Mickey Z

Cool Observer

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Lab rats, corporate science, and the monsters we’ve all become

The January 24 Associated Press (AP) story was unashamedly entitled, “Lab rats out of a job.” (It made me wonder if AP writer Michael Hill had covered the liberation of Auschwitz, if he’d have declared Europe’s Jews to now be “homeless.”) In the piece, Hill talks of possible “high-tech alternatives” to animal experimentation. Before you view this as a major scientific and moral step forward, I present Hill’s closer: “Taylor Bennett, senior science adviser to the National Association for Biomedical Researchers, said animal testing maintains an essential role in making sure new pharmaceutical products are safe and effective for humans.”

Safe and effective? Not so, says Robert Mendelsohn, M.D. “The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn’t work,” explains Dr. Mendelsohn. “It has no scientific value and every good scientist knows that.”

Read my complete article here

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James Baldwin sez: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

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NYC Event Alert:

Free showing of Sicko

With guest speaker: Ajamu Sankofa, an organizer with the Private Health Insurance Must Go! Coalition, a direct-action coalition of two dozen NYC-based organizations working together to secure health care as a human right, to end the health care crisis in the United States, and to create a national single-payer health insurance plan.

Monday, February 11 @ 7:00 pm
Generation Q
30-74 Steinway Street, 2nd Floor
(between 30th & 31st Ave) in Astoria

Directions: N/W train to 30th Avenue, east to Steinway
R, V or G train to Steinway Street, walk north

Co-sponsors: Generation Q and Astorians for Peace and Justice

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Mickey Z. for President