In Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey, Dr. John Gluck, Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, recounts his life’s experience as a primate researcher who later came to regret his complicity in what he new deems to be unethical research practices.
Former KIE Senior Research Scholar and longtime Gluck collaborator Tom Beauchamp offers this synopsis of the work:
Gluck tells the compelling story of how his thinking about human uses of primates in research evolved. His story is one of a professional psychologist learning to think beyond the value of his scientific research by incorporating thinking about the circumstances and points of view of the animals involved in the research. Gluck assesses how human beliefs about valid and necessary research with animals can easily be incoherent with basic moral standards. This gracefully written book is a beautiful read filled with insights about how we should and should not treat animals in research.
Like Gluck, Dr. Beauchamp has published widely on animal ethics. In 2011, Beauchamp, Gluck, and collaborators led a two-year project funded by a grant from the National Sciences Foundation (NSF) aimed at the question of medical research on chimpanzees. The collaborative, multi-site project brought together scholars from ethics, law, medicine, and the sciences, to address core theoretical questions that must be answered on the way to establishing much-needed ethical animal research policies.
Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey is published by the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about the work, and read reviews from peers and the popular press, by visiting the publisher’s website.