Get to Know your Local Laboratories - The Strick Lab

This entry will be the first of many to explain what is going on inside local animal laboratories. Based on knowledge of what goes on in animal laboratories in general, we can assume that the suffering of these animals extends past these already painful and deadly procedures. However, these entries will only use information that has been published.

Vivisection is opposed on ethical, scientific and medical grounds. Without a medical background, laboratory procedures can be hard to understand. This site will explain these procedures in more common terms. Below is one of first two animal laboratories this site will be focusing on.

The Strick Lab

Strick's lab implements various methods of invasive research using various nonhuman primates. These species include capuchin monkeys and rhesus macaques. These animals are studied because of their intelligence. Their intelligence level is similar to that of toddlers and young children, or possibly more so because they are self sufficient at this intelligence level. They also excel in areas that even adult humans do not. Because of this, being confined in a cage is very stressful for them. Like most other species used in laboratory research, primates begin showing signs of mental distress such as rocking back and forth in their cages and injuring themselves. The image below shows the elbow of a macaque that would bite himself while confined in a cage.

Macaque Self-Injury. Photo credit: Brown.edu Primate Research Laboratory Newsletter.

Laboratories claim that they do their best to prevent these behaviors, but they are inevitable when animals are confined in small cages and prevented from engaging in natural behaviors, on top of all of the invasive procedures preformed on them.

From the Strick website: "One of the major challenges of modern neuroscience is to define the complex pattern of neural connections that is the substrate for behavior. Dr. Strick's laboratory has developed a unique approach to this problem which employs transneuronal transport of neurotropic viruses. Dr. Strick's laboratory has developed a unique approach to this problem which employs transneuronal transport of neurotropic viruses."

Translation: A neurotropic virus is a virus which is capable of infecting nerve cells, or which does so preferentially.(source) In other words, Strick's lab uses harmful viruses like Herpes or Rabies to better understand the nonhuman primate neural system (Akkal, Durn, & Strick, 2007 [4]).

Strick's lab also uses chronic preparations (intensive brain surgeries; see Yates Lab entry) in these animals in order to record from neurons (Matsuzaka, Picard, & Strick, 2006 [3]). Below are images of macaques who have suffered chronic preparations. Again, while not from Strick's lab, they are of similar procedures.

Macaques used neural recording research. Photo credit: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/CORBIS

Like the Yates lab, Strick's lab also lesions the brain days or longer before killing the monkeys.

Strick was hailed in a recent article for his studies in nonhuman animals in which he uses the rabies virus to trace neural pathways. Even though there are similar methods of studying the brain and its activity that are completely safe in human beings, Strick claims that his research is done to help humans. He claims that his lab hopes to detoxify the rabies virus to use it in Parkinsons and Alzheimers patients. However, nonhuman animals do not get Parkinsons or Alzheimers and nonhuman animals react very differently to diseases than humans do. Extrapolation of disease from nonhuman animals to humans is less accurate than a coin toss (and far more dangerous). We ask that the Strick lab step it up if they do indeed care so greatly for humans suffering with these diseases and do some research that will help us understand the animals that get Parkinsons and Alzheimers: Humans.

Peter Strick can be contacted at strickp@pitt.edu.

Office: Biomedical Science Tower 3, Room 4074

3501 5th Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Ph:412-383-9961

Fax:412-383-9061

This lab is but one of the hundreds that exist in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. More will be covered in this blog in future entries.

Have information on an animal laboratory that you would like to share? Email us about it. We will protect your privacy.

References
[3] Matsizaka, Y., Picard, N., & Strick, P.L. (2006). Skill representation in the primary motor cortex after long-term practice. J Neurophysiol. 97. 1819-1932.
[4] Akkal, D., Durn, R.P., & Strick, P.L. (2007). Supplementary motor area and presupplementary motor area: targets of basal ganglia and cerebellar output. The journal of neuroscience. 27(40). 10659-10673

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