Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Baboons, like bush pigs, were considered vermin. My Nguni technicians however told me
that when I came to the pearly gates the baboons would be waiting for me and I would have to
justify why I used them in experiments. To some Zulus (amazulu people of the sky), the people
who came down from the otherworld in the sky, an evil sorcerer rides naked backwards on a
baboons back, causing evil events to happen to people. Baboons were once humans but were
lazy and would not hoe their fields and so their hoe handles turned into tails that they carry
behind them as they raid human's fields of corn. The research I started in the animal labs there
for my Ph.D. in physiology resulted in further research at the Cleveland Clinic. When I first
approached my chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the time, Floyd (Fred) Loop, he suggested I
write a research proposal and submit it to his wife, Bernadine Healy, who was then Chairman
of our IRB at Cleveland Clinic. She graciously then re-wrote my proposal to the correct format
and then helped pass the protocol through the IRB. The research at that time was fairly radical
in that it involved injecting a medication called papaverine, an extract from opium that had a
very strong effect on increasing blood vessel size and blood flow, into the space around the
spinal cord and brain with the aim of preventing paralysis. The animal baboon studies had
shown it to be highly effective in preventing paralysis. In June of the year 2010, one of my
residents presented the research on nearly 400 patients at the Western Thoracic Meeting,
showing that this method approximately halved the risk of paralysis after major aortic surgery.
Sadly, Bernadine Healy passed away during the 2010 summer leaving a legacy of those people
who worked with her not only in the research field, but many other people she touched
including in the AHA, NIH and the Red Cross.
I was told that the baboon research has largely stopped at the University of Witwatersrand.
Shortly after I left, some animal activists broke into the research animal unit and released all
the baboons from their cages. The following morning the research assistants walked into the
holding area for the animals and found the activists perched on top of the cages with the
baboons trying to get at them to bite them. This is an unfortunate fact of modern medicine that
animals need to be used for product testing and there are no easy solutions or alternatives. The
one, perhaps reasonable, compromise is that invasive introduced macaque monkeys in
Mauritius have driven the indigenous pink pigeons to near extinction and the solution has been
to export 10,000 a year of the macaque to mostly Europe for research.
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