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Media Coverage Activists protest on campus: Various animal rights groups rally against medical testing on primates By Shauntel Lowe A proposal by a team of UCLA researchers to study the social effects
of Ecstasy on vervet monkeys was a key battling point in a protest held
Thursday throughout the UCLA Medical Center area by a small group of
animal rights activists. In conjunction with National Primate Liberation Week, the group of
about 15 activists gathered at the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Le
Conte Avenue just after noon, holding large posters with images of
monkeys during vivisection and other research procedures. The posters displayed slogans such as "This is not research, it's
torture" and "Vivisection: Science Gone Mad." Members of various animal
rights groups, including the L.A.-based Last Chance for Animals and the
Anti-Vivisection Campaign, were among the protestors who marched along
Westwood Boulevard. The protest did not focus on the use of primates in any specific area
of research, but the Ecstasy proposal became a hot discussion topic as
the event continued. The proposal, called "Making Connections: MDMA Research on the
Mechanisms of Affiliation and Trust," is intended as a stepping stone to
learning more about human social interaction. It was submitted to the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies by a group of UCLA
researchers about a year ago. The association is a non-profit research and educational organization
that helps scientists get funding and approval for projects involving
Ecstasy, psychedelic drugs and marijuana. So far the researchers have
not received any funding offers. Anthropology Professor Alan Page Fiske, one of the main researchers
behind the proposal, said Ecstasy has many emotional benefits, including
making people feel euphoric and a providing a greater sense of community
with those around them. For that reason, he said, it is important to
study how the chemicals impact people's sociability. "The biggest problems we have in the world are people not trusting
each other and not feeling a solidarity (and) feeling distant," Fiske
said. "If we could understand the basis of compassion and caring, that's
about the most important thing human and biological sciences could do."
Protesters argued that research on animals as a means to benefit
humans is a waste of time and money, saying the findings cannot
translate to humans because they are two different species. "We're different within our own species. How are you going to go in
an entirely different species (and do research)?" said Chris DeRose,
president of Last Chance for Animals, a group he started 21 years ago.
The group of activists, proceeded by a string of bicycle-riding
university police officers, made stops at the Semel Institute for
Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the MacDonald Medical Research
Laboratory. The officers sat on their bikes in front of the building
entrances, blocking the protestors and interrupting the flow of traffic
in and out of the buildings. The protesters were primarily concerned about the potential harm that
could be done to animals through research. Devin Murphy, a member of Last Chance for Animals, described the
desire to see the effects of Ecstasy on primates as a "totally sick
curiosity." Both Murphy and DeRose advocated the use of clinical studies, or
observing and analyzing human patients, as a more accurate and moral
research method. David Jentsch, an assistant professor of psychology and one of the
researchers behind the proposal, said clinical studies are helpful in
showing correlations, but not in finding why, mechanistically, things
happen. "Our society expects me to provide them with facts with a level of
certainty. You can't get that without mechanistic studies in non-human
species," he said.
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