By Jesse Bering Among the many disadvantages of being pasty white in complexion is the fact that a mere blush can broadcast one’s social discomfort for all the world to see. Granted, people of all colors and ethnicities blush at a basic physiological level—that is to say, human facial veins dilate in response to subtle psychosocial cues. But for mongrelized Caucasians such as yours truly, a white epidermis often acts rather embarrassingly like an objective gauge of subjective discomfort. And there’s not much you do about it, either: blushing is involuntary and uncontrollable. The good news is that although it may cause you some chagrin, blushing appears to serve a functional purpose. Recent findings by Dutch psychologists Corine Dijk, Peter de Jong and Madelon Peters reveal that if you ever find yourself in a pickle after, say, committing a social offence or being caught in an embarrassing mishap, the presence or absence of blushing can help determine if you’ll be forgiven by others. Surprisingly, these findings, published earlier this year in the journal Emotion , are among the first to address the adaptive significance of the blushing display—what Charles Darwin referred to as “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.” The gist of Dijk and her colleagues’ evolutionary argument for blushing is as follows: Publicly conveying embarrassment or shame may signify the actor’s recognition that she/he has committed a social or moral infraction, and regrets this. As a consequence, this message may mitigate the negative social impression that was caused by the infraction. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 13261 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Cassandra Willyard The human brain is a glutton, consuming 20% of our body's energy even though it accounts for only 2% of our mass. New research, however, suggests that little of that energy goes to power the brain's electrical signals. In fact, these impulses travel far more efficiently than previously thought. In 1939, a pair of British physiologists, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, took the first stab at figuring out how neurons transmit electrical signals, known as action potentials. Because most neurons are small--in humans, a cubic millimeter of gray matter can contain 40,000 neurons--the duo turned to squid, which contain a giant axon, the long thin part of a neuron through which action potentials travel. Electrical recordings helped Hodgkin and Huxley to develop a model of how action potentials move through neurons, work for which they won a Nobel Prize. According to the Hodgkin-Huxley model, the energy required to transmit an action potential in the squid giant axon is three to four times greater than what would be needed if the axon were perfectly efficient. That means the axon is about 25% to 30% efficient, roughly the same as a car engine. This number has been accepted for decades, but it never made much sense to Henrik Alle, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. "One would intuitively think that nature would try to optimize such a really important signal," he says, to make it as energy-efficient as possible. Alle and his colleagues decided to reexamine the efficiency question using mammalian neurons. The researchers recorded currents running through neurons in the memory and learning centers of rat brains, using a technique unavailable to Hodgkin and Huxley called the patch-clamp method. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13260 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Clare Wilson Far from protecting us and our children, the war on drugs is making the world a much more dangerous place. SO FAR this year, about 4000 people have died in Mexico's drugs war - a horrifying toll. If only a good fairy could wave a magic wand and make all illegal drugs disappear, the world would be a better place. Dream on. Recreational drug use is as old as humanity, and has not been stopped by the most draconian laws. Given that drugs are here to stay, how do we limit the harm they do? The evidence suggests most of the problems stem not from drugs themselves, but from the fact that they are illegal. The obvious answer, then, is to make them legal. The argument most often deployed in support of the status quo is that keeping drugs illegal curbs drug use among the law-abiding majority, thereby reducing harm overall. But a closer look reveals that this really doesn't stand up. In the UK, as in many countries, the real clampdown on drugs started in the late 1960s, yet government statistics show that the number of heroin or cocaine addicts seen by the health service has grown ever since - from around 1000 people per year then, to 100,000 today. It is a pattern that has been repeated the world over. A second approach to the question is to look at whether fewer people use drugs in countries with stricter drug laws. In 2008, the World Health Organization looked at 17 countries and found no such correlation. The US, despite its punitive drug policies, has one of the highest levels of drug use in the world (PLoS Medicine, vol 5, p e141). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Kurt Kleiner SMART implants in the brains of people with neurological disorders could eventually help develop treatments for people with Parkinson's disease, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. Last week, a team from Medtronic of Minneapolis, Minnesota, reported on their design for a neurostimulator at the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society meeting in Minneapolis. The devices use electrodes to deliver deep stimulation to specific parts of the brain. Neurostimulators are already approved to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, and dystonia, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder. But existing devices deliver stimulation on a set schedule, not in response to abnormal brain activity. The Medtronic researchers think a device that reacts to brain signals could be more effective, plus the battery would last longer, an important consideration for implantable devices. Tim Denison, a Medtronic engineer working on the device, says that the neurostimulator will initially be useful for studying brain signals as patients go about their day. Eventually, the data collected will show whether the sensors would be useful for detecting and preventing attacks. Human trials are years away, but elsewhere, NeuroPace a start-up firm in Mountain View, California, is finishing clinical trials using its RNS smart implant device in 240 people with epilepsy, the results of which will be available in December, says Martha Morrell, chief medical officer at NeuroPace. An earlier feasibility study on 65 patients provided preliminary evidence that the devices did reduce seizures. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Parkinsons; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 13258 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Torrice If you're at risk for heart disease, doctors can monitor your cholesterol. But psychiatrists don't have an analogous test for mental illnesses. That may change with a new discovery: Scientists have pinpointed a small spot in the brain that has a 71% chance of predicting whether high-risk patients will develop schizophrenia. About 75% of diagnosed schizophrenics show early, fleeting signs of the disease before they fully develop it. These so-called prodromal symptoms include mild hallucinations, such as hearing your name in the wind, or a sudden, unfounded suspicion that your friends are talking about you behind your back. Some patients may even experience a full psychotic episode--similar to what schizophrenics experience chronically--which lasts only a couple of days. Not all prodromal patients develop psychotic disorders: Two-and-a-half years after first experiencing these symptoms, only 35% receive a schizophrenia diagnosis. Predicting who gets that diagnosis is "a little better than flipping a coin," says Scott Schobel, a psychiatrist at Columbia University. To help understand how these patients progress from mild hallucinations to schizophrenia, Schobel and his colleagues compared brain activity between 18 schizophrenic and 18 healthy patients. The scientists used a high-resolution version of functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity through changes in blood volume, to take detailed snapshots of the subjects' brains while they lay in the scanner. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13257 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Linda Geddes STEM cells show promise for treating a range of neurological conditions, including Parkinson's, strokes and Alzheimer's, but it is tricky getting them into the brain. Perhaps inhaling stem cells might be the answer - if mice are anything to go by. Other options all have their drawbacks. Drilling through the skull and injecting the stem cells is painful and carries some risks. You can also inject them into the bloodstream but only a fraction reach their target due to the blood-brain barrier. The nose, however, might be a viable alternative. In the upper reaches of the nasal cavity lies the cribriform plate, a bony roof that separates the nose from the brain. It is perforated with pin-size holes, which are plugged with nerve fibres and other connective tissue. Since proteins, bacteria and viruses can enter the brain this way, Lusine Danielyan at the University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues, wondered if stem cells would also migrate into the brain through the cribriform plate. To test their idea, they dripped a suspension of fluorescently labelled stem cells into the noses of mice. The mice snorted them high into their noses, and the cells migrated through the cribriform plate. Then they travelled either into the olfactory bulb - the part of the brain that detects and deciphers odours - or into the cerebrospinal fluid lining the skull, migrating across the brain. The stem cells then moved deeper into the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 13256 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Torrice Try this trick at home: Have a friend remove an object from a room you know well--say, a napkin holder from your kitchen--and then see if you can guess what he's taken away. Even if you don't know the answer, your eyes will unconsciously fixate on the stretch of countertop next to the toaster where the holder usually sits. Remembering what goes where in your kitchen is called relational memory, and now scientists have shown that your unknowing stare may be a sign that your brain remembers even when you don't. What we think of as traditional memories are known as declarative memories. If someone asks us what color shirt we wore yesterday, for example, we say "green." Scientists know that a region of the brain called the hippocampus is responsible for these memories. But they've debated whether this region can also recall unconscious relational memories. Recent studies suggest it does: When people with hippocampal damage were given a test analogous to the napkin-holder theft, their eyes didn't fixate on the region where the object was missing. To further probe the role of the hippocampus in unconscious relational memories, cognitive neuroscientists Deborah Hannula and Charan Ranganath of the University of California, Davis, utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures changes in brain activity. They asked volunteers to view 216 photo pairs that showed a person's face and a scene such as the Grand Canyon. Later, the subjects had to pick which of three faces went with a scene they had viewed. While the subjects made their decision, the researchers monitored where the subjects looked. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13255 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays. Despite the X-rays, Mrs. C. W.’s seizures became worse, leaving her motionless and feeling as if an egg yolk were running down her throat. Erickson began to suspect that her sexual feelings were emanating not from her ovaries but from her head. Doctors opened up her skull and discovered a slow-growing tumor pressing against her brain. After the tumor was removed and Mrs. C. W. recovered, the seizures faded. “When asked if she still had any ‘passionate spells,’” Erickson recounted, “she said, ‘No, I haven’t had any; they were terrible things.’” Mrs. C. W.’s experience was rare but not unique. In 1969 two Florida doctors wrote to the journal Neurology about a patient who experienced similar spells of passion. She would beat both hands on her chest and order her husband to satisfy her. Usually the woman would come to with no memory of what had just happened, but sometimes she would fall to the floor in a seizure. Her doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy, probably brought on by the damage done to parts of her brain by a case of syphilis. More recently, in 2004, doctors in Taiwan described a woman who complained of orgasms that swept over her when she brushed her teeth. Shame kept her silent for years, until her episodes also caused her to lose consciousness. When the doctors examined her, they diagnosed her with epilepsy as well, caused by a small patch of damaged brain tissue.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13254 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Children born to women who had bariatric surgery for obesity may face a lower risk of severe obesity themselves, a study suggests. The study, of 111 children born to 49 mothers who had a type of weight-loss surgery called biliopancreatic diversion, found that babies born after the operation had lower birth weights than those born before, and their risk of becoming severely obese as children was one-third the risk of those born before. Only 11 percent of the children born after surgery were severely obese, compared with 35 percent of the others. Children born after the operation also had better cholesterol levels and improved insulin sensitivity, indicating they might be less likely to develop heart disease and diabetes later in life, the researchers found. Two notes of caution about the paper, to be published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism: The findings are based on observation of the children (the study was not randomized and controlled), and bariatric surgery can lead to complications like anemia, malnutrition, loss of bone density and, rarely, death. An author of the paper, Dr. John Kral, a professor of surgery and medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, said the benefits to the children might be due to metabolic and hormonal changes in the wombs of women who have had the operation. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13253 - Posted: 09.08.2009

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. The older girl was smart, neat and perfectly behaved in school; in her spare time, she won dance trophies. At every checkup, her mother would tell me what a good girl she was. She is the oldest, her mother would say, so she gets lots of attention, and she works very hard. When her younger sister turned out to be an equally good student, the proud mother explained that naturally she wanted to be just like her older sister. Then a long-looked-for baby boy was born. When he was a toddler, I began to worry that his speech seemed a little slow in coming. His mother was perfectly calm about it. He is the only boy, she said, so he gets lots of attention, and he doesn’t have to work very hard. Everyone takes it personally when it comes to birth order. After all, everyone is an oldest or a middle or a youngest or an only child, and even as adults we revert almost inevitably to a joke or resentment or rivalry that we’ve never quite outgrown. Children and parents alike are profoundly affected by the constellations of siblings; it is said that no two children grow up in the same family, because each sibling’s experience is so different. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13252 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Andy Coghlan A gene that helps muscle cells burn fat can be radically altered and switched off if the cells carrying it are exposed to fat. The finding suggests that the same process may occur when people eat too much fat-rich junk food, resulting in drastic changes to this "fat burning" gene. "Somehow, the environment plays on the genes we have," says lead researcher, Juleen Zierath of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. She says her team's findings provide new clues to how this happens, and may help explain how type II diabetes develops in adulthood. One possibility, she says, is that the altered cells become so engorged with unburnt fat, they become "diabetic", no longer accepting signals from the hormone insulin, which normally triggers the absorption of glucose from the bloodstream. But proof that components in the diet can permanently alter genes is itself a breakthrough, providing the first evidence that the food we eat may change the function of our DNA. This is a process known as "epigenetics". Fat switches off genes In this study the DNA itself remained unchanged, except for a masking process called methylation which can permanently mothball a gene by capping individual chemical units, or bases. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13251 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Infections outside the brain may speed memory decline in Alzheimer's disease, UK researchers say. In a study of 222 elderly people with Alzheimer's they found that getting infections in places like the chest or urinary tract could double memory loss. The Southampton University researchers think this leads to higher levels of an inflammatory protein called tumour necrosis factor (TNF) in the blood. They say better care to prevent infections is very important. The study published in the journal Neurology followed the Alzheimer's patients for six months. Between them 110 of the 222 subjects developed a total of 150 infections, in areas such as the chest, stomach and intestines and the urinary tract, which led to the production of TNF proteins. These are collectively known as acute systemic inflammation events (SIEs). Subjects with one or more SIEs during the six months follow-up had two times the rate of cognitive decline from their baseline score at the start of the study compared with those who had no SIE. And those patients who had high baseline levels of TNF and then suffered an SIE over the following six months had a 10 fold increase in the rate of cognitive decline compared to those who were SIE free. Professor Clive Holmes at the University of Southampton, who led the research, said they had looked at patients with mild, moderate and severe Alzheimer's disease. "The worse the infection the worse the affect on the memory, but this is only an association at the moment. '"One might guess that people with a more rapid rate of cognitive decline are more susceptible to infections or injury, but we found no evidence to suggest that people with more severe dementia were more likely to have infections or injuries at the beginning of the study. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13250 - Posted: 09.08.2009

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor A San Francisco researcher investigating a rare but serious heart defect in newborns has discovered a major genetic factor that makes us the warm-blooded creatures we are. Finding the genetic factor meant studying the cardiac systems of turtles and lizards, engineering the genes of specially bred mice, and investigating a congenital disorder known as "holes in the heart," or, in medical terms, ventricular septal defect. The research by Benoit G. Bruneau of the Gladstone Institute for Cardiovascular Disease was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The defect is one of many cardiac disorders whose origins he studies in his laboratory. "I'm particularly interest in heart development, and how this beating thing in my chest gets put together so well time after time, and keeps going every day," he said. Bruneau's goal, he says, is to understand "how the heart becomes a heart." His investigation was sparked by a physician colleague who told Bruneau about a cardiac problem in newborn infants he was treating at UCSF. The ventricular septal defect can occur in as many as 5 infants in every 1,000 births. When it is serious, cardiac surgeons can treat it successfully, but its cause is unclear. © 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13249 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The public will be invited to take part in a mass brain training study later as part of a project between the BBC and medical research bodies. A host of celebrities will kick off the experiment on the BBC science series Bang Goes the Theory at 1930BST. People are being asked to take part in regular memory and reasoning tests to see if they can boost brain function. Dementia experts believe such computer tests could help ward off and slow the development of the disease. But, to date, evidence has been mixed on the effectiveness of so-called brain training. Dementia is caused by the mass loss of cells in the brain, and some believe one way to guard against it is to build up as many connections between cells as possible by being mentally active throughout life. The theory has prompted several firms to market brain training programmes, but a recent investigation by consumer group Which? found only "weak" evidence they worked. However, King's College London research has shown that keeping the mind active though things such as work or computer use, especially later in life, could help. The BBC now wants to put brain training to the test by asking the British public to take part in the nine-month study, Brain Test Britain. Participants will carry out 10-minute online brain training exercises three times a week for at least six weeks. Before and after the study they will be tested to see if they have improved brain function. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13248 - Posted: 09.07.2009

By David Brown Two European research teams have identified three genes that affect a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia in the elderly. The new genes appear to have at least as big a role as four others discovered in the last 15 years that are known to play a role in Alzheimer's. "The message here is that genes are important in Alzheimer's disease . . . and there may be multiple ways of reducing the risk that the genes produce," said Julie Williams, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in Wales who helped lead one of the teams. All so-called Alzheimer genes have normal roles in brain physiology; they don't exist solely to cause dementia. Instead, small variations in their DNA alter their function and, through processes only now being uncovered, increase or reduce a person's risk of developing the disease. Two of the genes described in the new research may be involved in determining the brain's capacity to clear itself of toxic "amyloid" proteins that collect outside neurons, eventually poisoning them. The most important previously known Alzheimer gene promoted overproduction of amyloid. The new findings suggest that at least two processes -- production of amyloid and its removal -- are involved in the disease. At least 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. By one estimate, one in seven people age 72 and older has dementia, with Alzheimer's the most common form. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13247 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sanjida O'Connell Not just a window to the soul, the eye has a few tricks of its own. Newly discovered eye cells can warn us that an object is coming nearer, and do so without the brain's help. This ability may have evolved to speed escape from predators. Neurons that fire in response to horizontal and vertical movements had already been found in the retinas of mammals, but the only cells known to be sensitive to approaching objects were in the brain. While investigating mouse eye cells, Botond Roska and his team at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, noticed that one type behaved unusually in response to movement. Further analysis of this one kind of retinal cell revealed that it fired only when an object approached. The researchers suspect that people have similar cells, which alert us to approaching objects faster than our brain cells can. "It's an alarm system that's as close to the front end of the organism as possible," says Roska. "If you left it to the brain to respond, it might be too late." Next, Roska plans to discover how the approach-sensitive cells evoke a reaction in the brain. "This is exciting work," says Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. "How the nerve cells of the visual system work out that an object is approaching represents a very old question in neuroscience." Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2389 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders Sinking blocks and clearing lines in Tetris may pay off with more than just a high score. Playing the classic shape-fitting computer game, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, for just three months may boost the size and efficiency of parts of the brain, a study published September 1 in BMC Research Notes finds. “This is a fascinating result,” comments Pascale Michelon of Washington University in St. Louis. “It confirms how plastic the brain is.” Brain scans revealed that certain regions of gray matter — an information-processing mix of brain cells and capillaries — grew thicker in 15 adolescent girls who had played Tetris for three months. On average, these participants played for just 1.5 hours per week. “Brain structure is much more dynamic than had been appreciated,” says Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, who coauthored the report with collaborators from McGill University in Montreal and the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Brains of 11 girls who had not played the game showed no such increase. (Girls were chosen because they were less likely than boys to have extensive video game–playing experience, which might have thrown off the results, Haier says.) In another test, the researchers used functional MRI to monitor brain activity during Tetris play. For the girls who had played Tetris, researchers found that some parts of the brain showed less activity than three months earlier, when the girls were Tetris novices. Brain activity of girls who had not played Tetris stayed the same over the three months. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13245 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Cloud Teenagers are a famously reckless species. They floor the gas and experiment with drugs and play with guns; according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, more than 16,000 young people die each year from unintentional injuries. The most common-sense explanation for teens' carelessness is that their brains just aren't developed enough to know better. But new research suggests that in the case of some teens, the culprit is just the opposite: the brain matures not too slowly but, perhaps, too quickly. In a paper just published in PLoS ONE — a journal of the Public Library of Science — a team led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta shows that adolescents who engage in more dangerous activities have white-matter pathways that appear more mature than those of risk-averse youths. White matter is essentially the brain's wiring — the neural strands that connect the various gray-matter regions, where the actual nerve cells reside, that are otherwise independent of one another. Maturation of white matter is important because it increases the brain's processing speed; nerve impulses travel faster in mature white matter. Berns and his colleagues recruited 91 kids ages 12 to 18 and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their tendency to engage in behaviors such as driving without a license, having unprotected sex and using drugs. Then they had the kids undergo a relatively new kind of brain scan called diffusion tensor imaging, a type of magnetic resonance imaging that is used to look at dense tissues like white matter. After analyzing the scans, the authors found a strong correlation between how risky the students described their behavior to be and how sophisticated their white matter was. The more mature the look of the brain, the more risk-taking the teenager tended to report. © 2009 Time Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Mice with a mutation in an immune gene don’t get fat, they burn it. A gene that helps regulate inflammation also stops fat cells from wasting energy. When the gene, called I kappa B kinase epsilon or IKKε, is missing, mice turn a high-fat diet into heat instead of body fat, a new study in the Sept. 4 Cell shows. If the gene works the same way in humans as in mice, it could be a new target for antiobesity drugs. Scientists previously learned that low-level inflammation produced by obesity could trigger type 2 diabetes. But the details of the connection are still unclear, says Alan Saltiel, a cell biologist and endocrinologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In the new study, Saltiel and his colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet and discovered that levels of IKKε were elevated in the liver and fat tissue of the mice, compared with mice on a regular chow diet. IKKε is known to be involved in regulating inflammation, and the researchers thought the molecule might be the link between diet and diabetes that they were looking for. “What I expected was that if we knocked out this gene we’d get rid of the link between obesity and diabetes,” by eliminating inflammation, Saltiel says. He didn’t suspect that the connection would be severed further up the chain — preventing mice from getting obese in the first place. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13243 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway WITH "hormone-free", "cage-free" and "antibiotic-free" becoming common labels on our supermarket shelves, might "pain-free" be the next sticker slapped onto a rump roast? As unlikely as that may seem, progress in neuroscience and genetics in recent years makes it a very real possibility. In fact, according to one philosopher, we have an ethical duty to consider the option. "If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused," says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering." I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering Humans consume nearly 300 million tonnes of meat each year. Our appetite for flesh has risen by 50 per cent since the 1960s, and the trend looks set to continue. Most of this will likely come from factory farms, notorious for cramped quarters and ill treatment of animals. Battery farm chickens, for instance, routinely have part of their beaks removed without anaesthetic or pain relief to prevent them from pecking their neighbours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Animal Rights; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13242 - Posted: 06.24.2010