Anothony A Grace and Bill J Yates- Distinguished Professors of Fear, Stress, Injury, and Pain

The University of Pittsburgh has recently honored Anthony A Grace with the title of "Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience". You may remember the 'Get to Know Your Local Laboratories' piece on Grace on our page previously. Grace does research in which he deliberately mutilates, injures, freezes, starves, and exploits animals for interest. Grace does what is called "translational basic research" which has been under fire by doctors and scientists for it's lack of applicability to humans [1]. In fact, one meta-analysis of such published research (which doesn't even include things that did not work and were not published) found that "only (0.004%) led to the development of a clinically useful class of drugs (angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors) in the 30 years following their publication of the basic science finding" [2]. We can see given this evidence that not only is Grace's work incredibly cruel, it is also a waste of the tax payer dollars used to fund it.

The University of Pittsburgh, which gets huge amounts of money from such grants, has a history of celebrating those that bring them in. Another distinguished professor is Bill J Yates, whose research involves the cutting of connections in the brains of animals like cats and causing other suffering. It is no wonder that such cruelty and wastefulness continues to occur in Pittsburgh when the Chancellor (who is not a scientist) awards these researchers with distinguished professorships while people doing human research that will actually result in cures struggle to get funded.

Although PAAV has been on hiatus, we felt it important to share this story with any readers of the site. More to come.

[1] Greek & Greek. (2010). Is the use of sentient animals in basic research justifiable?
[2] Crowley WF, Jr.: Translation of basic research into useful treatments: how
often does it occur? Am J Med 2003, 114:503-505.