet. When I was 9, I had a baby sitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t having chicken with my older brother and me.
“Hurt anything?” I asked.
“You know that chicken is chicken, right?”
Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid woman with their precious babies?
Her intention might or might not have been to convert us, but being a kid herself, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full telling of this particular story. Without drama or rhetoric, skipping over or euphemizing, she shared what she knew.
My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.
What our baby sitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed so self-evidently true, but also because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include farmed animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.
Until I didn’t. My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our baby sitter’s code but found ways to smudge, diminish and ignore it. Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.
Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things you can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake-sale cause to fill the self-conscious half-hour of school break, an occasion to get closer to the breasts of activist women. (And I continued to think it was wrong to hurt animals.) Which isn’t to say that I refrained from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, “Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?”
When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. Not “believing in it” — whatever that would mean — but willfully pushing the questions out of my mind. It might well have been the prevalence of vegetarianism on campus that discouraged my own — I find myself less likely to give money to a street musician whose case is overflowing with bills.
But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of active forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I didn’t know the details of factory farming, but like most everyone, I knew the gist: it is miserable for animals, the environment, farmers, public health, biodiversity, rural communities, global poverty and so on. I thought life could, should and must conform to the mold of reason, period. You can imagine how annoying this made me.
When I graduated, I ate meat — lots of every kind of meat — for about two years. Why? Because it tasted good. And because more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories we tell ourselves and one another. And I told a forgiving story about myself to myself: I was only human.
Then I was set up on a blind date with the woman who would become my wife. And only a few weeks later we found ourselves talking about two surprising topics: marriage and vegetarianism.
Her history with meat was remarkably similar to mine: there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning. There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there was the acceptance of complexity and fallibility. Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong enough.
People marry for many different reasons, but one that animated our decision to take that step was the prospect of explicitly marking a new beginning. Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division with what came before — the most well-known example being the smashing of the glass at the end of the wedding ceremony. Things were as they were, but they will be different now. Things will be better. We will be better.
Sounds and feels great, but better how? I could think of endless ways to make myself better (I could learn foreign languages, be more patient, work harder), but I’d already made too many such vows to trust them anymore. I could also think of ways to make “us” better, but the meaningful things we can agree on and change in a relationship are few.
Eating animals, a concern we’d both had and had both forgotten, seemed like a place to start. So much intersects there, and so much could flow from it. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.
Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom traveled from great distances to share our joy. (Find that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon, but we were in Japan, and when in Japan. . . . And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only whenever we felt like it.
And that, I thought, was that. And I thought that was just fine. I assumed we’d maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency. Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.
But then we decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story.
About half an hour after my son was born, I went into the waiting room to tell the gathered family the good news.
“You said ‘he’! So it’s a boy?”
“What’s his name?”
“Who does he look like?”
“Tell us everything!”
I answered their questions as quickly as I could, then went to the corner and turned on my cellphone.
“Grandma,” I said. “We have a baby.”
Her only phone is in the kitchen. She picked up halfway into the first ring. It was just after midnight. Had she been clipping coupons? Preparing chicken with carrots to freeze for someone else to eat at some future meal? I’d never once seen or heard her cry, but tears pushed through her words as she asked, “How much does it weigh?”
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, “Everything is possible again.” It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. The world itself had another chance.

EATING ANIMALS
Seconds after being born, my son was breast-feeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of years of evolution had wound the knowledge into him, as it had encoded beating into his tiny heart and expansion and contraction into his newly dry lungs.
Almost four years later, he is a big brother and a remarkably sophisticated little conversationalist. Increasingly the food he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi “lunch dates” with my mom, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother’s chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn’t have been the same without those foods — and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives — which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot — are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)
According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals — which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants — is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter.
Meat and seafood are in no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods. And we are healthier without it. So our choices aren’t constrained.
While the cultural uses of meat can be replaced — my mother and I now eat Italian, my father grills veggie burgers, my grandmother invented her own “vegetarian chopped liver” — there is still the question of pleasure. A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.
This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
And then, one day, they will choose for themselves. I don’t know what my reaction will be if they decide to eat meat. (I don’t know what my reaction will be if they decide to renounce their Judaism, root for the Red Sox or register Republican.) I’m not as worried about what they will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.
In the meantime, my choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.
Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. I’m thinking of those Saturday afternoons at her kitchen table, just the two of us — black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn’t. It was the story of her life — “Listen to me,” she would plead — and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

LISTEN TO ME
“We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted. . . . But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.
“Then it all changed. During the war it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.
“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is a novelist. This article is adapted from his coming book, “Eating Animals,” which will be published in November

Original Article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11foer-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3