Of Mice and HuMice, Part Deux

We blogged about Clyven, the chimerical transgenic mouse with human intelligence, before; but now researchers have 'kicked it up a notch', by creating mice with the human version of a gene involved in language, called FOXP2. As the article in Discover magazine notes, "hile the mice didn’t exactly sit up and start reciting poetry about cheese, they did show some intriguing differences in both their vocal patterns and brain structure."

The region of the brain that was affected was the basal ganglia; the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers; the researchers' findings that the baby hu-mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences. Here the video with research Wolfgang Enard that provides a summary of the paper published in Cell:



So what does it mean when we 'uplift' animals? Colleague and friend George Dvorsky has some interesting thoughts on this here.

All You Need is Love

A quick and driveby post as a follow-up to some of our previous posts about our interconnectedness and as the Sioux proverb goes, "With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives", this headline from the Discover magazine blogs caught my attention:

All It Takes Is Love: Baby Chimps Given Extra TLC Score Higher Than Human Infants on IQ Tests

We kid you not: Orphaned baby chimpanzees cared for by humans in a loving, attentive manner have been found to be more cognitively advanced than some human infants.

Authors of a new study in Developmental Psychobiology compared nine-month-old human babies to nine-month-old chimps who had received daily “mom sessions.” For 20 hours a week, humans would play with 17 of the orphaned infant chimps, helping them to develop motor skills and to “meet new challenges with curiosity instead of distress.”

Is anybody really surprised? [Apologies to anyone stuck with the Beatles tune "All You Need is Love" in their head now.]

No Monkeys Allowed?: Limitations on Service Animals

Those of you familiar with my writings know that interconnectedness of us and all other creatures with which we share the planet is one of my major themes. So, I was delighted to read Rebecca Skloot's story, Creature Comforts, in the NY Times about all types of service animals and how they help people with disabilities. And you can imagine how dismayed I was to read on Rebecca's blog, Culture Dish, that the Department of Justice is trying to limit the types of animals that can be used for service animals, so I am partially reposting her entry in the hopes of bringing attention to this matter and stimulating action:

"NEWSFLASH: In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, I reported that the Department of Justice had proposed a ban on guide miniature horses, service monkeys, and other non-canine assistance animals (brief overview of the story and legal issues here, several follow up posts here). In my story, I mentioned that no one knew whether the DOJ had removed the species ban from their proposal after the public hearings this summer.

Well, I just got an email from a source who's seen a leaked version of the latest DOJ regulations, and the agency has in fact made the species ban more restrictive. Its initial proposal would have allowed cats and other commonly domesticated animals (perhaps including parrots). But the current version (which the DOJ approved on 12/3 and is now pending final approval by the OMB), limits service animals to only dogs.

The outpouring of response I've gotten from this article has been predominantly opposed to the idea of banning non-canine animals. Folks have asked who they should contact to speak out in favor of these animals, since the final proposal is still awaiting approval. For those interested, you can contact the Department of Justice here, and the OMB here. You can also contact your government representatives and state senators to let them know about the issue. (Update for those who've asked: The relevant way to reference this issue is as, The DOJ's proposed ADA regulations that would ban the use of any species other than dogs as service animals. The exact regulation in question is 'Title III Regulation 28 CFR Part 36: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability by Public Accommodations and in Commercial Facilities.' "

The rest of Rebecca's post and comments can be found here, and her update here.

Is there really a rational basis to limiting ADA service animals to dogs? What am I missing here?

More Monkey Business (Chimp Business, to be more accurate)

In a follow-up post to our post earlier today about primates, Brandon Keim of Wired Science asks, "Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People?":

"As a population of West African chimpanzees dwindles to critically endangered levels, scientists are calling for a definition of personhood that includes our close evolutionary cousins.

Just two decades ago, the Ivory Coast boasted a 10,000-strong chimpanzee population, accounting for half of the world's population. According to a new survey, that number has fallen to just a few thousand.

News of such a decline, published today in Current Biology, would be saddening in any species. But should we feel more concern for the chimpanzees than for another animal — as much concern, perhaps, as we might feel for other people?

'They are a people. Non-human, but definitely persons,' said Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. 'They haven't built a rocket ship to the moon. But we're not that different.'

Fouts is one of a growing number of scientists and ethicists who believe that chimpanzees — as well as orangutans, bonobos and gorillas, a group colloquially known as great apes — ought to be considered people.

It's a controversial position. If being a person requires being human, then chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, are still only 98 percent complete. But if personhood is defined more broadly, chimpanzees may well qualify. They have self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. Hardly a month seems to pass without researchers finding evidence of behavior thought to belong solely to humans.

Some even suggest that chimpanzees and other great apes should be granted human rights. So argued advocates for Hiasl, a chimpanzee caught in an Austrian custody battle, and the framers of an ape rights resolution passed by the Spanish parliament. The question of rights is practically thorny — how could a chimp be held responsible for, say, attacking another chimp? — but the fundamental question isn't practical, but rather scientific and ethical."

For the rest of the story, click here.

Monkey Business

Friend and colleague Chris MacDonald of the Business Ethics Blog, is not monkeying around (alright, enough with puns, but I couldn't resist) -- he has provoked a firestorm of discussion about animal rights in his recent postings about a story on monkey waiters in Japan.




The video and news story indicates that the 'monkeys are only allowed to work two hours a day, which is not bad, even if they are only being paid peanuts.'

Fodder for discussion in your bioethics class!

Eulogies For Washoe and Alex -- Invitations to Enlarge Our Moral Universe

Washoe, the first chimpanzee ever taught American Sign Language, passed away on Tuesday night. An amazing creature, she was born in 1965 in West Africa, where she was captured by the Air Force. She was brought to the United States, initially for research use in the space program, but after less than a year in the program, she took up residence with two scientists, Allen and Beatrix Gardner, who raised and treated her as a deaf human child; during her lifetime, she mastered the use of more than 250 signs and taught them to other chimpanzees. The NY Times said "by age 5 she had mastered enough signs to capture the world’s attention and set off a debate over nonhuman primates’ ability to learn human language that continues to this day." She died in bed at age 42, of natural causes, surrounded by staff members and other primates who had been close to her. More details about her life and tributes can be seen at the Friends of Washoe website.

Just several weeks ago, the world also lost another star, Alex, the talking grey parrot. Alex, who served as an inspirational model for the character "Gerard" in Michael Crichton's novel Next, was able to identify 50 different objects, 7 colors, 5 shapes, quantities up to and including 6 and a zero-like concept. Below is a video interview with Dr. Irene Pepperberg, the scientist who trained and studied him for three decades. More details about Alex's life and tributes can be seen at The Alex Foundation website.





What both Washoe and Alex did for us in the field of biomedical ethics was to force us re-examine our attitudes towards our selves and towards the other inhabitants of the planet that we share. Washoe and Alex helped us recognize that the lines between 'human' and 'nonhuman' are not so brightly drawn -- that we are interconnected and interdependent and that drawing these separations is an illusion. In the words of Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either...

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the tree cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too...

You cannot point out one thing that is not here -- time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper... As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

[From The Heart of Understanding Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988, pages 3-5.]

Alex and Washoe, by virtue of who they were, extended invitations to those of us in the human sphere to enlarge our moral universes -- An invitation which many of us have gratefully accepted. May they Rest In Peace.

European Court may get test case of primate person

In bioethics, "personhood" is the gravamen of any discourse about a right to life, ranging from embryos, fetuses, and now to a possible test case involving Hiasl, a 26 y.o. male chimpanzee in Austria. The sanctuary where he has lived for the past 25 years has gone bankrupt. So that Hiasl will not become "homeless, " a Viennese attorney wishes to have Hiasl declared a "person"...meaning that "he has the right to life, the right not to be tortured, and the right to freedom under certain circumstances."
The case could end up in the European Court of Human Rights.
Among other things, if Hiasl is declared a person, he would have the right to own property and if people wanted to donate money to him, he'd have the right to receive it. Witnesses for Hiasl will include Jane Goodall.

[Editor's note: See also Great Ape Project, http://www.greatapeproject.org)