Good to hear from you, and thank you for the feedback. I’m sure MC will respond shortly, but I’ll throw in my $0.02 here.

Actually the ethics of animal research are widely discussed and are of great concern. I should also mention that doctoral programs in neuroscience generally have a mandatory ethics requirement.

Although I don’t work with animals in my research, I understand from people who do that permission to do so depends on providing huge experiment protocols (hundreds of pages) that fully describe all the procedures and precautions taken for the well-being of the animals — these must be approved in their entirety before any funding for the research can be granted.

In contrast, the protocols for human research are a tiny fraction of that size.

-PL

But I am a bit astonished by how little concern is given to the ethical issues of non-human subjects. It is known that monkeys have similar (homologous) neurological modules related to affect and emotion as humans (example: Jaak Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience) , which necessarily implies that fear, pain, horror, grief and suffering are part of their cognitive world. Extrapolating that further makes it clear that some of modern neuro-scientific research on non-human primates is pretty close to torture.

Is there any discussion of this in the scientific community? Or are the gains offered so great they automatically squelch the difficult questions of renouncing animal research?

respects,
Jhave