In my Cognitive Neuroscience class today, the teacher was discussing neural plasticity, and mentioned an experiment which I was horrified by. Infant cats had their eyes sewn shut, and their brain was imaged before and after a year of development to demonstrate that the visual centres did not develop without exposure to light. The cats were then killed and dissected for further examinations. The article's citation is:

Mriganka Sur, Douglas O. Frost, and Susan Hockfield, "Expression of a Surface-Associated Antigen on Y-Cells in the Cat Lateral Geniculate Nucleus Is Regulated by Visual Experience," J. of Neuroscience, 8, No. 3 (1988), 874-882.

Apparently, the expression on my face of hearing my professor clinically talk about this was apparent -- she asked me if anything was wrong. I mentioned that I worked for a time in an animal shelter.. and she said she'd like to talk about the topic sometime -- she's a big supporter of such things, and that there were large benefits to such experiments. I certainly agree that there are benefits, but that's not really a full examination of the ethics of such horrifying research. I'm aware that I have some unorthodox positions, at least for someone trying to enter the field of neuroscience, on medical ethics (I feel that a lot of the details of informed consent and similar are too conservative, and that given certain provisions such as right of withdrawl and protections against physical harm, a lot of the rest of the ethical rules are fluffy and stupid), but in this case we're talking about experiments where nothing resembling consent is possible, and incredible harm is being done to the subjects. It's reprehensible, and in situations like this, I smile on those who take direct action to free critters in such a miserable situation*. Yes, there are benefits, and so too would there be benefits to grabbing homeless people off the street for human experiments, and so too were there benefits to the experiments some German scientists did in WW2 on their unfortunate subjects, but regardless of the benefits, it remains that sufficiently intelligent creatures had this misery put upon them without consent, things worse than death. No society should permit such things.

On other news, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli who worked on Israel's nuclear programme, was released from prison (treason) after 18 years there, today. He was being kept there because he was the one who revealed to the world Israel's not-so-secret nuclear weapons capabilities. He was apparently kidnapped while in Italy, which created an international fuss, and while allowed out of prison, will not be permitted to leave Israel for a year.

Males are unnecessary -- with the right circumstances, females can create more females. Of course, no males can be produced (none of the crippled Y chromosome is around), but that might not be a big problem..

Here's the foot, here's the mouth (4 days later) Insert at will.

Someone sent me this. Funny. GNOME Straw is a neat little RDF reader.

I recently have been playing, to help someone at work, with the perl module NetServer::Generic .. it's neat, but the simple webserver provided is very horribly broken. We fixed it.. with some work, and now there's a really funny way to check up on my boss.

LINK I do understand that that's a link to a rather more liberal source than you'd prefer for an unbiased understanding of things, but the pictures are not very different from the things described and shown in some of the classes I've taken.