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Mićo Tatalović (right), the author of this week’s feature story, “The Newest Lab Rat Has Eight Arms,” explains the impetus for his piece and the ethical uncertainty that stuck with him.
The idea for this story came to me during two visits to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, last year, one with the Knight Science Journalism Program and the other as part of the MBL Logan Science Journalism Program. Both times we heard about MBL’s new cephalopod project and saw the cephalopod facility as well as another, more advanced, facility nearby: the National Xenopus Resource, just across the road from the cephalopods, where a somewhat dystopian vision of the future awaited. There, we found tank after tank of crowded, largely immobile frogs that have been raised there for many generations, over decades, as model organisms for lab studies. They are pumped with hormones that make them lay eggs, and otherwise they just float in an utterly sterile environment.
It’s a far cry from their natural habitat and lifestyle in the wetlands of Nigeria—and also far from the public image MBL projects: in a nearby accommodation center, MBL keeps two tanks with natural vegetation, rocks, and only a couple of frogs sitting in each. It made me wonder if this is the future of the cephalopod facility, too. And whether the frogs minded their predicament—and if the more intelligent cephalopods would mind it even more.
A simple frog is perhaps a sacrifice worth making for advancing biomedical science. But what of the more advanced cephalopods? Is it right to keep cephalopods captive just to collect their eggs and experiment on them? I left unconvinced that science can answer that ethical question.
Photo by Jes Burns, Multimedia Journalist, EarthFix, Oregon Public Broadcasting |
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