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Lab bill format for Animal science

I've been covering science for 16 years as a reporter for a local newspaper as the online science editor for Wired magazine and as a freelancer and so like many of you I've reported written and edited stories about research involving lab animals as we all know animal research can be a contentious issue that often pits one side against another among scientists among journalists and between the two groups as well so today we'll be talking about how the media covers the science with input from scientists involved in animal research and journalists who cover it and our goal here is to have an open and thoughtful discussion with a focus on the issues surrounding the journalistic coverage of the science so we're not having a debate about whether or not we should be doing research on other animals and so we're gonna hope to leave plenty of time for the audience to ask questions so please try to keep your questions focused on that aspect of it we have an excellent panel representing a wide range of relevant experience so I'm going to introduce each of them quickly they'll each have five minutes to share some of their thoughts on this and experience in the area and then we're gonna have a panel discussion and then open up to questions and I'll try to remember to let you know when you can begin lining up if you've got questions so we'll start with David Grimm is the online news editor for the journal science and is my co organizer for this session in addition to editing David reports on animal welfare for science and received the National Press foundation's animal reporting award in 2010 he's the author of the 2014 book citizen canine our evolving relationship with cats and dogs he also has a PhD in genetics from Yale and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins John Nye is a neuroscientist and the director of the QVC functional genomics lab at UC Berkeley where he studies the vertebrate olfactory system and cortex using the mouse as a model system he is part of the US government's brain initiative working to develop and leverage new technologies to study the human brain and he's been involved in the oversight of UC Berkeley's animal research program and in communication about the university's animal research activities to the public and the press Lari Carboni is a veterinarian and the director of the Animal Care and Use program at UCSF and he's been involved in lab animal care in academia for more than 35 years he also has a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell and is the author of what animals want advocacy and expertise in laboratory animal welfare policy his research focuses on pain management for lab animals and on how scientists write about pain in their research publications Laura Hellmuth is the health science and environment editor at The Washington Post she's also edited for Slate Smithsonian magazine and science she's the current president of the National Association of science writers a co-host of the meeting and she also personally put a lot of effort into this conference as a member of the US big committee as well as the organizing and program committees so thank you for all of that so welcome and we'll get started with David grim so I like Betsy said I am a deputy online news editor at science so I in addition to being a journalist I've been a journalist for more than a decade now my I've actually have a background in science so I got my bachelor's degree at UCSD in biochemistry and cell biology where I worked in a couple labs I worked at the Salk Institute for a year after I graduate from UCSD is a lab tech and then I got my PhD at Yale where I was for six years in the department of genetics but mostly studying cell biology and molecular biology and so I sort of bring that perspective a little bit into what I write because I feel like I can be sensitive and sort of understand what scientists are going through when not only when they do experiments but especially when they're doing things like instead of things like animal work just gonna have a little bit of background in that at science I oversee our daily news operation which we're running a lot of daily news stories covering research policy stories things like that but when I get a right which isn't as often as I'd like but I usually write my maybe there's an animal welfare and animal right so if any of you guys are familiar with the case that's going on at Yale with the postdoc being targeted by PETA that's something I've been but also covering things like animal welfare records and new strategies by animal welfare and animal rights groups to target research I've been pretty involved with this issue of chimpanzees personhood shouldn't NZ retirement so these are some of the future articles I've written for the for the magazine also things like cognition when it plays into welfare so our dolphins too smart for a captivity what should we do with killer whales and her in captivity I'm particularly interested in issues where scientists are very divided about you know people that study these animals sort of some of the ethical dilemmas they sort of have to confront themselves about you know am i learning so much as was the case with one of my dolphin stories am i learning so much about what these animals are capable of that I can no longer morally justify studying them in a captivity and I thought it was a really interesting dilemma and as you can probably see from some of these I cover cats and dogs as much as I can not always about rights and welfare although that does come up from time to time things like and I've written for other publications as well but things like legal rights for pets and and welfare and things like that but which also sort of plays into what's happening in the in the laboratory as well and just the last thing I'll say is right there's a couple of case studies I just wanted to really bring bring up briefly a couple of recent future stories I've written for science one that came out this year which was about this sort of dilemma of now that the US has basically said you can't experiment on chimpanzees any more and yet there are still hundreds of chimpanzees and biomedical research labs why are they being retired so slowly and one of the big challenges for me in doing this story is I had a lot of people saying you know these chimps are in these terrible places especially a lot of the animal welfare groups these temps are in terrible places they're in these labs you don't kind of have anywhere to run around we need to get them to sanctuaries as much as possible and yet the labs that were holding the two big facilities that were holding these chimpanzees wouldn't talk to me about because they said well we haven't been represented well in the press in the past and so we're really pressure and that ended up really I think damaging them for the story because basically had a bunch of people saying these chimps are in terrible conditions and these facilities never were never the record to say no they're not in terrible conditions you know we do XY and Z for them also when it came to procuring arm you know we really wanted to have art pictures showing because a lot of these facilities would say you know our chimps get a runaround and I'd say well send us pictures and they wouldn't send us pictures and so you know by not wanting the store to be biased the story ended up I think it's still a very balanced story but I think they were hurt by not willing to talk to a reporter about their side of the issue and this is something that I've come across a lot and I'm sure other reporters have as well and then the other story I wrote which was a couple years ago this was a profile of a scientist who used to be a PETA a guy named Justin good and then and I was interested in him because he basically he had this sort of new strategy of instead of like protesting outside of researchers labs let's publish papers as PETA let's publish scientific papers that show that animal research is flawed and let's not use that as a way to sort of try to shut down animal research and I wrote about that because I thought it was a fascinating strategy and a new strategy for an animal rights group that hadn't seen before but I got a lot of blowback on this story especially from her research groups who sort of felt like the story was biased because we shouldn't be interviewing PETA and we shouldn't be profiling what they do so I thought that was sort of an interesting lesson not really a lesson but it's sort of an interesting case study of what our scientist audience sort of expects of us and what maybe what the general audience expects of us as well and that's it for me and my email address is down there in case anybody wants to contact me after the session John thanks very much I'll add my perspectives as an animal researcher or I should say human researcher studying animal models yep I've I would like I'm going to echo many of the things David said my perspective as a scientist is that researchers need a way of getting out to the public what we do in the hopes that the public can appreciate and support what we do including research with animals but we often have to balance that against issues of frankly personal safety and the safety of our families and I just want to give you a few examples of my experiences with this to illustrate that this isn't just us being a little bit crazy or paranoid and or just because they're paranoid doesn't mean that people haven't been out to get us so in the mid 2000s or so there was an uptick in animal activism which often bordered into extremism and in some cases frankly terrorism we had colleagues down at UCLA who worked on non-human primates who were on a daily basis almost a 24/7 basis were being harassed and threatened by activists there were fire bombings successful fire bombings of investigators homes and so forth in the mid to late 2000s around 2008 or so there was a similar uptick in the bay area probably instigated by maybe four individuals four young very passionate animal activists and probably some others as well and what this involved from my colleagues and in one case myself was constant harassment for what we were doing as our life's work with the idea that we're doing something for the better good my colleagues would be threatened and harassed at their homes their property would be vandalized their kids would be threatened and harassed at their soccer games on and on and on at that point Berkeley assembled a task force to deal with animal activism I was for better or for worse assigned the point person for this and we tried to think of ways of how to defend ourselves but also maybe think about ways to be more proactive about generating support for what we do and this kind of morphed in over the years to getting more involved in communication my family was threatened maybe not that bad but it was kind of unsettling one one morning I remember is when I got a call from one of our Police Department contacts very early telling me that there was an attempted fire bombing of one of my colleagues cars going at the sciences a young kid I never thought I'd be sitting at a meeting for the rest of the day with a bunch of cops wearing guns security people Vice Chancellors talking about improvised incendiary devices so it's pretty serious and so this kind of I hope can give you some idea of why sometimes even though we're just as hungry for our 15 minutes of fame or at least to get the word out about the importance of what we do in the hopes of generating support for it why there is a reluctance for us to talk about what we do because there is the issue of somebody will come to me and say you know we'd like to do a story on some animal research involving perhaps non-human primates and I'll try to refer them the first question I'll get from the researcher is does that reporter have an axe to grind how do we know they're not going to turn the story against us and so we wound up with an imbalance where even if a reporter or a news outlet will try to give a balance story if we're not talking and if the only people showing evidence or pictures of whatever is a group that has literally an axe to grind then it's hard for us to get out a balanced story so I would say there's a responsibility on the side of the researchers but also we need help from people in the press to provide that balanced story and to find a way for us to do so in a way that basically preserves ourselves so I'll leave it at that okay Larry thank you okay so so yeah my name is Larry Carboni I'm a veterinarian I'm at UCSF just up the street a bit a very almost exclusively Medical Campus it's a challenge for a veterinarian working in a in a situation where all of them all of the work really is about animal health a human health using animal models you should know perhaps you already do that most places that do animal research have a team of veterinarians looking out for those animals and and that job was once described I think in science news is one of the 10 worst jobs in science along with wart researchers and a few other tasty tasty professions and it's one of the worst jobs in science because we're in many ways the in-house police looking at it what the scientists doing telling them nope can't do that nope can't do that shouldn't have done that that's going to the animal committee so it's it's a hard role to be in my own interest in pursuing a PhD in science studies was trying to think about what we know about animals what to fish actually think how do mice actually feel that should inform animal welfare policies because if the policies don't actually relate to how the animals are prospering they're kind of just a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork I'll just make a couple of points I I want to say as a research insider though I don't do much of the actual research myself and that is we kind of want two things we do want our animal research successes to be highlighted and celebrated you know as full away as possible and we don't always want to be in the spotlight when we're talking about animal research so a few months ago just as I was being contacted about joining this panel I was reading the New York Times tried to turn my eyes away from Trump for a few minutes looked at the science section and saw this this article about the FDA approving drugs to treat severe multiple sclerosis and whenever I see articles like this medical progress in the popular press I always scan for was somebody from UCSF mentioned I wonder if I know them well it turned out that the person who was most involved in this new treatment from Genentech was a researcher I'd known or at least I'd known his animals for many years when I first got to UCSF almost 20 years ago there was a colony of marmoset monkeys you can see them there being used in multiple sclerosis research and the techniques we have to cause multiple sclerosis like conditions in mice and monkeys are kind of kind of not pleasant for the animals they're rough on the animals and so I got to this campus and here was his colony of marmoset monkeys on these studies and my role was looking out for their welfare looking out for their health and wondering is anything ever going to come of this so fast-forward 16 years later here's a new drug that's based on them and I took advantage of the fact that was at UCSF to go and sit and interview the head scientist and say hey tell me about this did the monkey studies actually lead to this development absolutely what do you think about mice for this type of work not so good mice have led us to think that t-cells are the big culprits in this disease monkeys tell you that like people it's b-cells that's what we should target but when you read the popular press articles of course about the new drug for multiple sclerosis there's no mention of the mice or the marmosets and so it it starts to feel like this disembodied magic rather than something that's really rooted in many years of really ethically challenging animal studies so that's the that's the perspective of come on guys why don't you talk about the animals and of course it's up to the scientists to bring up the fact the road to this development went through a lot of animals and getting here but then the other side of the coin is when our animal research gets into the news in the bad way rarely into national level press so recently there was a case with some USDA sponsored research that was bad enough based on some expose Xand some some embedded spies bringing stories forward that got bubbled up to the national level usually that does not happen usually it's much more behind-the-scenes the sort of things john was describing that there's interaction between animal rights groups and scientists that may not even make it into the press and most of the press around this issue seems to be fairly local so we had our USDA inspection very strange law covers well under 1% of the animals and laboratories but it sends a government inspector to our labs once a year she didn't like some of what she saw she wrote her inspection report within a month people who know what they're doing can find out with about five keystrokes in the USDA's website and then forward that information to David and other science writers you need to write about UCSF they got a bad US DEA inspection so there's that frustration or that challenge or that concern of what's what's going to happen now we had a problem and it's in the in the press it may or may not make waves a few years back 2012 we were in the newspaper because of USDA inspection report concerning some monkeys and Parkinson's disease monkeys get a lot more traction if you're trying to generate concern about animals in labs our most recent inspection related to two voles and two pigs and generated four letters to the editor the local San Francisco Chronicle so it didn't actually bring the curtains down on at UCSF but nonetheless it was it was concerning to have to deal with it and that I believe is all that I have to say to get things started Laura all right thanks very much everyone for coming so I'm the health science of environment editor at The Washington Post so in addition to covering basic science that involves animals we also run a lot of stories about the political repercussions the political situation the policies that are involved and let's see by the way if you're tweeting about this our hashtag is hashtag animal research for the benefit of people who can't make it to this session we've got five really good sessions at every given moment right now anyhow some of these stories we run this this was a big one got a lot of attention a bipartisan group it was trying to stop government research on dogs and it's really rare that we have a story with bipartisan in the headline because it just doesn't happen anymore there's there are so few things that you can get Republicans and Democrats to agree about but turns out sticking up for puppies as one of them and one of the things that that's really been interesting lately is how sophisticated the animal rights groups have gotten so I think David was saying that PETA is now publishing scientific articles they're doing investigations they're really good at FOIA so they're getting you know more yeah it's not just was it Peter who had like naked ladies do any yeah they've up to their game and then there are all these more recent groups or groups that are getting more attention lately one of which is the white coat waste project and which sounds you know completely reasonable white coat you know you're responsible you're a doctor waste nobody likes waste and so their argument is not animal research is bad or animal research isn't effective their research is taxpayer money should not be wasted on animal research and so what they're trying to do is unite animal rights people which tend to be Democrats and fiscal conservatives who you know don't want to you know want to be really good stewards of taxpayer money and so this is one of the one of their big successes right now is trying to get the to put pressure to exerting pressure to end federal grants for research that involves dogs and of course they pick their species very carefully and and so you know dogs are a big thing whenever dogs are in research of course the the the the bar is very high the interest is much higher but what's interesting is they're they're changing policies across the board in ways that you might not have predicted so it used to be routine for medical students to use dogs cats and pigs to practice surgical techniques but no more now they do not do it anymore there was one school it was the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga was the last one that used some animals for surgery techniques and I think it was just this year they they stopped that and so it's been very interesting to see the animal rights groups having having that much influence because you'd think you know universities medical school doctors you know all of us if we want to have surgery when our doctors are you really good at finding those arteries and so they've they've managed to change basic practices there and the one behind this was the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine which is another a very carefully crafted message you know we're trying to be responsible we're all about medicine so there's a real art to naming your organization and there of course having a big influence on government agencies including the FDA which just ended some research on squirrel monkeys you know who are of course adorable so another good choice of animal if you want to make a point and stop some animal research and this was another white coat white coat waste project initiative and they enlisted Jane Goodall who's you know one of the most famous living scientist very well-respected everybody has good warm feelings about her so they got her to say that it was cruel and necessary and shameful research well what they were studying was tobacco and it was nicotine addiction and so this research was shut down and then the responsive scientists were involved or you have science advocates or people who knew about the issue is that you know almost half a million people in the United States every year died of smoking related diseases this was studying addiction to nicotine specifically an adolescent squirrel monkeys so not just cute squirrel monkeys but baby squirrel monkeys so it was really hard it was it was not an even match in this fight so any other research research is done even though it was on a very important question and then we have a story at the in the in the works at the post I can't say too much about it cuz it hasn't been published yet but this involves another government agency that allowed one of our reporters to go on a trip with a bunch of scientists to a place where there's an outbreak of an animal borne disease they're trying to figure out what the vector is it's a huge project very important it took a lady waited to jump through a lot of Hoops to go on this trip but the one basically the one precondition the one thing we had to agree to was we wouldn't say explicitly that they killed the animals in order to you know take the take the the samples and find out whether these animals were hosts of this deadly disease or not so we did we did agree to that we had to but it was very interesting that all the government agencies where even though in this case it's rodents they're they're not cute they're not puppies they're not squirrel monkeys so throughout the government there's a lot of awareness and concern about the the messaging around animal research and of course you know even though the ones that make the news and this is you know the phenomenon of what we all do are the monkeys and the puppies but if you look at what animals are actually used for research its it is mice and rats and so the sort of the more recent sort of line of journalism and line of investigation and I think another message that's the the animal rights people are starting to use is that you know Mouse research and animal research in general but Mouse research you know as Richard Harris Richard Harris says mice are not just small furry humans they're very different and we've cured Alzheimer's in a lot of mice but not in humans so there are a lot of common problems with medical research there too and it's late we had a big series about this about some of the issues with the mouse models are being used now so that's just to start us off and now I think we've got a discussion yeah great thank you all of you I I'll start with a question for Laura when you're thinking about just coverage of research that involves animals not specifically writing a story about the animals just about the research what level of detail do you generally think stories on what level of detail on the methodology should methodology should journalists go into when describing research done on animals and you know are are specific details or graphic photos inflammatory or informative yeah that's a good question and of course the the the standards are different for print versus online like we show which is really interesting things online that we could never put in the print paper because probably because of the audience and there's the whole cornflakes test that you don't to look at a disemboweled animal while you're eating breakfast so like I tend to that you on this I'm on the science desk and I want like lots of those details but it's really shocking how easily grossed out people are who don't routinely read or write about science and health research so like I think mcourser varies by publication but it's it's it's throwing her it's been very surprising to me how queasy it makes people to read about about just the basics of how research is done is that maybe more reason to put more details in I think so yeah I mean I think that's right I think we should as science and health journalists I think it's it's part of our responsibility to sort of you know be as open and straightforward about it as possible not with the goal of grossing people out but just this is how the world works this is yeah this is why the surgical technique that's you know saving your or your loved ones life works and I think we've I think there's been a lot of reluctance to talk about it and that's maybe something we should be pushing back against yeah I'm the on the on the flip side Larry I think you touched a little bit on whether leaving out mention of course of the animals but you know even details of what's going on is that hurting the public understanding of the value of animal research well I'm not a journalist and so thank you for inviting me into your world but to the extent that part of the goal of a good science article is to really explain how did you get this knowledge if you if you just whitewash the fact that there were animals involved in it I think that whitewash is that that gets rid of the the real texture of the story so it's interesting there's a new drug but if part of the article is where did this drug come from how did you figure this out and you don't mention the animals I think you're really giving short shrift to that that goal in the article do you think there's a change in attitudes with scientists who do research on animals sort of a way from trying to keep those sort of details out and more interest in having a more open discussion of exactly what's going on I may not be the best person here to answer that but this has been going on for decades there were some articles written about how Baton Rouge back in the early days of modern Physiology advised scientists - don't mention dog refer to the preparation so for decades certainly scientists have known that if you call too much attention to your use of animals in laboratories you're setting yourself up for criticism you want the focus on the science not on backlash on what you did to animals so so I'm not really sure I see that it's it's changed much I think it's there's been concern for a long time I think it's it's interesting to consider when one shows well you're as journalists or as anybody trying to communicate an idea you're showing some points of view and hopefully in a balanced way what one interesting thing that or frustrating thing that I found with regard to publicity or reporting about animal research is that from the point of view of an animal welfare advocate or an animal rights activists is what we see what a layperson see as an animal behavior is often interpreted in an anthropomorphic sense oh my kitty loves me it's rubbing up against oh you know the cat's hungry right but this extends as well to lab animals earlier this year a very old and close friend of mine who's a producer for one of the local network affiliates approached me because he was doing a piece that stemmed out of some issues with non-human primate animal welfare at UC Davis and he kind of got into this and he realized well there's actually some good being done here it seems that they had some problems but there's generally being good down here he'd like to show you know quote-unquote the other side and so I put him in contact with a few people and various people contact me back and ultimately nobody really wanted to talk on the record so he produced a piece it was pretty good and he he sent me a link to it and he any later he said well what do you think and in this piece they had visited I think it was a non-human primate sanctuary and there was like about a two-second clip of this monkey grimacing so you know the my reaction was oh my god people gonna think this monkeys unhappy because he's grimacing could could anything he might have had gasps right and and then on the other side since nobody from the research community would talk to him or his crew they interviewed some bureaucrat at the NIH I'm perfectly fine person and she was sitting in some mahogany walled room and extolling very bland general terms the importance of medical research it was like oh you know this not at all a compelling case so on the one hand you had kind of a grimacing monkey and on the other hand you have some government bureaucrats saying oh this is important but not really making a great case for it and I wrote to him and I said look you know what's the probability value of showing a monkey grimacing knowing full well that on the research side we were kind of complicit and not giving the compelling other case he said well actually they wanted to give us footage of other stuff but we insisted on only using their own footage and you know the bummer for me was that I know that there is non-human primate research which makes a lot of us queasy but actually leads to or will lead to cures in humans and rather than showing some bland extolling the very general virtues of animal research why not show a patient whose life has been saved there was some family of a patient who who had a horrible quality of life and maybe had some samadhis or great improvement because of animal research so these are the kind of balancing acts that I think we have to struggle to find but at the same time you know for me the innocuous picture of a monkey grimacing it felt to me like this could be taken in any number of ways which really doesn't reflect reality so I think there's one needs to be a little bit careful about what one was reporting on well I I agree that either it's you know there's the risk of images like that being taken out of context but animals that are being researched on do experience pain and you know that perhaps it was a grimace of pain on I'm not an expert on how monkeys express pain but you know is that not okay to show that that's part of the process I don't think I mean I don't find myself in a position to tell the journalists what is or is or is not okay to show for me the frustration is that it's very difficult for the scientist or the people in the scientific community to show what the benefit is I think at the end of the day what animal research is all about it's a cost-benefit calculation it's an issue of making a value judgment of a human life over a nonhuman life and everybody's going to fall somewhere and are somewhat different place in that mental moral ethical calculus but for me the frustration is the difficulty that we as a community have of getting out the message about what how it's really helping people and people's lives so so David John mentioned balance a couple of times and you know so you know scientists obviously have an interest in those sorts of pictures being balanced by images of people who've been helped but you know for showing images that of people who've been helped does that need to be balanced by images showing exactly you know how we got to the this help for the people and and maybe what happened to animals along the way is there is it possible to have a balanced neutral story about this sort of thing and if so what is what would that look like yeah you know in my experience it's not because I feel like you know I've been writing about animal welfare and all all rights for several years and I you know I always get nervous right before the story publishes because I I know I'm gonna get an angry email either from a pro pro animal research organization or a pro animal rights or welfare organization because it's so hard to I you know as a journalist we're not really true we were it's not I think it's no it's not our job to make our sources happy you know we're trying to tell a true and honest story that will inform the readers but you know it's so it's so in the Ivy holder you know it's you know of you know for example you know what is the Humane Society United States they call themselves an animal welfare organization but a lot of people consider them an animal rights organization so how do you refer to them in your story and should you reach out to them you know you know I think most of us that journalists in the room would agree that if we're writing a story about climate change I don't think any of us hopefully are gonna reach out to a climate change denying organization and say let's get their perspective you know or for writing a story about evolution we're not going to contact an evolution denier and say hey what's your perspective but I think it's different for animal research because I think while most of us would probably agree that being anti climate science or bling anti evolution is actually being anti science I think if you ask somebody is being anti animal research anti science I think you're going to get a bigger diversity of answers and so the question is you know if you're writing a story about animal research or animal welfare and you interview a bunch of scientists you know should you get that opinion maybe not necessarily from PETA but from humans United States the animal welfare Institute some place like that because there's a lot of scientists also believe that either a we shouldn't be using animals in research or that we should least be trying to reduce reuse you know so you know I think there that there's a much sort of more nuanced spectrum there and that makes it very difficult to write a nuanced article because you've got to quote the main society United States and then a research organization says how dare you quote that animal rights group they're a bunch of crazies right or you know or you you know the story I did with PETA and the Yale postdoc PETA I got not an angry letter from PETA but a bit of a fresh great letter from PETA they're like you didn't describe in horrific enough detail what this person was doing to birds at Yale and so you know we don't think you were doing a service you know and so it's it's really impossible to make everybody happy but it's also really I think it's really hard to figure out where that neutral line is and I think of a lot of it may depend on on who your audience is as well and it you know in a I don't know the statistics on this but it seems to me that there are more and more science journalists who were scientists turned journalists and have a science background in and maybe because of that might tend to be more Pro animal research than you know maybe somebody without a science background and it seems like maybe the default among science journalists is just a Pro animal research stance and is that is that problematic and we'll do first of all do you think that's true and if so is that problematic Laura yeah yeah I think that's a good point yeah I think that's a really good point and I think you're probably right that as at least in the u.s. is the profession is changing a bit and and the people coming into science writing careers tend to have more sophisticated science background versus the old political model which is that science reporters are just sports reporters who wanted to stop working on the weekends and so they shift a desk to science because we tend to have Monday through Friday jobs and Sports has to go travel the high school football games on Sundays so yeah I think that's I think that's a really good observation that especially if you're a science reporter reporting for science oriented publications so at the post we have a big mix of backgrounds for our reporters and I think you know in a more general interest publication like that it's a little bit more easy especially for the kind of powers that be to be captured by the well why are we tormenting animals line so it's I think within news rooms there's there's a lot of tension around that about you know what how to make it fair how to how to frame a story and as I mentioned that you know these animal organizations are getting much more sophisticated does everybody who gets press releases from PETA fairly regularly yeah they um they they have outreach there they're constantly getting in touch and they'll you know they offer us exclusives and if we don't buy it they'll offer an exclusive to somebody Alice or I don't maybe they've offered it to six other places and we finally bite but when we do get offered an exclusive I mean whenever you hear exclusive you know it's it's very exciting and you know you want to have their reporting and they're also they're very good at FOIA I mean FOIA is a pain in the neck and it's kind of a crapshoot you don't know if you'll get the you know the documents that you need or not and so when they have like a trove of data it's very tempting to work with them and we don't not work with them at the post sometimes we will report on a PETA investigation or well you know use some of the documents that they FOIA so it's it's very yeah there's not like a lot of kind of source you know keeping keeping them as reasonable sources getting getting information from them is kind of more part of the reporting process that as they get better at doing their jobs that's interesting that that you are having debate about that because I I guess I'm sort of under the impression that that's not really an issue people aren't thinking about how to make a story balanced as far as describing animals describing the benefits and that people in the press feel their responsibility and sometimes with making sure they mentioned that that this was a study on rats and that it may not be applicable to humans you know done so does it maybe maybe one of the scientists can answer this do you think that any science news story about you know a new device or new treatment that that was arrived to through animal research is just just buying the nature of that story is that a pro animal research story and and do you feel like do you feel sort of a general media bias one way or the other I mean it's an interesting question right I mean in some ways well like anybody else who reads the news which frankly has been a little bit insane for the last one nine months it's kind of is you know in a way reading these articles whether it's about animal research or politics is almost like a Rorschach test I mean we read into it what we choose to read into it and I guess you know I'll flip the question or the issue around a little bit I mean as journalists who work for different media outlets newspapers whatever presumably you're working for representing an organization that has some kind of point of view about the way the world is I mean we've seen it very polarized with different news outlets now and I guess the question is what what are you when when you're writing an article or a piece or when your organization is looking into an area I mean what's your point of view and what what point of view are you trying to promote or what what are you trying to reflect in society you know from our point of view we think we're doing good it doesn't mean that that there aren't sacrifices being made on the part of the animal subjects but we think we know we're doing this because we think at the end of the day there's going to be some benefit to society and I guess I'll just flip the question around to the journalist and and just ask you know what's what's your mission what are you trying to achieve by reporting on these issues are you trying to reflect what's going on in society what the desires and what the motivation is behind people as they live their lives and have aspirations at and at the same time hopefully trying to question some of these too decisions but really the you know my issue is or my open question is what are what story are you trying to tell and to what to what purpose yeah I can start with that yeah all of those things yeah you know we so at the post we have a new motto our goth motto it is democracy dies and darkness and so we try to shine a light in the darkness so you know for our particular mission you know we cover government agencies we cover government funding we cover science we cover research we do accountability journalism are people behaving in appropriate ways are people misbehaving so there are all those kinds of stories and then also it's our mission to cover what's important about the world to cover what's important about the future I think at least at the post and I think most journalists I think most of us don't feel like we are presenting a certain point of view other than you know truth as much as we get accused of being the enemy of the American people and I apologize for all the all of you who live in countries where your leader have not called you the enemy lately this can get a little insular we talk about it a lot right now but yeah we we press it I suppose that's everybody you know just like you can't perceive your own privilege everybody thinks you're not biased so we think we're not biased or we think we don't have a point of view although we do you know I think it's interesting at science because I think that's why the PETA article I mentioned at the beginning where I profiled this PETA scientist we got a huge amount of blowback for that and I think a lot of that was because we were science and a lot of the the letters and things we got were your science there why are you why are you giving PETA a platform you know your science you should be Pro animal research you know you know and this is this is anti science this is anti animal research which you know I don't I don't agree with a because you know most of our stories these days actually go online and our online audience is basically the general public and so scientists are not necessarily our audience our audience is the highest you know some scientists but also high school students and janitors and and lawyers and who and whoever else so I don't think we are necessarily trying to reach a specific audience with with our stories and also you know I think you know I think you know I can't johner Larry who said you know sort of you know it's a Rorschach Tech you said it sort of taught you this idea that you know people will sort of you know read into these read into these articles and just sort of just sort of assume that you know sort of lost my train of thought here but but you know this this idea that Wow late flight last night but you know they're sort of they're sort of it they're sort of expecting something or that that you know that they think that you know oh you know so you you you the whole reason I so the wrote the PETA article was because I was fascinated by this idea that PETA was starting to publish scientific papers and the whole reason I wrote this article about this dolphin researcher who had become an animal rights activist because I was fascinated by this idea that a scientist all of a sudden sort of cross this when she learned so much about these dolphins and she was studying that she started to confront these moral issues I thought that was fascinating not because I wanted to write a very Pro story about we should get dolphins out of captivity or wanted to write a pro story about like PETA is great it's because I these dilemmas this conflict is the heart of a great story right it's you know these and so I want to write those stories but you know some people read them and they will say oh well you know you you guys are just a mouthpiece for PETA now or you guys have just your tree huggers now because you're trying to get dolphins out of captivity and so I think they ascribe motivations to us that that aren't there just a quick comment I read your article on the on the PETA yeah and it's interesting that you got blowback I mean for me it was like oh now we got to deal with this right because because you know back in 2010 years ago we had these knuckleheads which I refer to them they we had them banging on her doors and throwing our trash around and trying to firebomb our cars and things like that and now it's kind of gone new age where it's electronic and it's much more sophisticated and for me I I read the article much more dispassionately I thought oh my goodness now we got to deal with this you know there's another flankers another tactic so for me it was something it was eye-opening and again we all have I mean if if if you write a story and don't get some kind of visceral reaction out of your audience you know this is kind of I think it's symbol over what you should be looking for but just I think there's different levels at which anybody can read into and interpret these stories I think it's probably just gonna be part of the game but you can't put something out there and it please everybody but again it's my question is you know what point of view and I think anytime we write anything we're showing some kind of some point of view and what is that point of view we're trying to get across as long as you've got the microphone let's talk a little bit about you know the the dilemma that you brought up for trying to encourage researchers to speak out more about the research they do and maybe the the the risks both real and feared you know you suggest this is something we need to work on how do you think that you know we're how how do we work on that issue and maybe right journalists have some ideas too so this has come up a few times and a reporter will make a query and I'll get a referral from a media relations office who should they talk to and we'll talk to that person and we'll have a debate should we talk to these people well the following questions is it okay if they send us all the questions in writing and we respond in writing and to some sometimes a first reaction is guys you're hiding in plain sight it's not like people don't know what you're doing why not just tell them what you're doing and the last instance it was the people came to conclusion which I actually totally respect as well just because a bunch of people out there know what we're doing they may not agree with it why risk pulling somebody else out of the woodwork who actually could cause a problem so there's that and then there's a whole issue of the worry about having a work being represented in a bad light or being even flat-out misrepresented and and there I think it's really just a matter of building trust I'm sure you know many times you'll do a story and you'll be coming on to it fresh I'll be meeting people first time but I'm sure that also many of you probably also have your quote-unquote trusted sources and I think a lot of times it's a matter of building trust to have you know have some assurance that that what that what your source or what your person you're interviewing is telling you won't be kind of used in a weird way the example that I gave earlier about the news piece on monkeys one of the researchers who was contacted contacted me and asked me to vouch for my friend and all I could say look is that he's he's an honorable guy he's you know a very solid journalist with a lot of credentials having served in in you know war zones and ultimately my colleagues universities Media Relations office put the kibosh on it because they didn't trust the news media maybe even that particularly network not to do something that they didn't like so I think it's really a matter of over the long haul building trust between the people that you're trying to work with on a story I think that um from working in a large research organization that you know obviously all big universities pharma companies have their own press office who are the people making sure that all the great things that happen at a place like UCSF are out there in the public eye for the donors for people who will benefit from learning about medical advances and so they are really important players in setting a tone it's not up to the reporter reporting on it to try to promote a particular viewpoint so much as what's the institution trying to say in letting us know there's an advance and do they want to embed in their stories yes this took years to do that's why this drug is so expensive yes this required animals that's why we defend the use of animals and different institutions have different approaches to that is it a don't mention the animals until we feel we're under assault or under a spotlight or is it try to make sure it's always always clear that going on and and it's hard when you're an institutional person potentially spokesman I think the reason you and I know each other is you contacted me for some background quotes on some lives Peter Science okay well do I really want to be in his article as somebody who's either criticizing Peto and PETA hasn't been hard on me or is somebody who's saying yeah Peter yeah they're raising some good points there and have the scientists I work with say why are you doing that so it is really hard I think for reporters to approach science organizations reat universities drug companies and really get somebody who's going to go on record and say something other than just the talking head in mahogany wall point of view maybe you can address another question and then and then we'll get to some audience questions about specific types of animals and you know should do you think that the the journalists should be treating chimpanzees dolphins maybe even dogs and cats differently from mice and zebrafish and rats and you know perhaps less charismatic as people like to say animals well for me as somebody who reads science articles with completely the eye to where the animals what happened there are so many situations I can think of what science at ucsf so some recent stuff that's going on with brain cancer treatments where all the basic cancer biology was done in rats but then it required a human sized brain and a human shape anatomy to figure out how to get these treatments into the right spot of the brain and so just sort of like the multiple sclerosis it's is really interesting when do you use the mice when do you use the cells when do you go to monkeys what are the limits of the monkeys that send you back to the mic that's part of the real texture of how some of this medical science is developed and it is it's completely missing from most stories unless the object of the story is what have animals contributing how have they failed to contribute to a particular question so I think you lose a lot of the texture if you're not able to really get in there and Laura or David about the differences in covering different types of animal research yeah I don't know I mean I we certainly we certainly get when we had comments the comments were a lot more passionate when we would feature research that involved non-human primates dogs and cats Laura mentioned white coat quite white coat waste there's also an organization called the Beagle freedom project both of these organizations in addition to using some really kind of interesting tactics who are they going after first they're going after dogs right because they know that they're gonna get 8090 percent of the public on board right away you know even more so I would argue than chimpanzees dolphins elephants whatever dogs cats you know they you know they you know and so I think for me personally those when we're talking about research on those animals I tend to gravitate towards them because I know there was gonna be a lot it's it was gonna be a lot more passionate in those stories there's gonna be a lot more reader interest frankly in those stories and you know so many the stories to be right they're doing basic research you know involve mice people tend not to get as worked up on mice although I think that may change I think that's changing a little bit and I think that once the public you know once you know I think these groups were really trying to bridge this empathy gap with pets and you know chimpanzees cetaceans I think once that is complete I think they will try to transfer that into maybe there may not be ever a day where we feel sorry for the mosquito in the lab but you know I I do feel like like it's not it's not insane to to think that it may be in ten years we may be talking much more seriously about the public concern about rats and mites in research as well I don't see a microphone set up for the questions do you so I think if we have questions we should start he's going to bring a microphone so you can you can get over to that [Music] no questions okay one second hello there we go what's up okay so I write for an institution and sometimes there is tension when we're covering a basic science story that involves furry animals tension between a researcher who might be okay with us covering the fact that this research was done in animals and upper-level communications administrators who are less okay who want us to protect the researcher or protect the institution and I wonder if any of you have thoughts on how to negotiate that well I will say that researchers certainly have a broad spectrum and how they feel from the folks who feel like yeah come on in open the doors come and see my monkeys - the folks who are very very very cautious and and you know certainly wherever I've worked it has been an upper administration the press office and Dean's of research who make the decision and either overrule scientists who want to be very outspoken or what they do or the other way around I don't have suggestions and what to do about that when I kind of got involved in this messy business mid-2000s up until that time our campuses policy was radio silence that's not to respond to any requests for information or to respond to any kind of accuse any accusations about what we were weren't doing to animals because that would just fuel the fire and I think in retrospect at the time and also in retrospect I think that was a bad idea because of that meant that somebody else got to control the conversation and so you know part of my involvement was to get out there and try to help communicate what we're doing when asked and to kind of be the person that got your figuratively shot at but when things blew up but ultimately it's it's really up to the researcher are you willing to put yourself out there and and sometimes maybe put you or your family in harm's way and that's my point of view is that I always leave that up to the person to decide because it's their life and they're their life's work and to respect that but it does run the gamut from my point of view and from what I've seen not dealing with it it's just not an effective way to to to handle the situation but you know it's messy yeah that's right not dealing with it I think that's there's nothing that makes a reporter more curious yeah getting the response we're not going to talk to you really well in that case I have a whole lot more questions thanks thanks for uh thanks for a very thought-provoking panel so with the exception of the last discussion question you were all mainly talking about what I think we'd call large mammals and and how you know it's understandable that research on them would be more controversial but the vast majority of animal research in this country and I would guess in most other countries is on mice and in my experience as a journalist a lot of that research is pretty lousy and I don't mean ethically lousy I just mean it's not very good it doesn't lead very far it sends people in the wrong direction and so on and I've always been really interested in what keeps scientists working with certain mouse models that have been proven to be questionable and so I'm wondering if from your perspective the the concerns or the resistance around working with large animals is one thing that keeps people working with mice when maybe they should be letting those models go it's interesting that you would say that that we were talking mostly about large mammals because I guess in my mind that wasn't the case but I realized we did mention primates a lot but I think most of this probably in at least in my mind applies to mice too but Larry did you have something to do you think that fear of you know more difficult questions and you know probably it's harder to get research approved and more scrutiny with use of non-human primates or other animals that are that humans have more interest in keeps people using mouse models that maybe aren't as effective as they could be within science there's a lot of debate among different disciplines of why don't we have better mouse models for pain why don't we have better mouse models for inflammatory disease and and so a lot of debate among scientists that sometimes spills over into a more popular press I think a big reality with a lot of mouse biologists is that they haven't they don't go to work necessarily every day thinking about and maybe you'll contradict me on this every day thinking about I'm a monkey researcher my kids can't talk about what my mother doesn't in at work every day I think they get to think less about the issue and hide behind the reality that if there's a spotlight it's a spotlight on the dog and the and the monkey researchers even people who use pigs in experiments that traditionally would have used dogs get to sort of stay backstage more because they they just don't go to work all the time thinking how much their work is is an object of scrutiny the way a dog or a monkey researcher does this is a question for Laura my name is Marla Paul and I write about the medical research at Northwestern and a lot of our research involves rice mice and rats and and our you know media relations director is very concerned about putting mice and rats in the in the headline and and and so we always of course discussed the fact that the research was done in these you know rodents but we we put it further down and as a journalist getting our releases does that bother you or concern you sorry that was it that it cou sticks in here or low goofy so the question is for for journalists does it bother you if you get a press release and it doesn't say until lower down that the research was in was it in other words if we don't make it clear in the headline that it's not that it's mice if we talk about it as as a experimental treatment that halted a progression of MS but you don't learn that it's mice until the third paragraph does that seem like we're misrepresenting it or is that okay you know how do you respond to that yeah no I think that's right I think that isn't a bit of a misrepresentation and for our newspaper headlines we when we do if we do cover I'm now study we say Mouse in the headline just to make it clear to not it particularly if it's a if it's a health story to not get people's hopes up you know Alzheimer's disease cured again in mice yeah so yeah so it would it would be unfair to not say it in the headline so we always put it very high up and I I do as somebody who gets a lot of press releases if it's buried I do get irritated about that I think it's I think that is not not quite fair that personally do you write about research advice are you less all the time because there been so many really promising treatments that don't turn out well and so for particularly for medical medical studies we tend to not cover them until they've been in human trials you know in the in the biomedical research community there has been a lot of angst about what do cows models tell us about strategy the basic biology of humans are and strategies for treating human disease and I think what's getting lost in this whole discussion at least within when we talk to the public is this expectation that everything we do is going to work if I chose if I'd listened to my father and gone into medicine right I'd be in a game where I'd be expected to get things right 99.999% of the time so don't kill anybody the advances in biomedical research don't come about because we