I recently came across an advertisement for an essay contest in one of my favorite magazines, The New Scientist. The essay contest was asking if science could end the need for animal research. The ad asked: “Can you envisage how advances in technology—perhaps stem cells, tissue engineering or computer modeling—could end the need for animal research?” I thought about this for a bit and found it an interesting question because I frequently come across research studies where animals have been used for the research study.

Unfortunately I missed the deadline on the essay contest, but still felt it was worth thinking and writing about the issue. The question itself is interesting and reminds me of a similar question that we hear debated in much of the popular literature about whether science and technology can save us from global climate change. The answer to both questions, unfortunately, is no.

The reason that science is unlikely to end the process of animal research lies in the very title of the essay contest ad. It suggests that there is a need for animal research. I realize many people will argue with me about this and say animal research is necessary for advances in biomedical engineering, health care, etc. But this isn’t a question about science. It is a question of ethics.

Where do you place yourself in relation to the other creatures that inhabit the planet with us? The idea that science needs animal research is one that is based on the assumption that we as humans have the right to decide how we use other animals without considering if they want to be involved in our research. If we subjected humans to many of the processes that are used in animal research there is no doubt that we would call this torture. Yet, somehow we are able to look the other way and say it is OK because it saves lives. Well, it doesn’t save the lives of the animals that are “sacrificed” in the process.

Eliminating animal research would clearly slow the advancement of many medical procedures and processes. Many people feel that increased human survival offsets any moral obligation we have to the way we treat other sentient beings. I can’t agree with that. It is time to recognize that if we are holding ourselves up to be the most intelligent creatures on the planet, we must also confront the ethical dilemmas of our actions. I would agree with the underlying assumptions of the New Scientist essay contest that science can make significant advances without the need for animal research. But we must go much further than that and recognize that it is really time to end the use of ALL animal research.

As teachers most of us are interested in how we can get students to come away from our courses with the things we really want them to learn. Yet the emphasis in so many courses is on gathering information that will be needed to achieve a higher score on the exit testing. I’ve watched students in class spend so much time trying to write down everything the instructor says that they miss the opportunity to absorb the overall meaning of the discussion/lecture.

Multimedia presentation is one area where e-learning can offer a significant advantage over the traditional classroom delivery structure. There is no question that you can produce a great live multimedia presentation with lecture and accompanying visual aids- especially if you are a good live presenter. However, one of the great challenges is that once the lecture is over, the students don’t have it to go back to for further study. That’s why so many of them are so frantic to write down everything that is said during the presentation. Many students tape record lectures and this is a great advantage for audio playback, but that misses the important visual aids that are an important part of explaining important concepts.

A well-constructed (and this is crucial) e-learning presentation that includes audio and visuals can be an excellent learning tool because the student can go back to the same original presentation over and over until the concepts have really been absorbed. Research has shown a greater degree of retention and knowledge transfer with high quality multimedia presentations, so I think this learning strategy holds great promise. Our big challenge now is to get people to learn what a high quality multimedia presentation entails and how to produce one.

With as busy as my life is these days, I find I have much less time to read than I used to many years ago. That makes me long for those bygone days when life was not so crazy and I actually had time to sit down and read a book in the evenings. So now reading comes in much shorter snippets and I am much more selective in what I spend my valuable reading time on. At home we subscribe to a great magazine called New Scientist, which is kind of a synopsis of new findings in many different science fields. Several weeks ago I read an article in that magazine that really shook me. I have not been able to stop thinking about it, which means it is one of those things that is most likely impact my world view in a powerful way.

The article was about the environmental impacts of this perpetual cycle of increasing consumption that we are mired in…. a subject that begins to bother me excessively every year around this time. For me the most disturbing thing that came to me out of that article was a relatively simple equation. I rarely have an emotional reaction to an equation, but this one has continued to haunt me so I recognize that it has major significance.

The equation was originally proposed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren in the early 1970s. It has since become known as the Ehrlich equation and is represented simply as: I=PAT where

I= The impact of human activity
P= Population
A= The level of affluence associated with the population
T= A technology factor, which is an impact on the planet of each dollar we spend

I once again watch the holiday madness in this country, including hearing that a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death the day after Thanksgiving in people’s mad rush to get into the store. I realize that with our exponentially increasing population (P) and the great deal of affluence associated with it (A), we are also using a tremendous amount of resources to produce the things we just have to have (T). Most people don’t want to talk about the population problem and they defend the necessity of having children. It is strange the odd responses and looks I get from people when I say I deliberately chose not to have children because of the world’s population and resource consumption problems.

If our population continues to increase at its current exponential rate, and a much greater segment of the world aspires to live a life of technological advancement and affluence that we enjoy in this country, we are headed for a catastrophe of major proportions. We simply can’t sustain that kind of impact. Changing light bulbs and lowering our personal carbon footprint is important, but will pale in comparison to the impact of all these people continuing to buy, buy, buy… With our current economic crisis we are all being told how important it is to return to healthy economic growth, but nobody seems to be talking about the giant elephant in the room. There is actually no such thing as sustainable growth. There will come a time before long that continual growth will cause a catastrophic economic, environmental and sociological collapse… Troubling thoughts for the holiday season, but I can’t continue to just look away because of this unpleasantness…