Dear member of the public,

No one wants to needlessly harm animals. No wants to do anything horrible, really—but we all also want to fix the world’s problems. There are people suffering from mental disorders like Schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s that would give the world to be ‘normal’. There are children who are dying from cancer far too young, parents who struggle to manage their special needs dependents, and youth who fight to want to live every day. There are hundreds of people who suffer from disorders or diseases that they honestly don’t deserve—and there are hundreds of animals that are in labs that are being used for testing.

So who deserves freedom more?

Animals in labs are subject to manipulation, but these manipulations range from simple ‘food reward’ tests to inserting devices to measure brain activity. Furthermore, these manipulations are tightly regulated and require very strict paperwork and I can assure you that no one—not even the most sadistic of scientists—would want to juggle the regulations involving animal research if they didn’t feel they had to. Another thing to consider is that these animals are kept safe and happy at other times. They are fed enough food, kept warm in properly incubated cages, and have many paid workers whose sole jobs are to ensure they are healthy and happy. If they happen to be part of a study that includes euthanasia, it is always done in the most humane way possible. So, having that in mind, is it truly better for an animal to battle for food, territory, and shelter every day of their lives in order to just survive (with the risk of dying every single day), rather than be pampered for all their lives and sent quietly and peacefully into death? Is it better to have bred these animals for lab purposes and given them comfortable lives, than to have them never live at all? Does it make it okay to search for a possible solution to thousands—perhaps millions—of people’s diseases if the animals have short lives, even if they are kept comfortable for most of it?

These are things that scientists have to think about all the time. We must consider what research is important in the (albeit, messy) path towards a solution for human diseases—but we also have to think about the animals. It is rather overly simple to just say ‘animal research is improving life for humans’ (because sometimes it’s not) and equally untrue to say ‘animal research is unnecessary because humans are overpopulating the world anyway’ and ‘animal research is useless because we can’t directly extend its conclusions to humans’. The fact is, there will always be disease, and struggle, and death—for both sides. The question as to which life is valued more (animal or human), I feel, is rather silly because the issue is not so black-and-white. It is a dirty spectrum of grey.

I think when it comes down to it, where you decide to put your flag down and say “From this point forward, the spectrum is black!” is truly a personal decision. Are keeping animals in captivity wrong? What if those animals were bred to be pets and would live otherwise awful lives in the wilderness? Likewise, is it okay for animals to be used in research? What if those animals live perfect, comfortable lives up until the point of their euthanasia or experiment?

Personally, I would rather be the lab rat than the sewer rat. How about you?

This past weekend, I attended the Pacific Evolution and Ecology Conference at Bamfield, Marine Sciences centre. It was my first conference ever, and I can say with confidence now that it will not be my last.

The conference is a student-run event whose organization is rotated between UBC, SFU, and UVic students. It is composed of entirely students (no professors allowed!) from a wide range of topics and levels, from conservation to molecular ecology; PhD to undergraduate. As a consequence, the environment was extremely friendly and casual. There were no looming PI’s (not that their criticisms aren’t always appreciated!), the judges for the talks were our own peers, and everyone there wanted to be there. The weekend started off with two long boat rides and a couple of beers, and there was ample time to meet and get to know everyone. The conference itself lasted a whole day (8:30am to 4:00pm) and there was the traditional conference dance on Saturday evening. Then, there was a talk by Michael Hawkes before we set off for Vancouver on Sunday morning to return to our regularly scheduled lives.

It’s truly an amazing feeling to be surrounded by like-minded people who love what you love, and have the passion and drive to really make things happen. I listened to talks about saving seahorses (which are adorable, by the way), hummingbird flight dynamics, and how to model ecological data in better ways. It is inspiring to see how creative the people around you are. It pushes you to want to be inspiring too. Being able to see the sheer variety in talks and ideas makes you realize how lucky you are to be in a world that can facilitate this kind of thinking, and how we can work together to build up the information of the future. In cell developmental terms, it’s like being near a million different enhancers. You’re working on your stuff and they are working on their stuff, but there are such beautiful and complicated overlaps between your expression and theirs that it’s hard not to be in awe.

Overall, the exam was a fun one to write. It was the kind that doesn’t prompt you to word-vomit on the page, but rather the type to make you think about the question. It was one of those exams that you walk away from, continuing to think about the problems given to you and I think those are one of the best exams you can write. They not only test you on what you know, but also prompt you to continuing learning things you don’t.

In that sense, I felt the exam was great for discussing in a group setting. It was a question that had many avenues for discussion, and I liked that it was a problem that could be interpreted in many different ways. While I doubt anyone will ever say “I don’t want to have the chance to improve my mark by discussing my answer with my classmates at no risk to my previously attained marks”, I would still like to reiterate how much I liked the group portion of the exam.

I find I really benefit from ‘solidifying’ my answers with my friends. I like hearing other opinions that back up my initial ideas, because it gives me confidence and helps me confirm that the way I approached the question is on the right track. I also like hearing rebuttals and disagreements with my models because they are often ones I would have never thought of. With each person comes a different perspective and I think it is crucial to learn that it’s never really possible to have all perspectives from a single person. The idea that you can discuss, refute, or disagree on data or ideas are reminiscent of what it is like in real life. Real data will likely never be perfectly clear and any proposed model will always have skeptics– and I believe that the group portion of the exam gives us an opportunity to learn how to deal with such hurdles or doubts in a way that can be constructive to our own work. In truth, I am not sure if our my answer improved in the group portion, but I did feel like I had a lot more to ‘think’ about after leaving the second part of the exam. Interestingly, I actually felt more ‘unsure’ about our answer after the group portion, and ended up coming up with other models in my head afterward by myself.

I felt the weakest point in my individual answer was explaining the mechanism by which the insulator blocked Hb activity, and my concern was that in the group portion, we still hadn’t really addressed this. One of my group members actually pointed this out to us, but we ran out of time and only managed to scribble something down in haste. It was this comment that prompted me to continue thinking about the question after the exam was over. I had a few new ideas pop into my head about how the mechanism might actually work, and I wish I had thought of them during the group portion. Oh well! I suppose there is always next time.

1. Humans are complicated creatures. The formation of our limbs is just one simple example of how complicated our body can be and what ‘techniques’ it uses to form itself. Our hands develop along three axes: posterior-anterior (thumb to pinky), distal-proximal (tips of fingers to wrist), and dorsal-ventral (back of hand to palm). The first axis (the posterior-anterior axis) allows the formation of your fingers in the correct order. The way it does this is by producing a protein called ‘Sonic hedgehog’ (Shh) which, depending on its gradient, will form all your different digits. Thumbs, for instance, form when Shh concentration is high, whereas pinkies form when Shh concentrations are low. Conditions such as polydactyly (more than 5 fingers) occur when the levels of Shh are abnormal, which can be due to mutations in both the protein itself and DNA sequences that regulate the rate of protein production. Protein production can be controlled in various ways, including using ‘enhancer’ regions that loop DNA and allow the proper machinery to express the proper genes. An example of an enhancer is the area found in the OCA2 system, which controls eye colour in humans. This enhancer was shown to interact with the promoter for OCA2 gene, and that when the enhancer is mutated, there is less interaction with OCA2. Thus, individuals with poor interactions within the OCA2 system have eyes that are blue instead of brown. These two examples are only two of the many ways our bodies can regulate growth, and it is of interest to all kinds of people (patients, physicians, researchers, genetic counsellors) to understand how these pathways work.

2. The hardest part about answering question 1 for me was being able to pick out the ‘main’ points in our discussion. This includes both filtering out the scientifically relevant points, but also knowing which points are important in a “summary for the public”-style paragraph.  It is much easier writing a summary using scientific language because you can use common acronyms, terms, or ideas to help shorten your paragraph. In layman’s words, however, you have to elaborate on each idea in order to fully explain what is happening—which makes it difficult to choose what is worth including or not.