As regular readers of SHS know, I am appalled by the terroristic assault on intellectual freedom and the rule of law by animal rights thugs against medical researchers. Delusionally thinking themselves akin to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, these nihilists commit arson, burglary, theft, blackmail, assault, and threats of murder (only threats, so far) against people trying to find cures for cancer, treat blindness, and otherwise prevent human harm.
Now, two researchers P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker, tell us what it is like to be on the receiving end of this orc-treatment in their fine newly released book The Animal Research War. One of the disturbing things about this issue has been the tendency to hang medical researchers out to dry rather than confront those whose howling fury threatens scientific research. (That seems to be changing: UCLA is standing firmly behind its researchers under current threat.) But it isn’t always so. Conn and Parker tell the story of Michael Podell, driven from AIDS research because of his research with cats. They write:
Podell came under attack. He began to to receive threatening calls. The university was inundated with chain e-mails [containing erroneous information][which]grew in viciousness.
In addition to receiving e-mails and anonymous phone calls, including death threats, Podell saw his studies become the target of lawsuits.
Podell was honored by an NIH review committee which ranked his research “among the most valuable in the country.” Yet, in the face of this threat to the very purpose of the university, Podell’s administration at the Ohio State University did not adequately support him. Consequently:
In June 2002, Podell published a significant study related to his feline AIDS research. His finding offered important clues and pathways and mechanisms that might explain why drug abuse quickens the rate of AIDS infection and dementia. A little more than a week later, Ohio State announced that Podell was leaving the university…He had been scared off in a matter of only months.
I found it interesting that Podell did not cooperate with the authors in their book. In my own work for my upcoming tome, I have found the same climate of fear; researchers utterly terrorized from even allowing me to quote them about their research and the assaults on their quiet lives.
Read The Animal Research War and learn that animal rights isn’t just about being nice to animals. It is in either explicitly or implicitly anti-human in its ideology and either by design or consequence, threatens to materially thwart human thriving.
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