TRINITY NEWS
Tuesday 10th February 2015
SciTech
Moral dilemma of animal testing in Trinity
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Science in Brief Dylan Lynch SciTech Editor
College spent nearly 400k on lab animals in 2014. Should and could they find an alternative to animal testing? Nessa Fitzgerald Contributor The issue of animal testing has become a hot topic on campus following recent revelations concerning its expensive use of lab animals. In 2014, according to information released to The Herald under the Freedom of Information Act last month, College spent nearly ¤400,000 on mice and rats alone. It purchased 8,563 mice, 1,346 rats, 29 pigs, and six rabbits between January of 2013 and November of 2014, mostly for biomedical research purposes. Its total cost, ¤387,391.92, does not even cover the maintenance costs involved with keeping the animals. According the Comparative Medicine Price List, the cost of maintaining a single cage containing five mice is ¤5.15 per day, so if we were to take the 8,563 mice that Trinity purchased in the aforementioned time period - not allowing for those that have died or for reproduction, which is used as a method to reduce the cost of purchasing new animals - this works out at ¤8,815.89 per day, just to maintain the mouse population.
Father of birth control dies aged 91 Carl Djerassi, who invented the synthesis for the first ever orally active contraceptive pill, has died. While leading a research team in Mexico City in 1951, he prepared norethindrone – a molecule vital in the development of contraceptive research - synthetically for the first time.
DU Zoo Soc host leading snake expert College’s own Zoological Society, in association with BioSoc and the Herpetological Society of Ireland (HIS), hosted a lecture with Dr. Zoltán Takács last Wednesday in the Hamilton building. Dr. Takács gave a presentation to a bustling crowd of students and biology staff in the Joly Theatre on the search for ‘life-saving animals’. While working as an explorer for National Geographic,
Controversy
The issue of animal testing remains a major moral conundrum: is the life of a mouse or rat worth the life of a human being? Of course, people want drugs and treatments that will keep them healthy, and they want them to be safe and have the minimum possible risks, but many people cringe at the thought of the animals that these drugs are tested on. Some of the more extreme animal rights groups campaigning against animal testing refuse to accept that there are any benefits to testing on the basis of pharmaceuticals, and believe that it should be banned altogether. These groups at times spread misinformation regarding animal testing is spread by these groups. In 2008, for instance, author John Banville wrote a letter to The Irish Times attacking Trinity’s policies on vivisections. He cited a statement from a member of National Animal Rights Association (NARA) that claimed that College performed research on “mice, rats, rabbits, and even horses, when they can.” The group claimed that most of this was for the purpose of teaching medical students, rather than actual research. While it is true that senior freshman science students taking the Vertebrate Form and
The Austrian-born chemist died due to complications of cancer in his San Francisco home on January 30th and grandson Alexander Djerassi. In an obituary released by Stanford University, at which he was a professor emeritus of chemistry, Professor Richard Zare described Djerassi
Takács also researches the medical potential of snake venoms and is the co-inventor of the Designer Toxins technology, which allows a library of catalogued toxins to be focused on a particular target – such as a disease molecule – and tested. These toxin libraries have allowed researchers to improve existing drugs and identify new leads for drug development.
Illustration: Sarah Larragy Function module (BY2202) are required to dissect rats - many of which have been used for research already and have been humanely euthanised - many people outside of College seem to believe that researchers perform vivisections on unanaesthetised animals, which is an absurd idea that has been rejected by the college on more than one occasion following accusations by animal rights groups. Such experiments do not take in fact take place, the School of Medicine has confirmed.
Justification
Many animal rights groups propose ideas such as computer simulations as a viable alternative to animal testing, but if, say, a new potential drug for Alzheimer’s was being tested, a computer simulation could only show how that drug would affect a single part of the body. Such drugs affect more than one system, and this cannot be shown in a simulation. Even if it did only affect one system, this method probably wouldn’t show all effects of the drug on that system. This is where animal testing becomes important. Tests on ani-
mals show how a drug affects the body as a whole, rather than just the targeted areas, and show how safe the drug is before it can come anywhere close to human trials. This minimises the risk to humans undergoing trials for these drugs. However, unfortunate side effects can still occur. In 2006, Parexel International tested a new drug which had been proposed as an anti-inflammatory and a potential treatment for leukaemia on six healthy young men. The animal tests (performed on cynomolgus macaques) had shown no severe side effects, and the drug had been cleared for human trials. When these six men took the drug, however, they ended up at death’s door, suffering from multiple organ failure. Thankfully, all the volunteers survived the ordeal. Of course, saying that we have an absolute right to use animals, or no right to use them, are both extreme views. The idea that the use of animals is fraudulent involves the thinking that it is not possible to extrapolate studies based on animals to humans. This argument is hugely flawed, and
highlights a misunderstanding of biochemical processes essential to most lifeforms.
Speciesism
There are two schools of thought among those who believe that humans have no right to use animals: speciesism, and personhood. Speciesism compares the use of animals to racism, and imposes certain ‘natural rights’ on animals which are equal to the rights of humans. This concept disallows the use of animals for anything other than a humananimal companionship. Personhood involves the concept that animals are aware of themselves, and that the value of a life, be it animal or human, cannot be measured by how useful it is to others, but by its experience of how important its life is to itself. Proponents of this concept tend to believe that all humans should be vegetarians or vegans, and that the use of many animal products is exploitation. More extreme proponents of personhood have been known to employ terrorist methods to convince people that their view is the correct one. Some have even been known
to discourage diabetics from taking their insulin, as it comes from pigs. Organisations such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), known for their shock-factor campaigns and sometimes unfounded accusations of cruelty and neglect, would be strong proponents of personhood. There are similar groups which share these ideals not far from College’s front arch. Each weekend see’s a group of a dozen protesters outside of Barnardo Furriers at the foot of Grafton street, campaigning for closure of the clothing shop. Animal testing is a huge moral dilemma in the modern era, but it is difficult to know what could be used as an alternative. At present, there is no viable alternative, and many people are not happy about this. It seems unlikely that an alternative that does not involve live animals will appear any time in the near future, but perhaps one day it will not be necessary.
New evidence of monkey’s evolutionary history published Recent work by Dr. Kenneth Campbell of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has shown that there is strong evidence to support one of the most widespread theories regarding primate origin. Having discovered fossils of a vertebrate in the Peruvian Amazon in 2010, Dr. Campbell first established that the fossils were in fact from a primitive monkey and mounting fossil evidence began to be uncovered by Campbell’s crack team of Argentinian palaeontolo-
gists. The evidence published in Nature on February 4thstrongly suggests that the South American monkeys have an African ancestry, and that a transatlantic journey must have been made at some point. Furthermore, this research shifts the evolutionary timeline backwards – the dating of these fossils indicates that these primates arrived in South America 36 million years ago, 10 million years further back in time than the previous estimate.
Trinity researchers to create Bitcoin regulation system College scientists are working on a way to make Bitcoin transactions safer. A student at the heart of the research explains how. Luke McGuinness Online SciTech Editor Bitcoin, an online peer-to-peer payment network, has grown dramatically in popularity since its introduced as open-source software in 2009. The aim of its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, was to cut out the middle man - the credit card company or bank - in online payments, meaning that no one institution, government or person could place a fee on the transactions, or control the flow of the Bitcoin currency. Instead of one organisation holding all the information on the state of the transactions they mediate in a centralised ledger, it was intended that each user of the Bitcoin currency would record the transactions made together. However, Bitcoin’s lack of regulation, which has allowed it to be used as a currency for financing illicit activities as well as making it liable to fraud, has led to some criticism of the system. A group of Trinity students are currently looking at ways to improve the security of transactions in Bitcoin through a “credit cheque” system, where potential partners in a transaction have the ability to scope each other out before deciding to do business.
How does work?
the
system
So how does the system currently work? Imagine going to a London pub, some of which now sell drinks for Bitcoin. You might have enough Bitcoin in your digital wallet to buy drinks for the entire bar, but how do you convince the bartender that you actually do? This is where the system of public and private keys, and a group of the Bitcoin community known as Miners come in. To pay for something in Bitcoin, or to transfer money from one wallet to another, you need to public key or public ID of the person you want to pay, as well as your own private key. Only if these two things are present to “sign” a transaction will it be allowed to proceed. The public key serves to identify the person or business you wish to pay, while your private key acts something like a pin code, ensuring that the owner of the wallet has given permission for the payment to take place. This is a minor drawback of the system, in that the community will not accept any other form of identification of ownership of a particular wallet except the private key associated with the wallets public key. This means that if the private key is lost, the wallet is no longer useable and the Bitcoins contained within it cannot be recovered, as happened in 2013 when a user threw out a hard drive containing his private key to a wallet containing 7500
Bitcoin, worth approximately $7.5 million at the time. Following a transaction being signed by both parties, it is broadcast as a proposed entry to the ledger. The mining community of Bitcoin then take over, and ensure that the central ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, also known as the block chain, is kept consistent and complete by collecting and verifying new transactions into blocks, or pages of a ledger. This also verifies that the account which is paying contains enough Bitcoin to do so. The miners compute a cryptographic hash function of a pair of transactions to give a digest, a single output, from this pair. A second hash function of the digests is then computed, effectively reducing the number of elements from the original four down to one. This happens across all transactions on the ledger page, or block, until a single digest incorporating all the transactions with the block is given. This new digest is then incorporated, or “chained” to, the digest of the block previous to it, meaning that each block can be traced back to the beginning of the Bitcoin system and giving the central ledger its “block chain” name. This is what affords the system its security, as to change a historical transaction, not only must a particular block be modified, but all blocks since it must also be modified, as they incorpo-
rate the information of that particular transaction. Despite the security of the system, one of the key issues surrounding the Bitcoin currency is the legality of it. The Baggot Inn, which for a period last year allowed drinks to be bought with Bitcoin, at a rate of BTC 0.0093 (¤4.40) a pint, has since dropped the scheme, citing the legal position of Bitcoin, and in particular Bitcoin ATMs, within Ireland as the reason behind the move as the Central Bank does not currently recognise Bitcoin as a currency. A number of reasons are associated with this, mainly that the system has little regulation, meaning that if theft or fraudulent transactions occur, for example if goods are bought online using Bitcoin and are not as described or don’t arrive at all, users are not protected by refund rights.
Trinity researchers
This is where a group of Trinity students, in particular Cian Burns, step in. Burns was originally involved in a group looking into creating a Bitcoin “regulator” - led by Professor Donal O’Mahoney of the School of Computer Science and Statistics - before he went on to create a database of linked accounts by trawling the transaction ledger and grouping linked Bitcoin addresses as part of his dissertation. “What I was doing was effectively going back through
the ledger looking for linked activity and by doing so, creating a record of interacting accounts,” Burns tells Trinity News. “If I see a transaction with many accounts going into it, I know that each of these addresses is owned by the same person, similar to paying a ¤25 bill with a ¤20 note and a ¤5 note.” After creating this grouping of accounts, and linking accounts to each other using transactions, Burns looked at building on his work to create a credit-check system that would allow potential transactions partners to scope each other out before deciding to participate in a transaction. ”The system might involve users reviewing their experience of dealing with a particular address, and on top of that, it could incorporate the proximity of the potential partners’ address to a malicious address,” Burns says. For example, if the account a user is looking at doing business with is linked to an address known for fraudulent behaviour or an account that interacts a lot with black market addresses, a user might reconsider whether they want to proceed. This address reviewing system should prevent a few of the problems associated with Bitcoin at present. Future projects by the team are looking into how Bitcoin might be regulated to an extent, while still maintaining the attractions the
system currently possesses. A future Bitcoin regulator, according to the group, would want to know the distribution of Bitcoin among address and to be able to recognise patterns in the transaction history that the community of us ers ought to be concerned about, and which could, for example, indicate fraudulent activity. While not yet perfect, Bitcoin deals with some of the grumbles
that users have with the current system, in that it does away with transaction fees and allows a degree of anonymity. Some regulation of the system, such as that proposed by the Trinity group, would likely improve the user experience and protect against exploitation of users, though.